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Posted by mahern at 8:02 PM | Permalink

1.jpg
Originally uploaded by mahern1

Nice photo.

Posted by mahern at 1:42 PM | Permalink

I have seen amazing things done with Photoshop. I even know some Photoshop tricks myself that look impressive. Over the years, I have also used the program that's been included with Windows -- mspaint. It is short on features, very basic, etc.

This video is the artist creating the Mona Lisa. It took two and a half hours for the artist to create. This video is sped-up and takes 5 minutes.

Posted by mahern at 3:42 PM | Permalink

You may know zefrank. He has a daily webcast that is very thoughtful and usually pretty funny. What you may not know is that this is the last week of his show. I don't know if he has said exactly what he is doing next, but I bet it becomes big news.

The "popular shows" part of his site has some pretty good episodes.

Posted by mahern at 11:31 AM | Permalink

There are many solutions to reading RSS feeds. From browser-based to Outlook add-ins to stand-alone applications. There are merits to all of the different approaches. For the past few years, I have been using Bloglines.com. Bloglines happens to be one of the web-based solutions that renders all of the feeds in your browser with a navigation outline on the left of the window. It is not a bad way to go and really works well if you switch around between multiple computers.

I have been tempted to switch from time to time, especially when Bloglines was having some technical issues a while back, but the primary reason I have not moved on is their Bloglines Mobile feature. Bloglines Mobile is an amazing, light weight version that strips the html to work really well on small screens and mobile devices. I have access to all the feeds (or a subset if I choose) and can start reading exactly where I left off on my desktop.

Bloglines just added an additional new feature to the mobile reader. They have integrated Skweezer technology to optimize web pages for your personal handheld mobile device. So the key development here is pages from links on Bloglines are now also optimized for small screens.

When you click on a link while reading a blog post in Bloglines Mobile, Skweezer will compress and reformat the content so you get it faster and better looking on your small screen. As you surf, the content will continue to be skweezed.

Posted by mahern at 7:15 AM | Permalink

The cover story in Business Week is about Click Fraud.

The article states that the amount of fraud this year is over one billion dollars. They do a good job explaining the issues.

"Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits automatically and anonymously. Participants from Kentucky to China speak of making from $25 to several thousand dollars a month apiece, cash they wouldn't receive if Google and Yahoo were as successful at blocking fraud as they claim.

Posted by mahern at 6:51 AM | Permalink

There was a trick during the Windows XP install, where if you got bored (and wanted to play pinball) or needed to minipulate or find files on your disk, you could press F10 and get a cmd.exe prompt. You could then do all kind of command line activities.

Well this works also on the Vista RC1 install.

To play pinball on the Windows XP install, the commands would be:

SHIFT-F10 for command prompt

cd \

cd "Program Files"

cd "Windows NT"

cd Pinball

pinball.exe

I did not see pinball copied over during the Vista install, so not sure if you can play it, but you can play anything you can launch from the command line.

Posted by mahern at 12:12 PM | Permalink