I heard about Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope a few weeks back through their presentation at TED and today, I saw an article featured on the MSN website about it’s public beta finally released.

The WorldWide Telescope takes images from numerous sources such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) and compiles them into a single user friendly interface allowing people of all ages to essentially fly though space and view planets and galaxies one would never normally see.

While the software may be in beta, it all runs quite well. It’s very similar to Google Earth in the way that the images are streamed to you as you require them which makes for a very lightweight application storage-wise but heavy on the internet connectivity and graphics requirements.

None the less, I highly recommend everyone check it out at least once and be sure to give the final a try whenever that may be.

Thanks to Google, YouTube will be adding live streaming to it’s list of features by the end of 2008! There are a few others doing this right now like justin.tv and ustream.tv but they’re not the greatest services in my opinion. Hopefully YouTube will be able to do it right!! It would be even cooler if they managed to allow live streaming from a cellphone too!

We’ll just have to wait and see.

A feature in Windows Vista rarely mentioned can now be on your Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP machine too! Vista Drive Icons changes your drive icons under My Computer into the Vista ones with little bars under each to show how much drive space is in use.

Now this is something I had never heard of until I Stumbled Upon it. Ever wonder what one can do with the mysterious SysRq key on your keyboard? (I just noticed my Logitech S510 keyboard doesn’t have it marked but it’s usually the Print Screen key)

Well, for you Linux users, it can actually be a bit of a life saver. If your system is frozen and you can’t kill the X server with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace or you aren’t able to jump to another terminal using the Function keys, most people will just go and hit the power or reset button and reboot, risking damage to the system. I know I would…

Well, next time, press and hold Alt+SysRq and enter REISUB (Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring).

This will send the term signal to all the processes (except for init), then the kill signal to all process (again except for init), mounts the filesystem as readonly to prevent triggering fsck, and finally reboots.

There’s actually a lot more you can do with the SysRq key combination, all of which you can find on Wikipedia.

I also came across this post which talks about how to disable the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key combination while trying to find out what it did

I’ve always wanted to get a Wacom tablet and a Cinq would be even better but I probably wouldn’t use it enough to justify the cost of getting one. But why buy one when you can build your own for cheeeeap!!?

Drew Northcott thought the same thing and embarked on an adventure to get it done! For only about £100, he was able to purchase an old Wacom tablet and 15″ Dell 1501fp LCD off eBay (along with a few other small bits and pieces), and combined them into a beautiful Cinq replica!

What’s even better is that he’s posted his steps and pictures on his site for all to see for anyone else daring enough to do the same!

So I’ve taken on another project and this time I’ve already gotten started

I’m working on converting an old Sony VAIO PCG-FX220 into a picture frame I can hang on the wall to display my photos. The main idea being that it’ll run off WiFi and should be light enough to hang safely on the wall. I’ve started documenting my progress and you can find the link here, or on the top nav of the blog.

If you have any questions or ideas along the way, feel free to post a comment and I will do my best to answer them for you.

Right now, the plan is to install Windows XP on it, and use Slickr to show the images. I’ll probably set up a share on the network and have Slickr read off that so I can easily add and remove photos as I go. Another idea which I got from another site was to have a startup script to map a drive to the network and run another script that I can customize which would allow me easier control of the frame.

The question on my mind right now is how I want to mat the frame. Do I keep the full 15″ at 4:3 or should I bring it down a little to 5:4 (Do I have my aspect ratios right?) which is where all my photos will be sized at?

Pretty much everyone has a digital camera now and everyone just loves to takes snapshots of their friends, belongings, evets, etc… But what do you do with them afterwards? Not all are print worthy but you still want to display them or view them. So, why not use them as screen savers!

The “My Pictures Slideshow” screen saver that comes with Windows XP is *okay*… But it’s kind of boring. There are much better options out there and for the price of FREE, you can’t go wrong!

The first one is similar to the Apple photo screen saver, and is called Nostalgic. You set where you want the photos to come from (by default your “My Pictures” folder), and how often you want the photos to change. Other settings include how long to cross fade between photos, how much you want to scale the photos, and even the resolution you want set on the monitor (you can set different ones for each monitor you have if you have more than 1).

The next one I just found today, is called Slickr. Similar to Nostalgic, this screen saver can be set to pull images from a folder on your computer but has the added bonus of being able to use images off of Flickr. You can select images from Flickr by user, group, or everyone and then narrow it down even more by choosing if you just want recent images, by tags, or interestingness and if you REALLY want to narrow it down, you can even select a specific date. With Slickr, you can even set how you want the images to be shown, whether or not you want to use fading, panning or zooming, or show file info. If your user has access to private photos, you can authorize Slickr on your account to be able to access those as well.

The great thing about both these screen savers is that they’re multi-monitor friendly unlike the Windows XP  one which utilizes all monitors but only treats it as 1 and even then the image ends up only on 1 of the monitors. These two will actually utilize all your monitors and show different photos on each which is nicer in my opinion. Check them out!

While this was written with more of a freelance/contract worker in mind, this can still be applied to anyone who has to deal with clients in general. FreelanceSwitch published this great article on the many types of clients that one would encounter through out their working life along with the pros, cons and how one should work with them. It almost seems like it should be made into a handbook everyone should get when jumping into the freelance tech pool.

So, let’s hear about which types you’ve encountered and your experiences with them!