QR Codes

  So what are all these mixed up checker board looking things you're seeing everywhere? They are called QR codes, and they make your smart phone a whole lot smarter. Imagen you are walking through the mall and you see a poster of that new movie everyone is talking about. You want to discover more about it, but you're never going to remember the web address. Then you see the QR Code in the corner. You scan the code with your phone's camera and you are taken to the web page. All with a few taps of your fingers and none of it typing on a keyboard. Let's find out what else QR codes can do and what is needed to read them.
  QR is the abbreviation for Quick Response, and was named so because the 2D bar code is meant to be decoded at high speed. It was developed in 1994 by Denso-Wave for automobile parts tracking. Since then the technology has evolved to allow much more. To use them you will have to have a camera phone and an app designed to read the QR codes. Google has pushed this most by allowing android phones the ability to scan the code for apps. Blackberry and iPhone users also have apps that allow them to read the codes. Windows Phone 7 users should have one available soon. Just place a search for QR Code reader in your app store to find one you like.
  I already mentioned they are used for URLs. That technique is known as a hard link or real world hyperlink. It allows a user to visit a web page without having to type an address. You might have already seen these hard links for marketing use in magazines or on posters, and even on the back of cereal boxes. More recently they are being adopted by governments for expanding the available information a document, like a building permit, provides. QR codes have added support for much more then visiting web sites though. Now a person can use QR codes as a business card that is saved directly to your contacts , geographic locations, adding calendar events, sending SMS, setting up wireless connections, and plain old text. The possibilities for the technology are growing all the time. I'd love to hear what you have used QR codes for.

Is Twitter set to fail?

  OK so right now twitter is the "killer app." of the Internet. It is one of the social network sites that have near instantly seen infamous status and attention from almost everyone in the world. If you have been near a radio, TV, or computer you have most likely heard or read about twitter, and while we all celebrate this deviously simplistic site it's only a matter of time before the company notices how the site has gotten away from them and has become something more. The site has become an appliance for add on applications. How often do you actually use the website?

  Most new websites centered around interactivity between other sites or desktop programs develop something known as an API, or Application Programming Interface. This interface is a friendly way for developers outside of the original company to access data from the original site and use it for the new programs own purposes. Twitter's success has generated dozens if not hundreds of interactions using their API. Most of which are desktop applications that regurgitate what you would see on the website. Others are websites trying to improve on the way the information is regurgitated. Another more recent way developers are interacting is through something twitter is calling Connections. Connections is a part of the twitter API that doesn't require you to send or save your twitter login information on the other website or application, reducing the number of places someone can discover what your user name and password is. The API is great and that is where the potential problem is, almost no one actually visits the website because the API is so great. This means that unless twitter changes the way we interact with them, they will have to develop in cooperation with other companies to execute their revenue strategies.

  Currently they only have a only few advertisements, relying more on investors to finance the company. The business model has never been made official so it's more a myth then fact.

MUSIC IS THE PRESENTABLE SOUL OF MAN

Almost anywhere you look you can find someone or something playing music. Since the time of Napster the internet has been linked to music with little success from the powers that be to separate them. As if almost in spite of the efforts to keep a tight hold onto the rights to distribute the music places like Amazon, Napster, Real player, and iTunes have legitimized the internet as a system to distribute music. Among all this confusion piracy still holds a place when looking to acquire a song or album. The RIAA would have you believe that the number is much larger then it could be but since the applications and sites that host the illicit content do not keep tabs or share the information with anyone it is near imposable to know for sure. While it seems that all the angles have been covered and that you could not find another avenue, hope is just a web address away. In an effort to distance myself from pop-media music I started to look for sites that offered great content that was not being highlighted well enough in my opinion. You might see the link for MTUNE in the places of interest column. The “M” stands for Magna so the site and company are called Magnatune. That was one of the first sites I found that offered great music for a fair price and they have a brave philosophy. Download the music you want to try, in full, and pay us for what you think is worth paying for. The site gives you the ability to listen to a song or album over the internet in a streaming form or download the song to listen to later. You can even listen to an entire genre's list of artists in a streaming play list that resembles a kind of radio station. They have a good selection and the company even goes out and sells the music to companies for advertisements and on occasion you can find the CD version of the artist's album on a store shelf. Give the site a shot, I don't think you will be disappointed. The next site I feel I should mention is Shoutcast. It has been around for years as the site that was developed for WinAmp, a popular music player. WinAmp does more now then just play music and the site has grown to work with more then just WinAmp. Thanks in part to mp3 player popularity programmers have created their own players that use the site also. Shoutcast has grown from geeks with music servers in the garage broadcasting their massive music collections, and now includes radio stations from across the globe broadcasting live shows. The format is dominantly MP3 but AAC has been used here and there. I use this site when I feel like listening to something new quickly. I'll round out the list with a new site I have been using called Jamendo. It's also an international site that uses the new creative commons license. Creative commons was created as a way to better deal with technology like the internet and copyright. From their site Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved." From the site you are able to look for new artists that would otherwise have been un-noticed. It's also great to listen to other countries music in the genre you like best. It all seems to help put a fresh appeal to music. They allow you to listen while you brows the site but it uses it's own web based player so once you close the browser the streaming music stops too. You can however download the songs or albums you like for free. I have found a few artists already on the site I like already and I'm listening to them as I type this up now. No matter what you like to listen to the internet has become a standard way to listen. The sites above are one three of the hundreds of sites available that can be used to help reconnect with yourself or the world. I encourage you to leave a comment with a site you like to use, and share your experience of the sites I've mentioned above.

