Prices are coming down on SSD’s and even on the name brand ones. I noticed just today Samsung drives are getting cheaper. A 512GB EVO is ~$200 now with the 1TB EVO for just over $414. Not bad at all. But not all Macs are as friendly and upgradeable the old G4 and G5 Mac towers from years ago. Now instead you’ve got to use suction cups and gingerly pull out a bare 27″ LCD screen on the iMac. But thanks to the DIY spirit 9to5Mac has shared the steps to do a hard drive swap. Power to the people, we can do this!
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MIT Researchers: Crowdsourced Outlines Improve Learning from Videos — Campus Technology
A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University are using crowd-sourced conceptual outlines to help learners get more out of educational videos.
via MIT Researchers: Crowdsourced Outlines Improve Learning from Videos — Campus Technology.
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Even The Name Is Cool!
On the BBC show “Top Gear”, the host Jeremy Clarkson is heard to use the phrase, “A Concorde Moment”. He means to say the moment in time when British and French Aerospace Engineers designed, built and manufactured the fastest and most advanced civilian transport in the world. This followed only by the Apollo Missions in the U.S. to land a man on the moon. Add to this now another big accomplishment the SR-71 and it’s predecessor the YA-12. We’ve seen and now have seen pass the highest level of achievement in aeronautics we will EVER see. There’s no where else to go but an even plateau going forward or slightly downwards as time marches on.
One day several months ago, when I was still able to use Twitter, I was minding my own business when someone tweeted this photograph:
As a pilot it mesmerized me. I’d never before seen an aircraft that looked like it. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I thought it was something that had been designed for a film. I didn’t think it was a real aircraft, but I wanted it to be.
Later in the day I took over and showed it to my neighbour gentleman and said “I bet you’ve never seen anything like this before.” He glanced at the photograph and said “Of course I have that’s that famous SR-71 Blackbird airplane.”
EVEN THE NAME IS COOL!
I now had a name and I rushed home and began researching it and what I discovered was nothing short of astonishing.
This aircraft was conceived, designed, built, tested and flown…
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The Question of Light: Tilda Swinton’s speech at the Rothko Chapel
I have said before, and I still feel it’s true, Tilda Swinton is a time traveler visiting from the future. This speech is further testament to my magical thoughts.
Below is the only place to read Tilda Swinton’s moving and radiant speech at the Rothko Chapel in Texas.Why do I have it? A brief explanation.
Last year, actress Tilda Swinton was presented with the Rothko Chapel Visionary Award at the The Rothko Chapel, which is home to fourteen of Mark Rothko’s paintings. It’s also a spiritual and human rights center whose mission is “to inspire people to action through art and contemplation, to nurture reverence for the highest aspirations of humanity, and to provide a forum for global concerns.”
One of her friends (writer William Middleton, mentioned in the unabridged version of the speech) sent the speech along to me and my boyfriend. We read it aloud to each other, we paused, we marveled at the wisdom: art and light and compassion. Then we read it again, inspired by its unfolding grace.
When I tried to locate…
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Gorgeous neo-retro Mac Neue redesigns original Apple Mac as thin, metal silhouette
Homages can be a great thing, when they force one to reconsider the thing being honored. Parodies too, they can be useful as homage. Austin Powers forced the producers of James Bond to reconsider all that had gone on before. So they rebooted the franchise with Casino Royal and Daniel Craig, and the rest as one might say is history. Apple take note.
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Human/machine partnership for problems otherwise Too Hard
Clippit asking if the user needs help (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Agreed. I think insofar as a computer AI can watch and see what we’re doing and step in and prompt us with some questions, THAT will be the killer app. It won’t be Clippy the assistant from MS Word, but a friendly prompt saying, “I just watched you do something 3 times in a row, would you like some help doing a bunch of them without having to go through the steps yourself?” Then you got the offer of assistance, it’s timely and non-threatening. You won’t have to “turn-on” a Macro recorder to tell the computer what you want to do, and let it see the steps. It (the computer) will have already recognized you are doing a repetitive task it can automate. And as Jon points out it’s just a matter of successive approximations until you get the slam dunk, series of steps that gets the heavy lifting done. Then the human can address the exceptions list. The 20-50 examples that didn’t work quite right or the AI felt diverged from the pattern. That exception list is what the human should really be working on, not the 1,000 self-similar items that can be handled with the assistance of an AI.
My recent post about redirecting a page of broken links weaves together two few different ideas. First, that the titles of the articles on that page of broken links can be used as search terms in alternate links that lead people to those articles’ new locations. Second, that non-programmers can create macros to transform the original links into alternate search-driven links.
There was lots of useful feedback on the first idea. As Herbert Van de Sompel and Michael Nelson pointed out, it was a really bad idea to discard the original URLs, which retain value as lookup keys into one or more web archives. Alan Levine showed how to do that with the Wayback Machine. That method, however, leads the user to sets of snapshots that don’t consistently mirror the original article, because (I think) Wayback’s captures happened both before and after the breakage.
So for now I’ve restored…
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Retrotechtacular: Supersonic Transport Initiatives
Back in the day MIT and WGBH produced films together. Imagine that. Well imagine no longer. This was an actual production done at NASA facilities in Virginia and California surveying researching Supersonic Transports (SST) from 1966, a few years before Robert McNamara shut it all down to save money to spend on teh War in Vietnam.
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The same, but different!
I too am a big believer in doing some amount of testing when the opportunity comes along. Most recently I had to crunch down some video to smaller file sizes. I decided to use Handbrake as that’s the hammer I use for every nail. And in the time since I first started using it, a number of options have cropped up all surrounding the use of the open source x264 encoding libraries. There are now more commandline tweaks and options than you could ever imagine. Thankfully the maintainers for Handbrake have simplified some of the setting through the GUI based version of the software. Now I wasn’t going for quality but for file size and I got it using the “constant quality” output option as opposed to my classical fave “Constant Bitrate”. Let’s just say after a few hours of doing different tweaks on the same file I got bit rates way down without using Contant Bit Rate. And it seams to work no matter what the content is (static shots or fast moving action). So kudos to Spreadys for giving a head-to-head comparison. Much appreciated.
After another long phone call, I decided to repeat a test previously conducted 3 years ago.
The conversation surrounded a small experiment on transcoders and players. It highlighted an issue in that any documented process must include what software was used, the settings and then a comparison of the results. It originally proved that just specifying a player type and / or container format was useless, as the video file itself could have been created in a million different ways. I was asked, “would the same issues happen today?” With updated software and higher spec PC’s, would issues still arise. I said Yes… but then thought I had better check!
Disclaimer!! – This is by no means scientific. I have replicated the real world and not dug too deep into encoding parameters or software settings and the PC used is mid ranged. I have posted this information in order to…
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Study Finds Internet Congestion Really Is About Business, Not Technology
That’s right, the fault dear reader is not in our stars but in ourselves. We have slow internets speeds, ‘Cuz Business. That’s the briefest synopsis yet that I’ve written. Whether it’s carriers allow each others traffic to run across their networks or peering arrangements or whatever, each business is trying to mess with the other guy’s traffic. And the consumers the customers all lose as a result.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 