image

Valentine’s Day Advice For Geeks

Many people derisively refer to Valentine’s Day as a “Hallmark” holiday, invented and popularized by commercialized interests in the greeting card, floral and chocolate industries.

Not so!

Valentine’s Day was named after two Christian martyrs named (wait for it) “Valentine.” According to Wikipedia, Valentine’s Day became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the Middle Ages. Lovers have been expressing their love for one another on that day ever since.

Geeks can have special challenges, of course. Bonding with your laptop or server cluster can be a little lonely. Your iTouch is sexy… just not in that way. What to do? If you’re feeling lonely, stressed out over expressing your love or have an unrequited geeky crush, fear not! The interwebs are your friend! [Tetris Heart from Mitch at 4colorrebellion.com]

If the target of your affections has a sense of humor, fill out this “Declaration of Romantic Intent.”

If you have a crush on a fellow photographer, follow this helpful howto from Wired and turn your flickr crush into real romance.

The Road to Know Where has a ton of templates you can use to put together an electronic Valentine Day card, including a Silverlight “Share the Love” ecard builder.

Your Mom’s Basement gets pretty specific about how to meet a girl and navigate the pitfalls of romance. If you’re spending time in your mom’s basement, can we assume you need the advice?

If you’re trying to decide what to get a geek for Valentine’s Day, there’s a Slashdot thread to help you with a last-minute purchase, along with a gazillion other shopping guides.

Finally, if you just need a laugh, Josh Frolinger put together a hilarious list of geek Valentine’s Day videos. My favorites?

Computer Camp Love:

Internet Love Song:

Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)

(This last betrays my own geeky love for collegiate acappella, bringing me back to the glory days of singing under the arches and then networking some PCs together to play Marathon. Nothing says loving like a good fragging. )

Vector Magic: A great webapp for precision bitmap to vector art conversion

Are you thinking ahead to making gifts for the holidays? I certainly am; once the Thanksgiving holiday is on the immediate horizon, my internal clock starts ringing madly. Less than a month until the gift exchanges begin?!

{angst}

Fortunately, a friendly colleague forwarded me a rather useful tool: Vector Magic. If you, like me, love to make your own gifts, including digital imagery, this tool will excite you as well.

Here’s a quick and clean summary. Vector Magic converts bit map images to vector graphics.

Why is this cool? Because a bit map uses a fixed or raster graphics method of specifying an image, the image cannot be immediately rescaled by a user without losing definition. A vector graphics graphic image, however, is designed to be quickly rescaled.

Instead of using commercial software, you can just upload your image to Vector Magic (essentially, a stanford.edu server) and they’ll vectorize it for you.

Here’s their example of the difference:

In other words, you can scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. Savvy? Happy gift making!

Here’s a video that demonstrates how you how Vector Magic works:

Check out this FAQ for more info. Vector Magic supports the JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF image formats as inputs and outputs them as EPS, SVG or PNGs.

Andrew Sellick’s 100 terrific open source or freeware apps for web developers

Say what you will about link bait — this list of freeware and open source Web development applications from Andrew Sellick is a great resource if you’re in the business (or even hobby) of building Web sites and don’t have the budget for Adobe’s creative suite. While some resources are likely to be familiar to many, like Eclipse or the IE Toolbar, if you work in the creation or maintenance of online content, it’s a sure bet you’ll discover something new and worthwhile in Andrew’s list.

Thanks to Andrew for all of his hard work researching and pulling them together — and to the delicious community, as always, for highlighting the achievement by collectively bookmarking it to the top.

xkcd: a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language

Yuval Shavit, a triple threat of writer/coder/sarcasm maven over at SearchITChannel.com, turned me on to the xkcd webcomic a few months ago. Today, he pointed out the edition above, an example of DB humor that might just result in coffee-laced chuckles in server rooms worldwide.

xkcd is written by by Randall Munroe, a Christopher Newport University graduate who worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia before he began producing xkcd full-time.

These days, his witty, snarky comic is produced three times a week and has found its way into the offline world on prized geeky t-shirts everywhere. Techies who live and breathe acronyms (and challenge themselves to identify them) may be disappointed to learn that xkcd doesn’t actually stand for anything; according to Randall, “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation. It stands for the comic and everything the comic stands for!”

