Aviary - free online art creation tools

The new website Aviary.com has a variety of browser based programs that allow you to edit and create images, add effects, create filters, and collaborate with other artists. Following their bird-theme, the available programs so far are called Raven (a vector editor), Phoenix (image editor), Toucan (color palettes), and Peacock (visual laboratory).

In the future they are looking forward to release programs for audio editing, music generator, font creation, 3D modeling, terrain generator, a word processor, and much more. They all follow the websites bird theme, with names like Hummingbird, Owl, Starling, Roc, Eagle, and Pigeon.

The website has a light, clean, and airy feel to it and navigates simply. They have sections where you can view the different programs, see tutorials on how to create certain effects, and a section where you can view people's creations. (They even has a section called "undiscovered" to help you find art that you like/are interested in that hasn't made it "big" yet, so everyone can have a chance to have their art viewed.) They even have a blog where you can follow up on all the new happenings.

You can sign up for a free account with them, and it doesn't take more than a second.

The site is made by the same guys who made Worth1000.com, a fun site where you can show off all your trippy Photoshop images in various themed contests.

CD Sales Drop Off Dramitically

Last year, 17 million people in the US just stopped buying physical CDs, and switched over completely to purely digital formats. Most of these people were either teenagers or those over 50. All the missing CD buyers are now giving their money to buying and downloading music online.

"80% of Americans think science knowledge is 'very important' to the future"

And guess what?

Ironically, out of three questions, only 21% of the interviewed adult population got them all right. The questions were as follows:

1) How long does it take for the earth to revolve around the sun? (1 year = 365 days = one rotation of the earth around the sun.)

2) Did the

earliest humans and dinosaurs live in the same time period? (No. The first humans didn't show up until the Paleolithic era, around 2.5-2.6 million years ago. Dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic era that ended 65 million years ago. Humans didn't appear until comparatively late in the Cenozoic era, which began at the end of the Mesozoic and which we are still in now. )

3) About how much of the earth's surface is covered with water? (71%, answers around that number were acceptable.)

For the first question, only around half of the interviewed population got it right, 59% for the second question, and 47% for the third (15% of of those for the third question got it exactly right.)

I have a qualm with this 'test'. This test was called the scientific "literacy" test, when it's actually not a literacy test. Quote the National Science Education Terms Standards: "Scientific literacy means that a person can ask, find, or determine answers to questions derived from curiosity about everyday experiences. It means that a person has the ability to describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena. Scientific literacy entails being able to read with understanding articles about science in the popular press and to engage in social conversation about the validity of the conclusions." As we can see, this test was not a scientific literacy test that involved a person's ability to utilize the scientific method, but a test of more "trivia" and knowledge of facts.

Does the author of this article understand scientific literacy? Guess not.

A Battery on par with an Ultracapacitor

Test lithium ion battery electrodes developed at MIT can be fully discharged within 10 seconds, with a one liter battery capable of discharging 25,000 watts worth. One of these batteries could carry 10 times as much power as an ultracapacitor of the same size. These could be good for race cars or lasers; things that can store a lot of energy and need to release it quickly with high performance. Sadly, the developing company is not planning on developing the batteries for lasers.

Learn German, Give Free Rice to the Poor

The website freerice.com is making it its mission to donate rice to the hungry of the world, but they need your help. Now you may have heard about this a few years ago, but something has changed.

Before I tell you what that is, I'll tell you how the website works. You go to the site and answer a question on a chosen subject, and for each question you get correct, 10 grains of rice are donated to the poor. (The sponsors on the website pay for it, which allows the site to purchase the rice.)

It's simple and a fun way to increase your knowledge base (painlessly) while you do a good thing.

The thing that's changed is before you only used to be able to answer questions on English vocabulary, like "thriftless means..." and then you had to choose from four possible answers what it meant. Now however you can not only do English vocabulary, but ones for German, French, Italian, and Spanish. You also can play this rice game with questions for Chemistry, Math, Geography, and Art. It's simple and a lot of fun.

Hopefully they'll put in some more language options for the rice game, like Norwegian or Zulu or Vietnamese or Swedish or something. =)

Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. Sets up Bittorent Tracker

NRK (a Norwegian public broadcasting company) has set up a bittorent tracker so that you can download their shows, DRM free, online. They even come with subtitle files for non-Norwegian speakers. They're also using OpenTracker software, the same one as the Swedish site Pirate Bay has been using, only the only content NRK will be distributing is their own.

The first show they will be distributing will be about people living in the remote areas of Norway. I'll be downloading it when I get home today.

