Category Archives: Web Wanderings - Page 11

Propaganda is Fun!

Posted by on February 6, 2006 Comments Off on Propaganda is Fun!

Regular readers may note that I’m a big fan of old “Mental Hygiene” and other government propaganda films. These historic films are readily availible through the Prelinger and A/V Geeks film archives as part of the Internet Archive project. I’ve spent countless hours downloading and viewing these classic classroom films.

Following the tradition of such propaganda the Modern Humorist website has created three propaganda posters for the internet age. This is really a fun site and I especially enjoy these spirited pokes at the RIAA and MPAA. Personally I think they’d make great artwork for my walls.

Historic Photographs

Posted by on February 6, 2006 Comments Off on Historic Photographs

It’s important to remember that even in this digital age many resources can still be provided by local agencies. One such example is the photography collection at the Minnesota Historical Society. While not all of their resources are avilible online, many are.

One of may personal favorites is the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company collection. It’s amazing what you can find if you know where to look. On this site you can find photos of everything from power plants to the Alaska Highway Construction to Minneapolis Saloons. What a great resource!

Let’s also not forget that it would be impossible to get such insteresting photographs as the power plant and telephone company photos with the restrictions (real or just imposed by unknowning officials) in place today. Will our modern infrastructure be documented in art such as this for future generations to enjoy looking back at?

Digital Video Self-Help

Posted by on February 6, 2006 Comments Off on Digital Video Self-Help

As more people start producing digital video they have more questions about how to format and convert it. One site with quite a bit of history in helping people with the thorny issues surrounding digital video is VideoHelp.com.

This site started off as VCDhelp.com. As you may recall VCDs (Video CDs) were a popular pre-DVD digital format in Asia but never made a big hit in the United States. The site grew to include SVCDhelp.com and eventually DVDRhelp.com but is now branding as VideoHelp.com.

Here you can find a number of tutorials that walk you through just about any digital video format conversion you can imagine as well as forums, background information and hardware/software suggestions and links. The site is a virtual trasure trove of all things digital video. In my mind there is no doubt that VideoHelp.com and doom9.net are the definitive resources for help with digital video projects. Next time you’re looking for help with one of your digital video projects be sure to take a look at one of these great sites.

Learning Your Preferences

Posted by on February 6, 2006 Comments Off on Learning Your Preferences

The folks at the Music Genome Project have spent the last six years analizing songs from over 10,000 artists. If you have ever wanted to expand your musical horizons but wanted some good suggestions about what music you might like take a look at their web-based music suggestion utility, Pandora. You start out listing some music you enjoy and the free service will start making suggestions of other music you may like. By listening to and rating these selections the service will start to build a profile of music you would like and theoretically get even better about suggesting new songs and artists. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. I’m surprised someone like the iTunes store or Amazon hasn’t started licensing this technology as a way to encourage people to buy more music.

The Mac Minitosh

Posted by on February 6, 2006 Comments Off on The Mac Minitosh

Normally I’m not one for case mods but this is a really interesting one I found. Many people are familiar with the Macquaiums but the folks at destruc.tv have put a Macintosh Mini inside an old Macintosh Plus case. OS X running in a compact Mac case, now that’s something worth mentioning.

PS: Detailed instructions for building a Macquarium can be found here along with photos if finished mods here and here.

Photography is Right

Posted by on February 6, 2006 Comments Off on Photography is Right

Now more than ever photographers are under fire from government officials to stop taking pictures of “sensitive infrastructure”. Never mind that there is no evidence showing that photography has played an important role
in any terrorist attack in the last forty years. Perhaps more importantly unrestricted photography by private citizens has played a critical role in the fight for civil rights and protecting the freedoms we hold so dear. Much of the harassment faced by photographers is due to a lack of understanding by both the general public and police forces about what is and is not permitted in the United States. In general, if you’re on public property or have permission from the land owner you can photograph anything you want from that location. This has not changed by the implementation of the PATRIOT Act or any other national legislation to date which is a common mistake made by government officials. For a more complete understanding of the laws involved I suggest taking a look at Attorney Bert P. Krages The Photographer’s Right”. For a truly in depth look at the laws and concerns for photographers take a look at Bert’s book “Legal Handbook for Photographers: The Rights and Liabilities of Making Images“.

