Facebook PhotoZoom Magnifies Photos for Faster Browsing

500x_photozoom

If you haven't quit Facebook yet, you'll love free Firefox add-on Facebook PhotoZoom, which magnifies photos as you mouse over them so you don't have to click through albums or profile pictures to view them full-size.

Even disregarding Facebook's lack of speed and reliability when flipping through photo albums, this add-on is super helpful for seeing full-size pictures in any situation. Not only is it great for browsing through full photo albums, letting you just page through and mouse over photos instead of loading each one separately, but it works anywhere on Facebook, not just photo albums. If you're on a profile page and want to see a larger version of someone else's thumbnail, all you need to do is mouse over it instead of going to their page and viewing the full photo.

As with most things that pop up as you mouse around a page, it can get a little annoying when you just want to browse around. But in those situations where a friend or family member returns from overseas with 50 Facebook photos, enabling this add-on can make your life much easier when trying to check them out.

Facebook PhotoZoom is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.

UPDATE: As many of you have pointed out, the orignal version of PhotoZoom is for Google Chrome and is available here.

Fix your blurry photos with Unshake

http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/fix-your-blurry-photos-with-unshake/

For any photographer, nothing can be more disappointing than a wonderful shot being ruined by camera shake or object movement. Something that could’ve been a masterpiece instantly turns into a few megabytes of junk. Or imagine a precious moment that you captured on a camera, only to find later that it is too blurry to be of any real use.

Although these photographs cannot be brought to clear focus again, but they can be nevertheless improved by using a mathematical technique called deconvolution. The software capable of doing so are commercial and expensive, and hence not an option for individual users or amateur photographers. Luckily, there is a free alternative as well.

Unshake is a free-for-private-use software that can deblur your photos with reasonably good outputs. It is Java-based hence multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux). It is also portable.

Download Unshake

See sample photos below:

(download)

NYTIMES: Diaspora: The Student-Made, Privacy-Respecting Facebook Alternative

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media_httpgraphics8ny_uvejx

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.

It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

“We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.”

They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers. “Maybe 2 or 3 percent of the money is from people we know,” said Max Salzberg, 22.

Working with Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20 — “four talented young nerds,” Mr. Salzberg says — all of whom met at New York University’s Courant Institute. They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”

The terms of the bargain people make with social networks — you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites — have been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users. That information can be sold to marketers. Some younger people are becoming more cautious about what they post. “When you give up that data, you’re giving it up forever,” Mr. Salzberg said. “The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy.”

FULL ARTICLE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

I love original stuff like this webcomic - AXE COP!

http://axecop.com/index.php/acepisodes/read/episode_1/

 

Axecop_420
Written by a 5-year-old, drawn by his 29-year-old brother

The first 5 episodes of Axe Cop were put online as web comics on January 25th 2010 and they went viral in a matter of days. Three days after AxeCop.com went online it was Entertainment Weekly’s “Site of the Day.” The Twitter-sphere was on fire with Axe Cop, and fandom spread rapidly across the internet. In four days the comic had 1,800 fans on Facebook (on a fan created page) and the number doubled two weeks later. The video of Ethan and Malachai creating an Axe Cop episode shot to 14,000 views, AxeCop.com crashed twice and saw 30,000 to 52,500 unique visits per day it's first two weeks online. In one month it had nearly 750,000 unique visits.  Axe Cop was listed as the 89th most popular search term on Google just four days after the site was posted, and every day vast numbers of news sources and blogs, personal and professional, have written or Twittered about their love for the series including MTV, NPR, GQ, USA Today, Detroit News, CollegeHumor.com, Wired, Dark Horse Comics, Kids.Woot, Cracked, and Wizard Magazine’s Geek Chic Daily.

Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

Hawkings385_711080a
Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The most awesome Mario versions in Flash

From article on Sharenator.org

Tuper Tario Tros (Super Mario + Tetris)

tuper


This is what happens when you combine two of the most successful classical games ever. Very original and really difficult game.

PLAY TUPER TARIO TROS

Bullet Bill

bullet_bill


Play Super Mario Bros as Bullet Bill. You control a Bullet Bill with the arrow keys through each of the 8 levels, hitting either Mario, Luigi or the flag at the end. If you like this game, check out Bullet Bill 2.

PLAY BULLET BILL

Super Mario 63

super_mario_63


Probably the most awesome Flash Super Mario ever created.
"Super Mario 63 is a fan-game inspired by Nintendo's Super Mario 64. Many levels and features are based upon it and other of Nintendo's games, but a variety of them are completely original."
Warning: This game may take some time to load (it's a 14 MB file)

PLAY SUPER MARIO 63