SteveintheUK.Com

Link to Video’s posted in 2007

This is a great use for all those old T-shirts

Humans have been around for a while. Flipbooks have been around for a while. Now, for the first time in human or flipbook history, they have been united.

and this is the ‘Making of the Human Flipbook’

If you have time have a quick look at they website @ Humanflipbook.com

both by
Added September 14, 2007
From humanflipbook

Archive of del.icio.us links

1. Up next for Apple: the return of the Newton - AppleInsider.Com

   Externally, the mutil-touch PDA has been described by sources as an ultra-thin “slate” akin to the iPhone, about 1.5 times the size and sporting an approximate 720×480 high-resolution display that comprises almost the entire surface of the unit.

2. Fusion io - the power of 1000 hard drives in the palm of your hand - TG Daily.Com

   The benchmark for the worst case scenario by using small 4K blocks and then streaming eight simultaneous 1 GB reads and writes. The ioDrive clocked 100,000 operations per second. Price $30 per GB. Note in 1984: 20 MB was $3150.

3. You’ve Bricked your Hacked iPhone and Want to Start Over? - 9to5Mac.Com

   If you tell the person at the Genius Bar that this is a GoPhone account, they will replace your iPhone right then and there. You must have an AT&T SIM card in the phone, but the Apple can’t verifying whether it’s a GoPhone account or not.

4. Britain to switch off energy-guzzling bulbs - IOL.co.za

   It aims to save up to five million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2012, or the equivalent to the carbon emissions of a typical 1 Giga Watt coal-fired power station.

5. Hollywood Studios go after two Piracy Sites - I4U.Com

   The lawsuit, filed Wednesday on behalf of the major studios, seeks to shutter cinematube.net (http://cinematube.net) and ssupload.com (http://ssupload.com) from further infringing on the copyrights of the MPAA members.

16 more articles after the Jump Read the rest of this entry »

Archive of del.icio.us links

1. You Never Will Call - YouNeverCall Promises $10,000 to the First Cell Phone Caller from the Moon - GadgetsClub.Com

   OK, it is a marketing scam, but a clever one, so we shall humor YouNeverCall. The press release states that $10,000 shall be awarded to the company/person that places a cellular phone call from the moon to YouNeverCall’s HQ in LA.

2. M-Audio’s Session Music Producer microphone lets you hear yourself as you speak - SciFi.Com

   Yesterday, M-Audio introduced its latest Session Music Producer USB microphone. At $99, it’s less expensive than other M-Audio mics, and has the added benefit of an in-microphone headphone jack, meaning near-zero latency.

3. Broadband Bill Gains Support - FreePress.Net

   A third of the 101 cities and towns in Western Massachusetts have no broadband Internet access, but that could change with a $25 million proposal from the governor that is wending its way through the state Legislature.

4. MySpace News Is Stealing Your Search Results - TechCrunch.Com

   Given what little traffic MySpace News is doing on their main site, there is little new traffic benefits from the service, instead the traffic from the MySpace News pages on Google cannibalizes existing search traffic.

5. Slim Aluminum MacBooks Coming Soon from Apple - 9to5Mac.Com

   Black aluminum and silver aluminum (like MacBook Pros) have been seen. They are considerably slimmer than current MacBook and even a bit more than MacBook Pros. The screen reaches much closer to the edges than current MacBooks

6. Apple admits some iPod touch players shipped with faulty screens - AppleInsider.Com

   It’s presently unclear how widespread the iPod touch display issue may be or what remedial action Apple will offer to customers who own affected units. Such information will be published once it becomes available.

24 more articles after the Jump Read the rest of this entry »

Link to Video’s posted in 2007

The first of 3 parts

Episode 1 “Techno is not a Joke”.
Animated adventures of techno art collective The Pod. The Pod are a late eighties electronic dance outfit trying to cope with the mid nineties post rave come down. 

This was made over five years ago but not many people have seem it, This version was posted on YouTube in April but so far has been viewed less then 10,000 times.

Added April 01, 2007
From clothears2000

Link to Video’s posted in 2007

We have already had ‘The Simpsons do Abbey Road‘ now the Simpson are taking on George Lucas as they remake the opening into in the style of the Starwars movies

An orignal pop culture parody by animator Rich Cando. More work can be seen at RichCando.com or DudeStudios.com.

Check out these other Star Wars videos dy Rich Cando at DudeStudios.com

Star Dudes, The Bad Dudes Strike Back, Return of the Dude, The Phantom Dude

Added August 06, 2007
From DudeStudios2007

Archive of del.icio.us links

1. Apple set to reveal iPhone launch date in UK - Telegraph.Co.UK

   Suspicions were aroused among journalists this week when the notoriously secretive company sent them an invitation to next week’s event, headed “Mum’s no longer the Word”.

2. Korea sues Intel for unfair trade - TheAustralian.News.Com.AU

   In July the European Commission alleged that Intel offered chips below cost. The Silicon Valley company could face a fine in Europe of up to 10 per cent of its global annual revenues and in Korea of up to 3 per cent.

3. Facebook breastfeeding flap - TheStar.Com

   Breastfeeding activists are emailing, posting and instant messaging their outrage. A new Facebook group set up to petition for a change in site policy – called “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” has more than 10,200 members.

4. MP tries to ban water - New Zealand National news - NZHerald.Co.NZ

   Mrs Dean was caught in a hoax by an online blogger asking for her help in banning dihydrogen monoxide - the chemical name for H20. The blunder is a long-running hoax that seeks to trick gullible MPs into calling for the eradication of water.