Unfortunately, many police officers (and even federal agents) fail to understand these rights. One grievous example of this is the story of Ian Spiers, a Washington state resident and photography student, who was harassed by police on two occasions for taking photographs of a local lock and dam as part of a photography assignment. He details his experience on his web site Brown Equals Terrorist. Lest you think this is an isolated case I suggest you listen to the National Public Radio Morning Edition story where they interview several East coast photographers who have also been harassed. The rights of photographers are being trampled from coast to coast and over zealous government officials who seem to have no understanding of the law and little regard for individual rights are making a mockery of the constitution. If you’re interested in this sort of thing one resource where you can stay up to date on the issue is the news site PhotoPermit.org which tracks news stories related to legal issues surrounding photography.

Calculating Subnets

Posted by on February 2, 2006 Comments Off on Calculating Subnets

If you do much network design you’re certainly familiar with the concept of subnetting, you probably even learned to do it by hand at one time. For those who are looking for an automated subnet calculation utility you can find a web-based one which requires no download or installation and supports subnets, supernets, CIDR and wildcards at subnet-calculator.com. The only real concern I have with this great utility is that the source code has not been provided so if the website goes offline you’re out of luck. In the long term timeframe I would like to write an open source version of this utility so anyone can run it on their intranet or another website. If anyone is interested in helping to write the code for this in PHP please contact me and I’ll move it up the list of priorities.

More public domain images

Posted by on February 2, 2006 Comments Off on More public domain images

Following up on my earlier links to free NASA photography and NOAA photography is a link to the Wikipedia’s list of public domain image resources. This list contains sites where you can locate images of everything from animals to sports to art to flags. There are also links to other catalogs of public domain images and general collections of public domain imagery.

Playing hard to get

Posted by on December 3, 2005 Comments Off on Playing hard to get

In August 2004 I read an article by computer industry columnist John C. Dvorak about the digital divide being more about computer literacy and less about what equipment people have. At the time I was impressed by the article and searched for a copy to add to my digital article morgue of interesting bits but was unable to locate an electronic copy. The article was published in Computer Shopper magazine which is a somewhat sketchy publication and has changed hands and layouts several times. Of course they’re one of the few computer magazines that doesn’t post all their columns online. I held on to the original paper copy of that article for some time before deciding that I would never be able to find it when I wanted it if I kept the paper copy and recycling it.

Tonight I was catching up on some of my periodical reading and ran across a new column by Dvorak about democracy on the net which triggered a reminder about that old column. I decided that being an expert researcher in grad school and all I should be able to find a digital copy. I spent some time (probably too much) and tried all my usual research sites to no avail. I guess none of the big article reference houses (ProQuest, EBSCO, SIRS, etc.) think Computer Shopper is worth indexing and they’re probably right. On one of my last ditch efforts I was able to use an obscure research site for children doing school reports called the “Student Resource Center” which is run by Thomson Publishing/The Gale Group and which my local public libraray system subscribes to. Mission accomplished, one more article added to my personal morgue.

Open Physics

Posted by on November 25, 2005 Comments Off on Open Physics

Christoph Schiller has written a free physics textbook and made it availible online for non-commercial use. I took a look at it and have a few ideas. First, he should make a printed copy availible via the fantastic Lulu publishing company. Secondly, I think he should make it officially availible under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike licence. It’s essentially that anyway and it would provide a better understanding and probably better legal grounds to the same end.

Finally, this book is overly technical and not user friendly for the introductory college physics student or advanced high school student in the United States. I would love to see a more traditional US physics text be made availible under a free license like this. I found it difficult to locate common US physics units in this book (eg. 2D kinematics, 3D kinematics, springs, waves, light (wave, not particle) and lenses, magenets and electricity). It would be great if someone could put together a book that looked this professional but which was shorter and designed for a more introductory college / advanced high school course. If someone wanted to work collaboratively on a project such as this I would be thrilled to be a part of it.

One example of a free license textbook is “All About Circuits” which was originally a PDF document but has been updated and become an online reference. I do wish they would come out with a PDF formatted book again though, it looks much more professional when printed. This electronics textbook was licensed under the Design Science License which seems to be even less restrictive than the Creative Commons NCSA license.