From the monthly archives: September 2011
I love most all things to do with wine. Not sure you knew that! 
Well this adds technology to wine – gotta love that even more!!
From ThingM:
Can you remembering everything about all the wine you own? Do you update that knowledge continuously? Can you slice through multiple dimensions of that information instantly? Do you know the second a bottle has been removed from your wine rack?
WineM is an information tracking system that makes all wine information always accessible and updatable. It knows what wine is in the rack, and where it is, without requiring you to consult paper logs or spreadsheets. A custom walnut radio frequency tag uniquely identifies each bottle, while readers in every cell locate it.
With WineM, a rack owner no longer has to choose a single organizational scheme. WineM dynamically organizes the wine it holds in any combination of year, region, price, appellation, etc. In addition, the rack knows in less than a second when any bottle has been removed, and can contact its owner by email or text page, or trigger an alarm.
A handheld browser commands the rack to display multiple types of information and cold, full-color LED lights illuminate every bottle in different colors based on the result.
For example, a collector planning a dinner party could specify they want to see all of their 2003 Napa Merlot wines whose current market value exceeds $50. WineM will light up just the bottles that match those criteria.
What about you? Those that know me can probably guess if I will or not!
From Mashable:
The iPhone 5 is on the way, and millions of people are asking themselves, is it time to upgrade? This infographic will point you in the right direction.
Let’s take a look at the current state of the iPhone 4 and its predecessors, how many apps users have installed, how much they’re using the iPhone and what new features they’d like to see in the next one. That should give us a good idea about whether we should upgrade, and why.
This elaborate infographic is part 1 of a three-part series that will lead us up to the launch of the iPhone 5, which is likely to be announced on Oct. 4. Developed by AYTM (Ask Your Target Market) and research firm PaidViewpoint along with Mashable, the survey asked 1,000 U.S. iPhone owners aged 18 years and older an extensive series of questions.
The result? A comprehensive set of data that pointed to their intentions to upgrade early to the iPhone 5 and a whole lot more:
Wow – this is sad. I like both companies, but this isn’t even close!
Here’s today’s depressing tweet, courtesy of the WSJ’s Dennis Berman: Kodak, which historically pioneered personal photography and employs almost 20,000 people, closed at an all time low, and “is now worth $468m, or $330m less than 50-person, profitless Tumblr.”
Kodak is more or less on a slow slide towards annihilation at this point. They’ve got no worthwhile foothold on the digital photography slope, and nobody buys film—not that they even make the film once prized by photographers across the world. And now a share of their stock is worth $1.74, on the same day Tumblr’s received a scalding hot injection of $85 million in venture capital cash, owing mostly to its ability to quickly spread animal memes and Rebecca Black GIFs. There’s no use mourning obsolescence, but sometimes the shifting of money from one place to another makes me want to frown. [Dennis Berman]
Have you heard of Munch on Me? Cool newer coupon site, but almost more of a new food exploration site Yum! Munch on Me is coming to more and more cities.
Well Diddy Riese isn’t new to my family, but it sure is yummy! For those of you in SoCalif – you gotta try em out if you never have! And check this out:
FREE!
(click on the picture below to go to this deal at Munch on Me)
FINE PRINT
- Limit 1 per person
- Redeemable 6pm-Closing
- Usable until 10/2/2011
- Standard conditions apply
Wow – VERY scary stuff!
Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.
An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code. This was produced for Australian TV program HungryBeast on Australia’s ABC1
Direction and Motion Graphics: Patrick Clair patrickclair.com
Written by: Scott Mitchell
From Gizmodo:
Despite no official confirmation by the Pentagon, it’s a very safe assumption that the US created the Stuxnet worm (with Israel’s help) to take Iran’s nuclear reactors offline. But when it was first discovered, it seemed too sophisticated for Earthlings.
NPR spoke with German security expert Ralph Langner, who was the first in the world to discover Stuxnet whirling around in the wild. It was the most amazing digital weapon he’d ever seen. And he knew that something so powerful could only really come from one place: “Thinking about it for another minute, if it’s not aliens, it’s got to be the United States,” Langner concluded.