5. And now a blog on Bollywood in Finnish - ExpressIndia.Com

   Anu, who travelled to India for the first time about a decade ago, admits she does not understand Hindi. Mann, the Aamir Khan-Manisha Koirala starrer, was the first Indian movie she watched. She fell in love with the song and dance sequences.

6. Wikipedia publishes 2-millionth article in English - AsiaMedia.ucla.edu

   Wikipedia, the sixth most visited network of Web sites worldwide behind commercial operators Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and eBay, is available in 250 languages. Combined, Wikipedia has published more than eight million articles.

23 more articles after the Jump Read the rest of this entry »

Archive of del.icio.us links

1. Please Don’t Marry Our Daughters - New York Times - Bits.Blogs.NYTimes.Com

   The site is a prank. But not everyone is in on the joke. The site has gotten 20 million page views in the last two weeks. The site’s “publicity director” has also appeared on at least half a dozen talk radio shows around the country

2. Mobile industry holds its breath - News.BBC.Co.UK

   The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme (MTHR) has received £8.8m in funding from the government and communications industry. There are now 70 million mobile phone handsets in the UK, and around 50 thousand masts.

3. Eating dark chocolate can prevent heart disease - DailyMail.Co.UK

   Good news for all us Chocolate lovers - “Dark chocolate may also stave off age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in the elderly, and dementia.”

4. Camera-toting partygoers leave paparazzi in the dark - theGlobeandMail.Com

   The new wave of citizen paparazzi who make it past the velvet ropes are causing concern to those running the events and the pros who earn their living shooting them. “It’s frustrating.” said Toronto freelance photographer

11 more articles after the Jump Read the rest of this entry »

Archive of del.icio.us links

1. We are an encyclopedia project, and more. - Citizendium.Org

   We aim at credibility and quality, not just quantity. * We offer gentle expert oversight, and public participation. * We use our real names, not pseudonyms. * We’re collegial. Over 2,700 articles since November 2006.

2. Web rivals plot the answer to Wikipedia - TimesOnline.Co.UK

   It was proposed that the new project will begin life by “mirroring” – or reproducing – Wikipedia’s content, a process allowed under the site’s copyright conditions. Citizendium’s expert editors will then “bless” articles as “approved

3. Spam up, PDF spam down - TechWorld.Com

   Symantec’s take is that spammers have backed off from sending PDF spam to tweak the technique or have decided this form of spam isn’t working and have gone back to the drawing board.

4. Talks under way to put Intel inside OLPC’s $100 laptop - InfoWorld.Com

   The design, which Intel plans to submit for OLPC’s consideration, will be based on either existing mobile chips, such as modified versions of the Celeron M called A100 and A110, or Silverthorne, an upcoming processor designed for small, mobile computers.

10 more articles after the Jump Read the rest of this entry »

With Apple annoucing a new range of iPods one of the biggest, or rather smallest, problems that the new range has is the small amount of storage that you get on th iPod Touch.

Images borrowed from Apple.Com/UK

I really want to get the 16GB iTouch but I have why to many audio podcasts and audio books that I listen to regularly and would want to put on it, that I’m not totally sure if I should get the 16GB iTouch or go from the 160GB Classic.

I know that you can just use iTunes to re-compress the files down to a smaller size, but this using a lower bit rate and thus a lower sound quality, plus this dosen’t always size that much space with podcasts and audiobooks due to the farily low bit rate that they use already (64kbps in mono or 40kbps in stereo, with a small number using 128kbps in mono).

So I have been looking around on the web and have found a piece of software called ‘ShrinkMyTunes from London-based Z Group which is £20UK, or $40US.

How I have found and read some reviews about this software on -

Wired.Com , CrunchGear.Com , PCAdvisor.Co.UK and PersonalComputerWorld.Co.UK (PCW.Co.UK) plus one on Playerbites.com that even has audio examples of a file before and after being compressed with ShrinkMyTunes.

Before

After

Click on either of the above to hear that file (the above 2 images and the files are from the article on about ShrinkMyTunes on the Playerbites.com site, so please take a look at they site at somepoint)

From listening to the above two samples (Thanks Playerbites.com) I think that the bass lacks depth and the treble disappears at the higher range, but the new file sounds alot better then if you compress a track down to 29kbps using iTunes, plus you don’t get many Podcast or Audiobooks that use either low bass or the higher range.

So I was wondering if anybody has used this software for compressing the spoken voice within Audio Podcasts and AudioBooks, plus what they thought about the sound quality? The above listed reviews only tested ShrinkMyTunes with music tracks.

part of the review from Wired.Com -

“The result is a file that plays back in any MP3 player and sounds only the slightest bit less punchy, but is much smaller in size. To the trained ear, the converted MP3s sound like they have a medium amount of variable-bitrate (VBR) compression applied. But the quality-to-file-size ratio is much higher than what you get with built-in VBR rippers from iTunes or Windows Media Player. Even LAME’s best settings can’t beat ShrinkMyTunes at these file sizes.

It’s available on the company’s website and at Amazon. You’ll also find it on shelves at Office Depot and other retail stores next month.

To test ShrinkMyTunes, we started with a little classic rock. On the “Best Quality” setting, David Gilmour’s acoustic guitar and breathy vocals on Pink Floyd’s “Wots … Uh the Deal” lost little of their sheen, though a small amount of washiness was introduced in the very highest frequencies. The Floyd’s rocking “Free Four” also remained loud and sharp. Both tracks were reduced in size substantially, ending up about half their original bulk.“