[via maximumpc.com, originally written by Will Smith]
We’ve become so accustomed to the ease and convenience of iTunes and blink-and-you-miss-’em CD rips that we forget how in the mid-1990s, ripping a CD was a time-consuming process fraught with peril. Shoot, ripping a single disc to a 128Kbps MP3 could take eight hours on a 200MHz Pentium! Fast forward a decade and faster hardware and better software have made CD ripping so mainstream your mom does it.
[via makeuseof.com]
Bored with your music and want to discover some new bands or singers? There are two main ways you can do that online. You can use services which create music maps, allowing you to explore artists similar in genre to the artists you already listen to. Or you can use music blogs and websites that showcase independent or up-and-coming artists, whether the music is being reviewed, or posted by the musicians themselves.
Some of these websites have a community built around them, which gives fans the opportunity to interact directly with these new talents.
[via cnet.com]
A Twitter user in Hawaii snaps a picture of the empty beaches leading up to the projected tsunami landing. (Credit: Twitter user @rickawho)
Typically, natural disasters come with little advance notice. But after a massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, much of the Pacific coast, including Hawaii, came under tsunami watch over the course of the day. That makes this was one time when the news media is poised to catch it all on film.
It may, in fact, be the first time that the developments leading to a potential natural disaster has been broadcast live in this way.
[via openforum.com]
Twitter is a perfect democratic forum: If people don’t like what you have to say, they can vote with their fingers. With a quick click, choosing the unfollow or block features, your feed is forever removed from their life.
However, for businesses small and large, the goal of Twitter and other social media tools is to build relationships, not tear them down. To master the fine art of friending followers, here are five ways to not be annoying.
[via APOD]
Click image for full-size (2200x1434)
A jewel of the southern sky, the Great Carina Nebula, aka NGC 3372, spans over 300 light-years.
Near the upper right of this expansive skyscape, it is much larger than the more northerly Orion Nebula. In fact, the Carina Nebula is one of our galaxy’s largest star-forming regions and home to young, extremely massive stars, including the still enigmatic variable Eta Carinae, a star with well over 100 times the mass of the Sun.
[via telegraph.co.uk]
At least 147 have been killed and nearly a quarter of the globe put on urgent tsunami alert after one of the most powerful earthquakes of modern times hit South America.
A tremor with a magnitude of 8.8 devastated large parts of southern Chile and sent huge waves racing at up to 400 miles an hour across the Pacific. Isolated ocean islands were reported to have suffered severe wave damage, and tsunami warnings were issued across a vast area stretching from Russia and Japan through to the Philippines and New Zealand.
[via gizmodo.com]
Helicopters make a lot of noise because of a physical phenomenon called blade-vortex interaction. Eurocopter engineers have developed a new kind of rotor blade that attenuates this problem. It’s called Blue Edge, and—as you can hear—it works beautifully:
The new blade shape is combined with another technology called Blue Pulse, which adds three flaps to the edge of the rotor blades. These flaps move up and down at 15 to 40 times per second, using piezoelectric motors that also help to reduce the blade-vortex interaction.
[via bit-tech.net]
Google is continuing its campaign to gently encourage users to upgrade from the severely out-of-date Internet Explorer 6 to a more modern web browser that properly supports web standards and features such as HTML 5 – and it’s using YouTube as its primary weapon in the fight.
As reported over on ReadWriteWeb, the advertising giant is looking to end support for Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer 6 web browser – the default browser in Windows XP, replaced by Internet Explorer 7 in Vista – and hopes to encourage users to upgrade via a nag screen.
[via bit-tech.net]
While our investigation into energy efficient hardware might have confirmed that choosing lower-power hardware can make a difference to your running costs if you’re willing to sacrifice performance – or buy Intel processors – it seems that the public isn’t yet switched on to the benefits of ‘green’ technology.
In a report released this week by consumer electronics site Retrevo – via CNet – a full 42 percent of those queried about their buying habits stated that they were unconcerned if “a gadget I buy is not green.”
[via consumerist.com]
Sarah had an unpleasant experience at her local movie theater, and sent a complaint e-mail to the company that runs it. We don’t know what response she expected, but it probably wasn’t a letter from a company vice president that began, “Drive to [a competing theater] and also go f*** yourself. If you don’t have money for entertainment, get a better job, and don’t pay for everything on your credit or check card.”