Nothing I can really add to this video other than technical garbage. You can find all of the details about this new device over at the official Google Blog. I guess all I have to say is, “it’s about time!”

Using gmail labs, you’ve been able to insert images into your emails for some time now. You’ve also been able to drag files right into the email rather than clicking “attach” and so on. Today, Google is launching a feature that combines those two features.

You can now just grab an image from your computer and drag it into your email and there it is in all its glory for your recipient to see. It’s unclear as to whether they will make it so you can drag images straight off a web page into your email or just from your computer’s hard drive. Either way, this is one more little piece of awesomeness from Gmail.

I just tried it out and it works like a charm. This isn’t even a lab feature, it’s built right into the software. You even have the choice of resizing the image once in its place within your correspondence.

PS – it only works if you’re using Google Chrome as your browser (for now). Which you should be anyway.

Last summer someone on the Tubes of You mashed up the opening credits sequence from Magnum P.I. along with Captain Han Solo and friends aboard the Millenium Falcon. While this newest mash-up doesn’t look like quite the same amount of patience and research the Solo P.I. employed, this Beastie Boys version of episodes from Battlestar Galactica is nonetheless still quite entertaining.

While cleaning out my email a couple of days ago I restumbled across this little nugget of unbelievable, courtesy of an irritated (but beyond patient) customer and the product of a public education system in the United States. This call is from about three years ago, so hopefully Verizon has sent their employees back to elementary school by now before bringing them back to the job. If you got through 5th grade match class, this call will entertain and frustrate you to no end. If I didn’t get my cell phone through work, this recorded call would be enough for me to terminate my contract with Verizon immediately. I can’t express it any better than that in words.

This customer is unbelievably patient with the operators on the line. If this were me I would have either exploded at one point or asked for someone else (again and again) until I get someone who was hired at Verizon that made it through elementary school with at least a C average.

The audio explains it much better than I can, so just have a listen here.

[display_podcast]

You can read and hear follow-ups to this situation over at Verizon Math. If you head over to that blog, it appears in the comment section that this is still a problem – years later! It is absolutely unbelievable! How can a company recognize there is a problem (again, a simple, elementary mathematics problem) and not have it fixed almost three years later.

Sorry state of affairs here.

Just a quick FYI on the state of music blogs and .mp3 sharing. Last week Google and its affiliate, Blogger, shut down a number of music related blogs citing that they had been violating their terms of agreement by posting copyrighted material without the permission from the holders.

Now if that were the case, I think it obviously appropriate to remove these sites from the interwebs because not only are they violating the terms of service, but they’re breaking the law – which would ultimately be the responsibility of Blogger.

However, as it turns out (and it’s a bit complicated), these blogs in general, did have permission to post the stuff they had on their sites. But just like a gov’t cleanup job, the left hand doesn’t seem to know what the right hand is doing and while “cleaning up” these blogs, deleted a LOT of people’s hard work and countless hours of time consumption.

So let’s be clear, Blogger went in to a number of its hosted web sites and deleted these blogs completely (which of course technically they have the right to do). They didn’t send a cease and desist notice. They didn’t suspend the account, they didn’t just remove one or two posts or put the posts temporarily into draft mode. They completely obliterated blogs with years worth of posts and effort… and as it turns out, for no good reason.

Take a look at a couple of these stories that can explain it far better than I can, with much more detail and with specific examples about the DMCA and Blogger’s responses as to how they handled the situation and why they handled it the way they did.

It’s pretty lame and discouraging reading, but it’s important.

Pitchfork
The Daily Swarm
True Slant
irockcleveland’s Blogger help ticket

With new IMAX Camera capabilities, we’ll be able to look at and study the Sun like never before.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory is designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously. Dean Pesnell, the SDO Project Scientist, explains the science that will be done using NASA’s SDO spacecraft.

 

 
Woo-hoo! [via]

We’re only about an hour from Apple’s big “unveiling.” Early reports are it’s the gadget of the year… maybe of the decade. Follow the up to the minute Live blog with The Times.

Need some powerful sound blaring out your ceiling but not a stereo in sight? Luckily Klipsch has made some nifty speakers that fit right into any standard light bulb socket and play your music wirelessly from your PC, stereo system or iPod.

Now you’re thinking, “That’s pretty awesome, but damn it got dark in here all of a sudden.” Not so fast. These speakers also come with 5 and 6-inch light fixtures which are completely dimmable, meaning you can replace the usual bulbs you use with a set of these Klipsch ones, which will last for 40,000 hours.

The speakers contain a 2.5-inch wide dispersion driver and uses up 20 watts. The LightSpeaker kit comes with a transmitter and sends the audio to up to eight of the light bulbs with two separate zones.

The two LightSpeakers, transmitter, remote and cables cost $599, with individual LightSpeakers on sale for $249 at the end of the month.

a video demo under the seats…
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Cassini gives us a glorious shot of what we call the Northern (or southern) Lights here on Earth. This is the first time we’ve seen them in the visible light spectrum on another planet however. And I gotta say, it’s gorgeous!

The high-resolution video was assembled from 472 still images of Saturn, spaced over 81 hours in October, that show the phenomenon in three dimensions. The lights can be seen as a rippling, vertical sheet up to 750 miles high above Saturn’s northern hemisphere.