What does the comic stand for? Mostly funny pokes at a geek’s challenges, including work, the quest for love, the oddity of daily life and quirks of technology, but that’s probably too narrow. Randall is unapologetically nerdy, honest and manages to inject his sparsely drawn figures with actual pathos, along with a brand of humor that seems to speak directly to the reptile brain of techies everywhere. With subjects ranging from raptors to Red Spider, zeppelins, Vanilla Ice, Mussolini, Guitar Hero and Firefly, xkcd plays on the heart strings of modern geek culture to hilarious effect, though occasionally with a thoughtful note. Cory Doctorow loves it, and so do I.

If you happen to live in Massachussetts, keep an eye out for the next real-world meetup. And if you’re looking for updates, here’s the xkcd RSS feed.

What are the 45 best freeware design programs?

snap2objects.com knows. In fact, Mauricio Duque’s list of the 45 best freeware design programs is just the thing to help you or any (cheap) relatives with image editing, desktop publishing or Web design.

The Colombian graphic designer affectionately known as “Mao” took a break from working towards his master’s in information systems design to go through thousands and thousands of applications and bring us his list of the best of the best. As he says, none of them will replace Photoshop, Flash, InDesign, Quark or other professional applications, but the price is right!

I’ve loved GIMP for a while, but, I have to admit, most of these were new to me. Thanks, Mao!

LOLcats: I can haz control of the Internet meme space?

Sometimes, Internet memes are just too powerful to ignore. Especially for a blog that delves into online humor at times. Witness the rise of the LOLcats.

For me, the tipping point may have been when a fellow editor emailed the WhatIs team a Schrodinger’s LOLcat.

For those unschooled in quantum theory, Schrodinger’s Cat is a famous illustration of the principle of superposition, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Our definition of the concept also happens to be one of the most popular pages on WhatIs.com, as you’ll often see on our recently added/updated page.

As pictured on the right, it’s just darn funny.
 story of how the Schrodinger’s LOLcat was created, if you’re intrigued. Credit goes there for the image, naturally.

It’s just one of the latest creations (albeit one more thought-provoking than some) to emerge from the minds of punchy technologists and quirky geeks.

So what is an LOLcat?

Put simply, an it’s an image of a cat with text on top of it.

As usual, there’s considerably more history to the etymology of the word.

Adam Koford, in fact, believes that the idea is much older, going alllll the way back to the early past of last century, where a cartoonist (his great-grandfather, Aloysius “Gorilla” Koford) he produced a comic strip entitled “the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.”

Whether you believe the modern phenomenon is based upon that or not, LOLcats are in many ways a throwback to the early days of the Internet, where Usenet posters would use image macros to insert an appropriate image behind text captions to make a more emphatic point.

And, in fact, that concept fully fleshes out an more accurate definition for LOLcat, an image macro where humorous, idiosyncratic or insightful text is pasted as a caption onto an image of a cat that’s engaged in some sort of funny activity.

Call them “cat macros” for short.

For once, we might be “chasing the tail” of deadtree media, as TIME Magazine wrote about the LOLcat phenomenon recently, bringing this element of Internet culture out of the blogosphere and into mass culture.

While the fervor over LOLcats has subsided a bit over the past few months as netizens hit the beaches, these furry funnies are still popping up everywhere, not just encyclopedia entries over at Wikipedia, UrbanDictionary, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Answers.com.

And, lest you think this is just about “kittybloggers,” BoingBoing has been blogging up a storm about LOLcats.

Witness this tremendous post that dives deep into the etymology of the LOLcat (alluded to above.)
Or this one, where Xeni alternately praises, with tongue firmly in cheek, a “pedantic overanalyzation” of LOLcat history.

Personally, I rather admired how the author, David McRaney, offered such a thorough discussion of leetspeak and Internet slang.

BoingBoing and David aren’t the only commentators on the phenomenon, of course. Anil Dash, of SixApart fame, made a thoughtful post about LOLcat grammar and Internet pidgin languages.

Mahalo also has a great LOLcat roundup.

If you just want your LOLcat fix, however, Xeni also linked to two huge archives of LOLcat pictures, here and here. You can find more at LOLcat.com, LOLcats.com and ICanHasCheeseburger.com.

