MY DOODLING PAD: January 2010

1/29/10

12 Essential Tips to Using XBMC as the Perfect Media Hub

XBMC, an open-source project formerly known as Xbox Media Center. XBMC was originally developed for the first Xbox console, and through the years, it has evolved as a fully fledged, cross-platform media hub with a rabid following and plenty of user-created plugins and scripts. It's also given birth to more familiar projects like Boxee, Voddler, and others, all of which initially borrowed from XBMC's source code.

iPad - Starting at $499

The long-awaited iPad is here. I've got to get my hands on one and see it in action!

1/26/10

Video Gaming Just Might Fight Aging

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=112615

I think I should start getting into the games, as a preventive measure. Seems like it couldn't hurt. My mom plays them and they're definitely entertaining. She's as sharp as ever! Love You Mom!!!

Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo compared at the macro level

Nick Bilton of the New York Times has put together a segment-by-segment comparison between America's tech heavyweights, which does a fine job of pinpointing who competes with whom and where.

1/20/10

HandBrake

"Creation comes out of imperfection."

There's an old proverb in the video encoding world: "Speed, size, quality: pick two." It means that you always have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to encode a video, the amount of compression used, and the picture quality. Well, this release of HandBrake refuses to compromise. It picks all three.

Download it now.

1/11/10

Highs and Lows of 2009 Illustrated in a Google Wave

from Maximum PC:

Google's Wave platform is one of the more interesting technologies to see the light of day (to a select few) in 2009, but it's far from the only thing that happened this year. Memorable moments abound, from the Obama inauguration, to Kanye West's antics.

These and many more have been captured in a pretty cool Google Wave rendition of the year's most memorable moments. Perhaps not as cool as Samuel Jackson describing the technology in a Google Wave (Link - NSFW), but pretty groovy nonetheless.

Check it out the 2.5-minute here.

Firefox Add-on of the Week: TinEye Reverse Image Search

Awesome! That image rocks! Where did it come from? Can I get it a size bigger and make it my desktop wallpaper?

Such are the common questions you might ask yourself should you stumble across an awesome picture on the Internet And until now, there's been no clear way to search for an identical version of an image across the Web No, a Google search for the image's characteristics doesn't count--good luck trying to find the one shot of a red balloon you're looking for in a sea of thousands.

The Mozilla Firefox add-on TinEye Reverse Image Search uses a novel method for finding copies of said image across the Internet Whenever you submit an image to be searched, the accompanying site--tineye.com--assigns a digital fingerprint to the picture. It then looks for similar fingerprints across its archive of collected images, allowing the site (or your add-on) to pull up partial or exact matches for the image you've searched for In that sense, you're not just looking for images that are similar to your picture in terms of coloration or subject You're looking for exact copies, crops, or scaled versions of the shot.

How well does TinEye Reverse Image Search actually work in practice? As expected, you can't just click on any ol' image on the Internet and expect it to produce comparable results Trying to search for alternate versions of random Web graphics on, say, CNN.com or maximumpc.com isn't always going to produce much to look at. Remember, you're searching for duplicate images. Screenshots will certainly pull up results, as will pictures that would otherwise be the kind that are copied around the Web--like certain Flickr photographs, for example And now that I've mentioned that, you should probably know that TinEye Reverse Image Search is an excellent way to find out who's using your images around the 'net as well...

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