Över ån efter vatten

När livet går för fort är det skönt att varva ned med en god bok eller en rafflande omgång pong. Eller varför inte både och?

Paper Pong

 

Kör försiktigt

Trygghet och säkerhet. Terrorism ska förhindras och livsmedelstillsatser kontrolleras. Detta och allt däremellan är stort och komplext, men frågar du mig "vad kan jag göra för en tryggare och säkrare tillvaro?" så är mitt svar enkelt:

Kör försiktigt!

Recognizable features

The Register writes about researchers who claim to have a system for automatic face recognition with much higher accuracy than other existing systems. You know, the kind of system paranoid people think are connected to CCTV systems in public places to track people.

How does this system work then? To avoid being distracted by changed hairstyles, different facial expressions, and so on, one must provide several images of the subject ranging over different looks. It then uses an average of the provided pictures to find the features that are constant and unique to the subject.

Phew, that means that only celebrities who are frequent paparazzi targets are in risk of being tracked by public CCTV cameras. Unless someone decides to grab tagged faces from pictures on Facebook. Hmmm, mabye I should start writing that add-on to show me the location of all my friends on Google maps...

Thanks to Bruce Schneier for the tip.

Keeping up with updates

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the task of keeping all applications on my computer up to date. While a few applications makes it really easy to stay current with the latest version (I'm talking about you, Adium), others require me to visit their websites to find out if there are newer versions available. That's way too much work!

I have just tried out a Dashboard widget called App Update that really simplifies staying up to date. It looks at your installed applications and compares with information from Apple, MacUpdate and VersionTracker and shows you a list of applications that have newer versions. Sweet!

Now, go get up to date! Working through that list also makes a good opportunity to uninstall all that software you installed to try out but ended up never using.

Steve in 60 seconds

Curious about the new stuff Steve Jobs presented during yesterdays MacWorld keynote, but not enough to spend 90 minutes watching the whole thing?

You can have the important stuff in just 60 seconds.

Story of Stuff

Apart from telling an important story about consumerism, the Story of Stuff is an example of how to make a great online presentation.