All the best art is dirty: Where a normal person sees a dusty windshield, Scott Wade sees a canvas. This guy is good. Check out the paintings he makes on a dusty windshield. Below is an example of his art. This one took him about an hour to paint in three sessions.
Check it out: Dirty Car Art
– Suramya
A good article about how to choose a good digital camera. It talks about how people mistake higher megapixel camera’s to be better cameras.
I have actually seen this personally with photos I have taken. At Gaurang’s engagement the photos I took with my 1.3 Mega-pixel camera looked better than the ones taken with a 4 megapixel camera. The pics from the 4 megapixel camera looked blocky and the indoor photos were the worst. They pretty much looked like they were taken with a 4 year old camera. The sad part was that I used that camera more than mine as I thought that it would give me better pics.
Right now I have a Sony Cybershot and I don’t see a lot of difference between a 3 mega pixel shot and a 5 mega pixel shot. Oh, I know the 5 mega pixel has some more details and even when I crop out a particular portion of the photo I still get a good resolution on that portion.
Check it out over here: The myth of maximum megapixels
Thanks,
Suramya
Here’s an interesting concept, using jangl you can call someone using a regular phone without having their actual phone number and they can call you back without having your actual number.
The way it works is that you goto the website and sign up for a Jangl ID and you give them your phone number. Once you finish the registration you can give your ID to any one you are interested in calling.
Once they have your ID they will have to visit the site and create an account by giving their phone number. Once they do that they will get a unique 10 digit phone number that either one of us can call to get connected to the other person.
I tired it using my cell phone and black berry and it worked pretty nicely. One of the useful features is that it forces the called to identify themselves with a brief message and that message is played to the other party and they can choose to accept or reject the call.
I think it will be of good use in the bar scene or using to communicate with people when using online dating services (Match.com uses this service).
The only down side is that you have to use a website to register and get a number. They should allow users to register using SMS etc. That would make it a lot more popular/easy to use.
Check it out.
– Suramya
This is a really interesting idea. It uses the power of open source/wiki/group efforts to create a free map of the planet. Now you might ask why do we need a free map of the world? Can’t we just use Google Maps or Yahoo Maps to get a map? After all they don’t charge us for access…
Well yes and no. In the open source world there are two kinds of free: “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. Google Maps are free as in beer, not as in speech.
Basically since Google has to pay for the mapping data it can’t make it available for free. So even though I can access it for free online and get directions I can’t export the map data and create a map to be used on a GPS from it. That would violate Google’s copyright. You can’t copy it to your local system and fix a street name that they got wrong or add new items to the map.
To fix this issue OpenStreetMap was born. It uses GPS coordinates fed to it by users to a Wiki like system and allows users to fill in information like street names etc. Which gives us surprisingly accurate and upto date data as whenever anything changes (e.g. a new street is added) anyone can edit the map and make the changes.
Check it out here: OpenStreetMap.
I think I will be using my GPS on my trips from now on and upload the tracking data collected to the site.
Thanks to TechRepublic for the link.
– Suramya
I like the concept of realtime collaboration over the web and I have used a couple of tools for this earlier but didn’t find any that I really liked. Until now. I really like Thinkature as its pretty easy to use and intuitive.
Thinkature has a couple of features that I really like:
The parts I am not a big fan of are:
I have emailed their support about it, lets see what they say,
Over all a good tool. Check it out over here: Thinkature – Real-time collaboration for the web
Thanks to OpenDotDotDot for the link.
– Suramya
Found this interesting service that allows you to catalog your books online. Then based on the books in your library it connects people with the same books and comes up with suggestions for what to read next. It gives you the ability to include your books in your blog, and create feeds etc.
The only downside is that its free service only allows you to catalog upto 200 books, to catalog more books you need to pay a $10 for a year price.
Check it out :LibraryThing
– Suramya
Really funny stuff. A sample of some of the curses I got from the site:
“Listen, thou sulphurous nonentity, for you will become as popular as a boil on the king’s backside!”
“Behold, thou shalt be trampled by a herd of stampeding pigs, O ye offspring of a squashed cockroach!”
“I pray thou shalt beget difficult teenagers, thou armpit of Satan!”
For more interesting curses visit: Ship of Fools: Biblical curse generator
– Suramya
Lego’s have been used to create the strangest things… In past they have been used to create Churches but this one is really cool.
This guy named Ed Hall used lego bricks to recreate his favorite painting: “Van Gogh’s Starry Night”. It took him several months and approximately ten thousand bricks to complete but the result actually looks cool as you can see in the photo below:
Check out Starry Night LEGO Mosaic for more details.
– Suramya
This cool DIY (Do It Yourself) project teaches you how to make your own sextant to experiment with celestial navigation using the following items:
As you can see you only need some commonly available items and the instructions don’t look that hard to follow. Might try making this one of these days…
Check it out: Here
Update (4th Aug 2006):
Since a couple of people got confused and this post was an OHT (Over Head Transmission) for someone here are a couple of links with more info on Sextants:
* Define Sextants
* Wikipedia entry of Sextant
* The Sextant
* How to use a Sexton
– Suramya
This is really cool stuff. It lets you use AJAX (asynchronous javascript and xml) without cluttering your HTML code with javascript tags. So essentially you are separating javascript and html making it easier to maintain code. The best part is that the process looks really simple to use. I am thinking of trying it out for a couple of test pages and see how it works.
Check out Behaviour’s Extended Demo page to see an example of what all you can do with it.
The main problem I have with 100% javascript controlled pages is that if the visitor has JavaScript turned off all your flashy jazz is of no use to him. Plus with all the new hacks/exploits that are coming out that use javascript more and more people are browsing the net with it disabled… So no I won’t be converting suramya.com or my photogallery to something javascript driven or flash driven anytime in the near future.
Check it out: Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours
– Suramya
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