Internet Activity #4

2 Podcasts

I listen to the pandora one quite often, it is available as a podcast and as a vidcast. It is interesting to learn about the different ways that music is made, for example in building a song:
http://blog.pandora.com/archives/podcast/2008/04/building_a_song.html
They detail how a song is built (well, that was pretty obvious based on the title of the podcast).

I have also listened to the Onion radio podcasts (http://www.theonion.com/content/radionews). I find them pretty funny.

I enjoyed both of these podcasts and I am sure that I will listen to them when they arrive on the internet. They are both of high interest to me, I love music, and I love stuff that is funny. I am sure that I would listen to other podcasts if I looked around for them.

I would probably enjoy them more if they were provided as text as well as the podcast, it would let me go through them easier on my own time, though, it is nice to be able to hit play and go somewhere else to go do some work.

For audio books, I went to http://librivox.org/. There, people provide their services reading chapters of Public Domain books, and then they upload them. Apparently their goal is to provide every book that is in the public domain.

The book I chose to listen to was The Short Science Fiction Collection vol 005

http://librivox.org/short-science-fiction-collection-vol-005/

It was interesting to listen to as I really enjoy sci-fi. It is also good because this preserves the works as many of them are not in print any more.

I did look at the purchasing plans of Audio books on some sites like Amazon.com and Chapters.ca, and the prices seemed extremely high, you could buy the books for less than the recordings in some instances. If you could buy the books for one price, or the recordings for another, but they should be comparable. There is no way that it costs that much to transmit the audio over the Internet, there is no printing cost involved with it. Perhaps a bit of money added to the price so that the voice actor can be reimbursed for their work. Even if you get physical discs of the audio book, there is no way that it should cost as much as it does.

The vidcasts that I watched were from Pandora again, which was nice because it adds a visual element to the information that they are presenting.

http://blog.pandora.com/archives/show/2008/04/music_101_singi.html

I enjoyed it, and I will listen/watch them again as they come out.

Another one that I have listened to is Cute With Chris (http://www.cutewithchris.com/).

It is a very ammusing one that is available on youtube as well as from his site. Here is an episode:



Youtubes sucess comes from the ease of its use. It became popular as one of the first video sites, and is therefore one of the biggest and most widely used. It is also popular because anyone can upload any content to it, so even shows that should not show up because of legal issues will show up there for a little while for people to watch, then they are taken down when they are found by the owners. Youtube attempts to respect copyright laws, but this is made easier by people marking things as infringements or innapropriate. The Google cannot be everywhere at once, so they rely on the users to help them out, which many do.


High Definition defined:

A television system that has twice the standard number of scanning lines per frame and therefore produces pictures with greater detail. (dictionary.com) Generally I think this is in 1080i(interlaced) or 720p (progressive interlaced). There are other formats too that were created in different countries.

I watched some previews of trailers on Apple.com in both resolutions. On my laptop it made very little difference because the screen is not very big. On my desktop computer however, it made a huge difference because the monitor has a resolution of 1680x1050, so the difference is definately noticable.

I watched the exclusive Speed Racer trailer in both hd and normal definition. I do not believe that the difference in resolutions made me want to see the movie any more or less. The exclusive trailer however did make me want to see it. Another trailer that I watched was for Hellboy 2... I didn't even know that there was a Hellboy 2. I am definately going to go see it. The HD version once again did not sway me either way. It is nice to be able to just go to the site and watch the trailers though, the availability is nice (On a side note, I hate that I have to install Quicktime to look at the trailers).

Internet Activity 3

Google maps mashups

There are many google maps mashups out there, some of the more interesting ones are:

http://www.flightstats.com/go/FlightTracker/trackFlight.do

It lets you track your flight (well, all flights) to see when they will arrive at the airport.

There is also Flicks (http://photoskml.googlepages.com/flicks.htm) which lets you see where pictures were taken on flicker (the person needs to embed a geocode to tell it where, but thats all). It is nice because then you can see the sights from one location (if people aren't lying about where the pictures were taken). It could even help you to decide where to vacation to!