Right now, the US likely has the lead in the ability to both cook up and deploy an online attack with offline damages. But it won’t stay that way for long—and we know it. That’s why the military’s slowly ringing the alarm bells already.
Wow – I need this! Glad I use Chrome and of course gmail!
From AddictiveTips:
As a word processor, one of the greatest things about MS Word is that it fixes your typos and grammar automatically, as a browser, the great thing about Chrome is spell check (Internet Explorer 10 might have an edge over it though) and of course, Gmail too saves you from coming off as a bad speller. The point is, all these spell checking and grammar correcting features save our skin, they’ve been covering our hides so long we’ve become bad spellers and we love them for it. So, Gmail is naturally great because it tells you when you’ve misspelled a word but what it doesn’t do is auto correct your typos. ezAutoCorrect for GMail is a Chrome extension that auto corrects select typos as you type in Gmail.
To get a better sense of how this extension works, open MS word, type teh (typo for The) and press the spacebar, it is automatically corrected to The. Now imagine this happening in Gmail, that’s what this extension does. It runs quietly and unobtrusively in the background and fixes those little mistakes you make as you type. As opposed to having to right-click a misspelled word and choosing the right one from the context menu, this extension will automatically correct the words when you hit the space bar.
The list of typos (which aren’t listed anywhere) are, for now, hard coded (i.e., you get what you get). It corrects words like teh to The, yuo to You, dont to Don’t and i to I. The slight short coming with the extension is that you can’t add your own customized corrections. The developer has promised to add the feature if the extension is deemed useful by users, i.e. shown some love. I personally found it amazing and will be sending the developer a cake in hopes that it’ll get that feature implemented sooner.
Even if it doesn’t correct all the typos you make, it corrects some of them and there is no harm in having it run in the background.
Great news for history buffs – these scrolls are old! How cool is technology?!?! To be able to see and zoom in and wander through the Dead Sea Scrolls!!
From Google:
It’s taken 24 centuries, the work of archaeologists, scholars and historians, and the advent of the Internet to make the Dead Sea Scrolls accessible to anyone in the world. Today, as the new year approaches on the Hebrew calendar, we’re celebrating the launch of the Dead Sea Scrolls online; a project of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem powered by Google technology.Written between the third and first centuries BCE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. In 68 BCE, they were hidden in 11 caves in the Judean desert on the shores of the Dead Sea to protect them from the approaching Roman armies. They weren’t discovered again until 1947, when a Bedouin shepherd threw a rock in a cave and realized something was inside. Since 1965, the scrolls have been on exhibit at the Shrine of the Book at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Among other topics, the scrolls offer critical insights into life and religion in ancient Jerusalem, including the birth of Christianity.
Now, anyone around the world can view, read and interact with five digitized Dead Sea Scrolls. The high resolution photographs, taken by Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1,200 megapixels, almost 200 times more than the average consumer camera, so viewers can see even the most minute details in the parchment. For example, zoom in on the Temple Scroll to get a feel for the animal skin it’s written on—only one-tenth of a millimeter thick.
You can browse the Great Isaiah Scroll, the most well known scroll and the one that can be found in most home bibles, by chapter and verse. You can also click directly on the Hebrew text and get an English translation. While you’re there, leave a comment for others to see.
The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for phrases from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll viewers on the Dead Sea Scrolls collections site may surface in your search results. For example, search for [Dead Sea Scrolls "In the day of thy planting thou didst make it to grow"], and you may see a link to Chapter 17:Verse 11within the Great Isaiah Scroll.
This partnership with The Israel Museum, Jerusalem is part of our larger effort to bring important cultural and historical collections online. We are thrilled to have been able to help this project through hosting on Google Storage and App Engine, helping design the web experience and making it searchable and accessible to the world. We’ve been involved in similar projects in the past, including building the Yad Vashem Holocaust photo collection and collections at the Prado Museum in Madrid. We encourage organizations interested in partnering with us in our archiving efforts to enter their information in this form. We hope you enjoy visiting the Dead Sea Scrolls collection online, or any of these other projects, and interacting with history at your fingertips.
