Just saw 2 brilliant TED Talks by Blaise Aguera y Arcas

One on Photosynth

And the other one on augmented reality maps

The Google Ad

Now this is one technology that will surely grow in the future. Trackpad will no longer be just a tool for finger navigation!

Try out Inklet!

Book Title: Pale Blue Dot
Author: Carl Sagan
Year written/published: 1997
Book Source: Google Books, Library
Summary: Human’s perception and conquest of the universe
Some extracts:

Our fear of tininess…

But if our objective is deep knowledge rather than shallow reassurance, the gains from this new perspective far outweigh the losses. Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs—in time, in space, and in potential—the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star… We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

The garden and the sin…

So long as we were incurious and obedient, I imagine, we could console ourselves with our importance and centrality, and tell ourselves that we were the reason the Universe was made. As we began to indulge our curiosity, though, to explore, to learn how the Universe really is, we expelled ourselves from Eden. Angels with a flaming sword were set as sentries at the gates of Paradise to bar our return. The gardeners became exiles and wanderers. Occasionally we mourn that lost world, but that, it seems to me, is maudlin and sentimental. We could not happily have remained ignorant forever.

Cosmic Purpose…

The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed. Sometimes it seems a very slender hope. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.
If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

Humbling us…

Even today, the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years, it still takes my breath away.
In every culture, the sky and the religious impulse are intertwined. I lie back in an open field and the sky surround me. I’m overpowered by its scale. It’s so vast and so far away that my own insignificance becomes palpable. But I don’t feel rejected by the sky. I’m a part of it, tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity, And when I concentrate on the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty our aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us.

The release names of Ubuntu is so funny

1. Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS (Dapper Drake)
2. Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)
3. Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
4. Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)
5. Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS (Hardy Heron)
6. Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
7. Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)
8. Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

From Yanko Design:

What is the next wave in multi-touch technology? Use our fingers?

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

9 speakers, 5 mins each, 20 slides… 9 ideas…

Matt talks about Wordpress and Open Source

As part of the European Southern Observatory, Chille has a bunch of spectacular telescopes that point to the skies. This place goes into my list of places to visit.

One more thing… i love their podcast. Do subscribe to that in the iTunes!

As presented by metacole at the BarCamp.. very funny!!

One amazing invention by genius, Pranav Mistry. And Sixth Sense will be open source!

with Intel being the major market player right now!

Credit

I’m waiting the MAC version for the OS that lives on the browser!

How amazing is this! You sketch the photo you have in mind and this program will automatically create it by merging several objects from various photos found in the internet! Can this be really done?? I have yet to try

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

World’s first bladeless fan! I want one for my room!

Very interesting take on Social Media (i found this from DK’s blog)

So the default image for screen shots in MAC is png. And we can change it to jpg!

Tom Merrit shows how to do it in Cnet’s “How to” podcast:

1. Open Terminal
2. type in:
   defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
3. Log in again
4. Test it:
   Shift+Cmd+4
5. the picture file created is in jpg

Here’s another post on how to change the default format!