A nice surprise this morning when I logged into my google home page. My RSS feeds had a new feature. They now include a little + symbol indicating that there is more to read on the feed. It gives you the first few lines of the feed. Pretty cool…
Being a father I tend to get a bit keyed up when and Amber Alert busts out over my TV screen. I heard a PSA on the radio recently that wireless Amber Alerts are now available for your cell phone.
Just go to wirelessamberalerts.org and sign up. You will only receive alerts that are pertinant to your area. If you like you can opt in for up to 5 area codes. There is no charge to your phone for each alert. Alert coverage is limited to the sites page of wireless carriers. There is also an opt-out option to remove yourself from the list.
This is definitely a positive use for cell phones in the world.
Watching the youtube My PC IS On Fire- Dell Laptop Tribute video I was intrigued at the video behind the silly song. After checking into the credits at the end of the show They took the video from the opensource movie called elephants dream and put a song over the top of it.
Elephants Dream is created by the Orange Open Movie Project, co-production of Montevideo and Blender Foundation both of which are located in Amsterdam.
The film is created by using totally open source software. One of them that they used was a program called Blender. I checked it out today and it looks like something I would really like to get my hands on. There are plenty of tutorials to boot. I will probably give it a good workin over within the next few months.
The Elephants dream site says:
the secondary goal is to research efficient ways to increase quality of Open Source projects in general.
The film itslef is really neat in itself. (Why do we still call them films??). At their site you can download the movie in several formats including an HD version. They also have “The Making of” series, and production videos. There is “making of” already posted at youtube.
Stop by and check it out!
I’m not sure how long this video has been circulating, but in my humble opinion this is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. The first time I saw it was without sound, and it was pretty funny. This is George Bush and Condoleeza Rice in a “Who’s on first” spoof. Enjoy!
I heard a caller on the morning radio show I listen to describe a Christmas light show in my area. I checked out the site and it’s a rather incredible show.
The over 8,000 lights(not a huge amount by any means) are all synced via a computer and software running it. When you drive within range you can set your radio tuner to a channel and hear the music thats synced to the lights.
He also shows on his site the progress, and process of each step. Really neat. The site (fdllights.com) also has ’show times’ and some streaming video of the shows.