A third one is:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/sealevel

It tells you where places are vulnerable to rising sea levels. This would be important for coastal cities because it could help people decided whether or not to move out of their homes.

Generators and the likes.

Here are some things that I have generated using different generators:
This one was created using http://hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php. It is a simple generator, but I liked it because I could make it do the 1984 thing, Einstein has clearly been gotten by the Ministry of Truth.

This next one was created using the clippy generator (http://www.imagegenerator.net/create/clippy/). Everyone loves Clippy!

Well, at least Clippy thinks so...

You know you want to make your own O'reilly books... (http://www.oreillymaker.com/)




Thoughts on Online generators:

I definately thought that the generators that I picked were fun to use, I enjoyed the Einstein one the most because it was simple to use, and easy for me to make him write something funny.

For the most part Online generators are just for wasting time, but there are some that are useful, like password generators, name generators and Lorem Ipsum generators. The ones that actually generate text are generally more useful than those that generate images, there are however exceptions, like the 3D box generator which lets you make a box that represents your software or something that you are selling.

RSS Feeds

Personally, I have been using RSS feeds for quite some time.

I prefer to view a site through Google Reader (or another rss reader) because it allows me to save the time in looking to see if there is another post (or new content on the site). Most of the time, I simply go to Google Reader instead of actually going to other websites because I have a large number of sites that it keeps track of for me. One of the sites that I keep track of with it is a 'digg style' site (30-50 posts per day), where users submit content to it. This would be very time consuming to have to go to that page multiple times every day to see if there was something that was interesting to me. With Google Reader, all I have to do is click on the feed and see if there is anything interesting in the titles of the posts, and if there is, I end up going to look at it, otherwise I just ignore it.

There are three ways to add an RSS feed to Google Reader. The first way is to go to the page and look to see if there is an rss icon in the address bar. If there is, you just click on it and a page will load asking you what you want to do with the rss feed. Here you can make it a live bookmark in your browser (at least in Firefox) or you can add it to your Google homepage, or you can add it to Google Reader, or you can just copy the link into another RSS reader.

The second way of adding something your reader is to search for it from within Google Reader. All you have to do is click on the "Add Subscription" and it asks you for the URL of the feed, or you can use it to search for something to add.

A third way is to use the browse recommendations functionality in Google Reader. This only really works if you have at least one or two feeds that you are already subscribed to. It lists various feeds that Google recommends to you based on the feeds that you are already keeping track of.

Internet Activity 1

How has blogging changed the world?

Blogging has made the world a much smaller place. It has made it so that people can report on news that is going on as it happens, there is now no need to wait for the 6 o'clock news, nor is there a reason to wait for the paper in the morning.

Personally I read blogs a lot, some of the more interesting ones that I have read are:

The Daily WTF

Which is about how not to write code, as well as strange errors that people encounter on the job or out in the real world. This is good for most computer science students to look at and to try and understand the code that is posted and why it is wrong.

Ctrl-Alt-Del

An entertaining site about computer games. I read this to keep up with what is going on in the world of computer games, and all of the things that I cannot play on my computer because of how bad it is compared to what you need for todays games. It is interesting to look at some of the technology that is behinde the games that are coming out. There is also a really good web-comic.

Coding Horror

This site is another computer science related site. Unlike the DailyWTF, this site is more about doing things right the first time. There are many other topics that are discussed in this blog, but most of the posts end up being about how to get things done the right way, either through the authors experience, or through other anecdotal methods.

Twitter

Twitter is a social network type mini blog site. It allows users to make many many small quick posts about what they are upto at the moment, or what they were just doing. There are many features that allow people to stay in touch like RSS feeds, and SMS notifications, as well as allowing users to comment on posts (twitters?) on their own twitter pages.

Personally, I think it depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for a way to keep your parents (friends, the world... what ever) updated with what you are doing at the moment, then Twitter is the way to go, it is quick and easy. If you are looking to make more indepth posts (though probably not as often) then you should probably be blogging. Though, there probably is nothing stopping you from writting long posts in Twitter, much like there is nothing stopping you from making really short posts in any blog.