Each image has a 2 to 3 minute exposure time, and together they reveal that Saturn’s auroras are rapidly changing, as on Earth. But because of Saturn’s lighter, primarily hydrogen atmosphere, the lights reach much higher than in Earth’s heavier oxygen and nitrogen atmosphere.

Though Cassini has spied the alien auroras in ultraviolet and infrared light before, this time the phenomenon was captured in the visible spectrum. The imaging team added false color to the black and white images to highlight the aurora. Scientists are still trying to figure out what color the lights really are.

Proving that social networking is a huge cultural force, the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen ‘UNFRIEND’ as its 2009 Word of the Year (WOTY). To “unfriend” means to remove someone from your friend list on a social network like Facebook or MySpace. The new word is an excellent choice as the 2009 WOTY because of its “currency and potential longevity,” according to Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program.

This is a word you may have used yourself – or at least hear others use. If you’re on Facebook, that’s a concept you’ve likely been exposed to (and hopefully, not been the victim of yourself).

Other contenders for 2009 WOTY.

hashtag: a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

intexticated: distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

netbook: a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

paywall: a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

sexting: the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

This is pretty weird, kind of gross but also interesting and entertaining. An inside view of various women’s vocal chords as they sing a capella.

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We haven’t tried it yet, but I was just introduced to TuneUp. If you can believe the demo video below, looks like a pretty slick plugin. Available for both Windows and Macs, the program will clean up all the garbage in your iTunes folder. In other words, it will find all of the missing artwork, clean up tracks (ya know, the group in your library marked “Track 01, Track 02, etc”) and even fix all the multiple spellings of a particular artist (Black Crowes, THE Black Crowes, Black Crows, etc). I really like the concert feature as well.

So a sort of demo version is free, which gives you 100 track fixes, 50 album covers and unlimited concert reminders and related content. Or you can download the “unlimited everything” version for $30 lifetime or $20 per year. If anyone bothers to try this out, let us know how well it works. Maybe it’s easier to just hunt for missing album artwork on your own and drag and drop? That’s what I’ve been doing.

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I read this book once in which an invention was made where a person could see anywhere into the past at any time. This means you could look into the past and watch the Kennedy assassination from any angle at any moment. But, you could also look into the house down the street where the hot chick who lives there is taking a shower. The way the book describes this and the way it is explained is actually theoretically possible. Which means that although the invention hasn’t been made yet, someone from the future could be watching you right now. Maybe your grandkids are watching you as you stalk that dude on Facebook or as you rub one out at SpankWire. Scary right? In the story, privacy went completely out the window for everyone. Hence, society changed drastically. Kids walked around naked and everyone pretty much told the truth about everything. You had to. Anyone could see you doing anything at anytime anyway, so you might as well just be the best you you can be right?

This really is neither here nor there, but it sort of relates or reminds me as to how the internet culture, specifically online social networks, is changing so quickly and so dramatically and what it may be doing to our society as a whole.

This is not necessarily good or bad, but rather a simple observation. I was browsing through some friends picture albums this evening and looking at all the cute shots of them going swimming with their kids or going to the amusement park for the first time with their kid or Christmas ’08 when Little Sara opened her first Christmas present or Little Johnny does his first dance recital in the family living room – complete with pink tutu and “magic wand” with streamers. Cute right? But these kids have absolutely no say in the matter; their entire lives are being broadcast to complete strangers all over the internet. As somewhat of an old-fashioned guy, this both intrigues me and frightens me just a little bit.

Parents are proud of their kids, as they should be. And most of the photos I see of friends’ families are harmless and the kids are usually cute as buttons. But what is the long term impact of posting every waking moment of your kid’s life for the whole world to see on the internet? Maybe drastic, irreparable, psychological change; maybe nothing. Again, I’m not necessarily saying it is good or bad, I’m simply posing the question – especially for those of you who are parents and even more especially those of you whose profiles are not completely private, have you thought about when your child reaches junior high and all of his/her classmates can access pretty much any embarrassing story/photo/image that they choose, whenever they choose? Maybe society will change so that this is simply the norm (as the first paragraph hypothesizes – in an extreme example) and just another thing everyone has to deal with. But maybe this is sort of a strange invasion of privacy on one level and maybe on even another level a complete abuse of your child?

I’m sure I’m not the first to think about this and maybe I’m being cynical, but I know for me, at least specifically 7th grade, that would have been a nightmare. Last time; I’m not saying this is the case, I just want people to think about it. Thoughts?

Want to make sure you’re well prepped for what could be the final party on the planet? Keep up to date with the impending armageddon with the Asteroid Watch widget from Nasa.gov.

JPL’s Asteroid Watch Widget tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The Widget displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. The object’s name is displayed by hovering over its encounter date. Clicking on the encounter date will display a Web page with details about that object.

The Widget displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon); an object larger than about 150 meters that can approach the Earth to within this distance is termed a potentially hazardous object.

If this is too much for you, you can follow the Twitter which is a bit more selective and doesn’t notify you of every passerby, just the ones that are likely to kill us all.

Check out this coolness. Then adapt it so it fits within an actual melody/rhythm. Sign Contract. Make money. Who needs to know how to actually spell?

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