New "eCycling" program makes it easier to dispose of your old phones & e-waste

Can't sell it on e-bay? Not able to trade with a friend or family member? The EPA has begun a new "eCycling" program to help make it easier to correctly dispose of old electronics, ink and toner cartridges, and batteries.

http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/osw/conserve/plugin/index.htm

Review: Recolored

If you visit my site johndgeek.com you will see I have added a new 2d image to the portfolio. It's a photograph of my grand parents, mother, and uncles in the traditional dutch costume. The picture was taken just before they moved to the USA from Holland. At the time the photographer only offered the prints in black and white. The picture endured several decades until one day my grand father asked if I could colorize it. I didn't hesitate to help since I knew how to colorize a photo using Paint Shop Pro or PhotoShop and proceeded to work. It turned out to be taking a lot of time to complete because of so many details in the clothing and background. Then while reading the digg articles I noticed that someone had created a better way to colorize photos. I had to check it out for myself. The examples posted by the application's author were great so I downloaded a demo and tried it out for myself.

The application was easy to install and has a small file size. Once I opened it the interface was similar to windows paint. It has only eight tools, one of them being the colorize command, as well as a color selection pane. It also has preset swatches of color for several common objects and body parts like stone, wood, skin, or hair. The sparse interface and features placed some doubt in my mind at first but as I used it I could see that what was available was very useful and performed better then expected. The demo allowed me to save the work in the Recolored format of RCL, as well as the finished product in several formats including PNG and JPG. I got to work on my Grandparent's photo and found it to be a much quicker process. I simply highlight the area with the the color I wanted and that was it. Since I didn't have to be perfect the picture was done in a couple of days. I printed the colorized photo at the local drugstore photo booth and gave it as a gift for my Grandfathers birthday. Everyone that saw it was very pleased with the outcome, and were amazed at the short amount of time it took me to create.

I do however see some short comings. The first was a lack of a selection tool. While I was colorizing the photo I found out that the "strokes" of color can be copied and pasted to a different photo. This is best used when colorizing a smaller picture maybe 25 % the size of the original to reduce the time in colorizing. Once you find the colors you like you can copy the strokes and paste it to a lager picture and colorize it. It was very useful and a further time saver for me. I did wish however that I could pick and choose the strokes I wanted to use in the final, larger photo. Something in the way of vector lines or layers would have been great too. It would give a person the ability to have several versions all in one file. One tool I was frequently wishing for though was a colorize area tool. something that was show a colorized version of only the area you selected. It would have saved time and allowed me to see several versions of color more effectively. While it did have some short comings, I was still impressed. I would recommend this to the home or semi-professional user. Someone who would actual colorize dozens of pictures a month. With a simple group of tools it does a great job of colorizing. Recolored

Icon Sushi

It isn't often that I come across a program that I think deserves to be mentioned. So often they miss the mark. Some programs will be intuitive and easy to use but lack the power or ability to do anything effective. Other times the application is powerful and give the user limitless potential but requires classes or several books to just learn how to use. This little application is one such wonder that makes it easy to use but just misses the mark on ability. That said I still like this programme.

The first thing that sets this application apart is the ability to use PSD, PNG, BMP, EXE and ICO formats. Have a picture you want to crop and make an icon? you can do it with the standard windows paint program and Icon Sushi. Have an avatar or logo you spent hours in Photo Shop with to get alpha and transparency just right? you can open it in Icon Sushi and translate the work into icon form. It has the ability to create icons without sacrificing quality. It also has the ability to add alpha channels and transparency from within the app. it's a solid download if you ever wanted to create icons.

Check it out at snapfiles.com or from the creators site towofu

The Underbelly of Junk Mail

I just finished watching a report about porn junk mail on NBC's Dateline tonight and saw something that reminded me of some other business actions not allowed in the US. The story went along the line that people, family people, where receiving pornographic e-mail without asking for it. The reporter John Hockenberry then went on a journey of two continents and 4 cities to trek down and confront the actual person that send the e-mail. I found it interesting that even though each piece of mail is identified with a code that shows you who sent the mail, no one wanted to correct the problem. Through Mr. Hockenberry's trips to Toronto, Las Vegas and Montreal He came across companies that did not have a physical listing. At the same time he found that several companies employed the same people even though they know they are breaking policies set by the company.

This is all fine and well and I do think that junk mail is a part of business that laws have turned there back on. What I don't see is why the companies that have fake or non physical addresses get strict penalties imposed on them for there illicit activities. The company that is being advertised in the junk mail has records of who is sending the mail and while some companies are out of the bounds of US law a large part of them still are and so they should be forced to give up who is behind all this internet clogging mail.

Internet providers are trying to fight the problem buy locking down the network they control. The logic is that you or me have some virus or Trojan that turns us into what's been called a SPAM ZOMBIE. If you become a zombie the locked down network now forces you to sign in to send mail. the zombie program doesn't use your outlook or thunderbird mail application so it doesn't know what it is and therefor is blocked. This will help for a few months but is not the answer. So instead of one person sending millions of e-mail it's thousands of people sending hundreds of thousands of e-mail. You don't know it and mail doesn't show up in your sent folder because the program that is doing this is different from the outlook or thunderbird program. Some answers for a common user like you and me is to use temporary e-mail accounts like mytrashmail.com or mailexpire.com. They are free to use, easy to sign up for, and you have no obligation to the account after it's created. The alternate solution is to have one account that you use for anything that asks for your e-mail address. Wait a few weeks to see if new types of junk mail is sent to you. Once a few weeks pass you change your e-mail account that you signed up with to one that you don't give out to just anyone. Another idea has been to restrict who can send you mail by placing them in your contact list.

Link to Datline story