My brother loves playing his ukulele, and luckily he’s pretty good; but he has nothing on U900 – a ukulele duo from Japan. Just take a look at their recent video animations of a couple of The Venture’s songs:
Diamond Head:
Walk Don’t Run:
Thanks Scott for introducing me to them.
September 26th through October 3rd is Banned Books Week and is dedicated to bringing awareness of ongoing censorship and promote freedom of speech.
Head over to BannedBooksWeek.org to get more information about how prevalent book banning and censorship really is and how you can help prevent it.
You will also find many events scheduled at your local library and book sellers if you would like to participate in your local community.
Here, for your perusal, is the list of 10 most challenged books:
There is a relatively new site called Super User that has been developed by some very well known tech gurus including one of my favorite – How-To Geek. The site is a combination of Digg/Reddit, wiki, and forum and at its core it allows you to ask a question and get answers back from the techie masses.
The site is specifically for hardware and software questions and more details about the types of questions and answers can be found in the Super User FAQ and About pages, but the basics are: if your computer is doing something you don’t understand or you have a question about using your computer, Super User is the place to go.
Besides just asking questions you can watch the hot topics to see what interesting items the Super User community is discussing as well as search through to see if someone else may have had the same question and already found an answer.
As a moderator, the How-To Geek has written up an excellent run down on what exactly the hope of Super User is and here is the line that make me truly support this site:
“Super User was created by a group of guys that really believe in putting the reader first.”
This site has the potential to be the best tech support resource on the internet with tons of common users and techie geeks working together to make computing just that much easier for us all.
Today is Reading Rainbow’s final broadcast. After being on the air for 26 years it has reached the last page and the cover is being closed.
NPR reports that the main reason Reading Rainbow is going off air is that nobody will pay the broadcast rights – but the primary cause of that is not so much a financial reason but a change in how reading is currently being taught. The focus of literacy has shifted to being more about the basics of reading: phonics and spelling. This shift is more about combating literacy in general as opposed to promoting reading as a form of education in itself.
It’s an understandable shift since conceptually it’s imperative to be able to read in order to function in society – but what a loss to those kids who will only know reading as a technical function and not a gateway for learning and imagination.
Reading Rainbow was a big part of introducing new and interesting stories to children and it will surely be missed by me and my fellow bibliophiles.
Tilt-shift is a technology implement in camera lenses that adjusts the depth of field in such a way that images look miniaturized.
Here’s a video of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco done with a DIY tilt-shift lense:
http://www.vimeo.com/6243891This is the first video I’ve seen using tilt-shift and it’s kinda interesting to see. Thanks to Scott for pointing it out.
There’s a weird bug in Firefox that when watching videos on YouTube or Hulu you will see a little video lag every 10 seconds or so… and luckily someone figured out how to fix it.
The fix was presented quite some time ago actually but I only just came across it and it has made watching online video so much more pleasant – and it’s an easy fix.
That’s it. You should now have much smoother video playback at YouTube.
Some friends of mine are moving away. Brian is moving to Las Vegas, NV and Kat is moving to Buffalo, NY. Luckily for us we were able to catch them together and convince them (it didn’t take much) to show us all The Move … one more time.
Good Luck Guys! Hope to see you back here soon…
Hayao Miyazaki creates some of the most stunning animation and imaginative storytelling including movies Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Howl’s Moving Castle just to name a few. Miyazaki’s latest release to come to the United States is Ponyo (full title: Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea).
Head over to the Ponyo Apple Trailers to see the HD version.
If you haven’t seen any of his other works I highly recommend them… they are generally family friendly and are truly … well… magical.
The sequal to Tron is in production and this past weekend at Comic-Con they showed a trailer. Yup… Light Cycles are back!
Here is the teaser trailer that was presented:
The names passed around for the new movie were Tron 2 and TR2N, but it seems they’ve settled on Tron Legacy.
Gmail recently fixed up some of their security to help keep sites like eBay and PayPal from being used as phishing attacks. They do a double check on the origination and if it isn’t right it gets removed – not even spammed, just gone.
They’ve now added a Gmail Labs function that can let you know when an email is from a verified secure sender (currently it’s eBay and PayPal only). It puts a little key by the address to let you know that the sender has been checked and verified. Just another helpful little notice that it’s a safe email to open. Just go to your labs options in your Gmail settings to turn it on.
Check out more about this updated function at the offical Gmail blog post.