If that still isn’t enough, you can sort through images and pages tagged with lolcat at Flickr, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and WordPress. (This relatively new phenomenon of being able to link to tag aggregations on social bookmarking sites as useful reference material is, by the way, one of my favorite outcomes of the Web 2.0 movement.)

If those reams of LOLcats still don’t slake your thirst for cat macros, you can always make your own at either of two great LOLcat generators, LOLcatr.com or kscakes.com.

If you want to extend the LOL meme beyond cats, you can also roll your own LOL at laughingsquid.com.

Above is a personal favorite, to round out the post for those of you who love a good unexplained paper jam.

(Credit: ljg)

The long wait is over — your flying car is here

Ok, we’re still not seeing any personal jetpacks but the flying car has arrived. If we had a definition for it, I’d have to go in and change all the references from future to present tense. Because a company called Moller has — finally! — developed the Skycar.Here’s Moller’s definition of what they’re calling a volantor (from “volare” — nothing to do with volunteering. No point in even calling to ask. I tried.):

vo - lan - tor (vo-lan’ter) n. A vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that is capable of flying in a quick, nimble, and agile manner. –intr. & tr.v. -tored, -toring, tors. To go or carry by volantor. [Lat. volare, to fly. Fr. volant, to move in a nimble and agile manner

It flies! Ooooh … and it’s a sedan. Room for the kids and the picnic basket!

Sign up here! You can guarantee a spot between 25 and 100 on the delivery list for only $995,000 — yes, less than a million bucks! — assuming the FAA certifies by Dec. 2008.

I’m so excited! I’m gonna get a red one.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Picnik: Free web-based photo editing in real-time

Up until the wonderful moment that my camera was exposed to the wonders of North Atlantic wave action a few weeks ago, I’d enjoyed over half a decade of great digital pictures from my little Coolpix. (For some of my lessons learned, listen to this podcast). Taking pictures, however, was really always just the start of the process of importing, editing, optimizing and uploading them to the Web. While I’ve been using iPhoto and Photoshop for years for that purpose, lately I’ve been using so many different machines and platforms that neither has been as convenient as I might wish.

Last week, however, a friend pointed me to Picnik, which offers a level of functionality and ease that lies somewhere around iPhoto… except that it’s a free Web-based application!

Amazing. It’s a cinch to take a photo from around the Web or one that you’ve uploaded, resize it, flip it, crop it, use the red-eye reduction and even apply some advanced filters and effects.

There are some caveats. First, Picnik is currently in beta, so some of the more advanced functions won’t be free forever.

Second, you’ll need a relatively new PC (from the past few years) and a speedy Internet connection to make use of the application (mimimum 1 Ghz processor and 256 MB of RAM) . The Picnic FAQ also recommends at least Firefox 1.0 or Internet Explorer 5.0, which brought a huge grin to my face… if you haven’t upgraded your browser beyond those two, it may be time! Picnik is also Flash-based, so you’ll need to download and install the player to use it.

There are also other nifty features that Picnik offers. For one, you can pull a picture directly from your hard drive into the application for editing. For another, it’s easy to do the same with the major online photo sharing sites like Flickr or even from MySpace, assuming you’ve been brave enough to post pictures there. Flickr users will especially enjoy the ability to choose to overwrite the original image with an edited version. If you allow Picnik to access your account, you can also add a new photo, as I did for the picture of the waterfall seen on the left.

Sharing photos right from Picnik is easy as well; just edit and click share to email them or send a link.

It’s rare to find free applications that offer such a smooth, well-conceived user experience, combined with a functionality that’s genuinely useful. In a few short years, it seems like we’ve all become photographers. Picnik, ideally, will help take the pain out of the process that takes place after you capture the image.

[Editor's Note: Both photos on this post were edited with the application. One is a bridge in Acadia in Maine, the other a waterfall in Oregon. If you have shots you'd like to share of your own travels and online edits, please feel free to link to them in the comments. Cheers!]

Riya.com: Visual search engine for the public domain

Riya is a visual search engine that uses face and image similarity to search the Web. While it’s still technically in beta, you can already try it out to find pictures in the public domain.