I just joined FriendFeed, which is like a Facebook News feed created by pulling your friends’ Flickr/Twitter/etc. feeds all into once place. I love it already.
I almost joined one of their competitors, Spokeo, but 30 minutes after the Spokeo email address verification, they sent a spam email titled, I kid you not, “Why don’t you want to see your friends?” WTF? And another today. They should change their name to Spookeo.
Today Wine 1.0 and Firefox 3 were released, which will probably be remembered as a milestone in the open source software movement.
Wine is a Windows emulator for Linux, in the colloquial sense of the term – that is, it allows you to run many Windows applications straight from Linux. This because there are probably many people interested in Linux who can’t switch because of a few Windows applications they need. This allows them to switch, assuming those programs work in Wine.
(More technically, I think I understand that Wine is not an emulator – which is actually what the acronym stands for – because it just reproduces the API without mucking about with more basic levels of Windows. Right?)
And Firefox I suppose needs no introduction. I’ll just say I rather like the new and improved location bar.
The “web as platform” concept — the increasing ability to do everything via a web browser — started with easy applications like word processing, but as time passes more complex programs are going online. Adobe recently put a stripped-down version of Photoshop online for example, probably to preempt competition.
Thing is, I haven’t come across any other online photo editors I’ve been crazy about. I do use Snipshot for cropping and resizing sometimes, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.
But I’m excited about Aviary — the photo editor looks decent, and they’re promising a long list of other useful tools. I has five three private beta invites for anyone that wants one…
Really this is more about viral marketing than beta testing I’m sure, but I’ll bite
I confess I always thought of Pizzicato Five as J-pop for the uninitiated, a band for tokenistic mixes. But musical snobbery aside, this song is killer — “The Night is Still Young”:
I came across it via the version below sung by Miku Hatsune — who is a computer, a version of Yamaha’s singing synthesizer Vocaloid:
We’ve all heard speech synthesizers before, but it seems that singing synthesis is a bit newer.
In other weird simulatory news, here’s ELIZA reacting to the recent death of her creator. (Who, I just learned, intended her to be a parody of a Rogerian therapist)
English lyrics under the cut: Continue reading →
'If you're a believer ... the most dubious thing becomes possible. Your faith and your aggression should be limitless.' (Josh Axelrad)
This work by Zach Alexander is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.