Shape Shifting Phones

Intel is currently working on developing a material to be used in shape-shifting phones. They are looking at silicon-dioxide hemispheres which roll over each others surfaces due to an electric current; this movement and re-arrangement will cause the object to change its shape. They hope to have this technology in 3-5 years, but as far as being on the market, it's going to be a lot longer than that.

Welcome to High-school Mr. Bond

A school in the UK has introduced face recognition technology to sign their students in and out of school, thereby removing the need for teachers and staff to take up time with taking attendance.

It takes 1.5 seconds per student and apparently, they love it. Who wouldn't right?

It is one of the first schools in the UK to do this, and so far it has been very successful.

Read more about this here.

The government knows your browser history...

Perhaps they do, what if they are keeping tabs on you, what if they know what sights you were on last Thursday when your boss thought you were typing up those spread sheets on Excel? You must be worried now, comrade... (Joking, it's fine, don't fret.)

A new website put out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a website that gives you information on how to protect yourself and your virtual data from government spying, it's called the The Surveillance Self Defense (SSD) Project.

From their site: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it".

One problem here. Most of the people from whom this site is targeted probably will never see it.

Also, I'm not too sure about this site.... -_-

*suspicious look over at it*

Band Member Pirates His Own Album

And guess who that was? Lars Ulrich of Metallica (who vehemently spoke out against file sharing sites in the earlier part of the decade) pirated his own album off a torrent site a couple days after Death Magnetic was leaked on the net last year.

“I sat there myself and downloaded ‘Death Magnetic’ from the Internet just to try it,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is how it works.’ I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download ‘Death Magnetic’ for free, it’s me.”

Now he isn't so uptight about torrent sites and file sharing (although he has a right to be), now, he says that "it’s part of how it is these days.”

Kindle as an iPhone App

Well that title was certainty creative. (Sarcasm of course, which I have just painfully slayed by telling you that it was sarcasm.)

Well, now you can have Kindle on your iPhone, and thanks to something called Whispersync you can keep your iPhone and your Kindle both in sync with each other. So if I read The Two Towers on my iPhone, then leave my iPhone at home and take my Kindle with me on a trip, I can continue reading The Two Towers from where I left off, exactly.

This application is only available for books right now, and you can't buy books directly from the app, you've got to go to Amazon's website or use Kindle itself.

Google Verb Meme

I Goggle meme'd myself just now. For those of you who don't know what that is, you can see how to do it here. Basically you search for your name and a verb following it, and make a list of what you get. It's a lot of fun. =)

1. Alex needs more than just a rat trap for this vermin
2. Alex looks like the kind of girl who would take you to the forest and feed you a bunch of mushrooms and then leave you to fend for yourself
3. Alex says "the adventures of an Italian in Silicon Valley"
4. Alex wants to stay as far away from that place as possible
5. Alex does Galactic Domination with pictures, videos, personal blog, interests, information about me and more.
6. Alex hates Rome
7. Alex asks for move
8. Alex likes to scribble and draw with crayons, dig in the dirt outside, and loves anything to do with water.
9. Alex eats babies
10. Alex wears her hat like a mask
11. Alex was arrested for allegedly embezzling two hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars from the post office and for burglary and marijuana violations.
12. Alex loves everything

If you want to do this, just take the "Alex (verb)" and change it to your name, then Google it. Write down what you get and post it in a comment.

Apple releases new desktops

Don't complain about the short blog post today. If you knew what my sleep and work schedule was like, you'd be tired too.

So here goes...

1) The Mac Mini: Core 2 Duo processor, 5 USB ports, RAM up to 320GB, 5400 RPM drive, and NVIDIA 9400M graphics.

2) The iMac: faster Core 2 Duo processor running up to 3.06GHz, NVIDIA 9400M graphics in the 20' one and NVIDI GeForce or ATI Radeon in the 24' one, 320GB , 620GB, or 1T RAM (!), and a 7200 RPM drive. Also has updated Firewire port.

3) The Mac Pro: Quad core Xeon processors (in a 4 or 8 core configuration), something called a "turbo boost" that lets the 8 core run as high as 3.33GHz bursts, NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics card or a ATI Radeon 4870 HD one, lets you run 4 of the GT 120 cards to drive up to something like 30" cinema displays. Nice. Oh yah, it has 4 Firewire ports.

All of them are mostly recyclable, are free of PVC and BFR, arsenic free glass on the iMac, and have an EPEAT Gold rating. They are also all available at your local Apple retails, unless something weird happened and the delivery truck took a detour to Yellowknife up in Canada or something and never returned.