I mentioned Real Alternative in a previous post. There are other alternative tools available such as QuickTime Alternative and Media Player Classic for those of you who prefer lean and mean programs as opposed to bloated resource hogging software. You will find these tools at Free Codecs.com which offers audio codecs and video codecs and some useful guides and tutorials as well.
Archive for February, 2005
Free (audio and video) Codecs
Monday, February 28th, 2005Free San Diego Hotspots
Thursday, February 24th, 2005Free wi-fi cafes and other wireless hotspots in San Diego.
If you are using wireless WiFi (802.11b) public hotspots then you are sending and receiving all of your traffic in “the clear”. It is penetrating walls, it is zooming across the street, and it is all readable plain text.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) protects you by encrypting your traffic and cloaking your destination on any network, wired or wireless.
Putfile Dedicated Digital Free Media Hosting
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005Putfile is a dedicated digital media hosting and free file storage service where you can upload and store videos and images to the internet for free.
Terms of ServicePornography, nudity, sexual images and otherwise offensive images are prohibited. Putfile – Putfile – reserves the right to decide appropriate content and can delete images or entire albums at any time.
By uploading an image to Putfile – Putfile – you give permission for the owners of Putfile to publish your image in any of their projects or publications. You release all rights to the image, and give full permission to Putfile and its associates to use and publish the image in anyway they wish. You will receive no money for the image being used in any such way.
As a user of Putfile.com – Putfile – you agree that Putfile – Putfile – is not liable for your images or any lost business due to the unavailability or loss of the website. Putfile.com – Putfile – makes no claims of future reliability in serving, hosting or storing your images.
Yahoo! Search blog
Thursday, February 17th, 2005Cool site. A sample of the type of articles found here is Yahoo! Search Tips for Webmasters: Saving Bandwidth.
Crawl-Delay: There’s one last trick you can use to help reduce the bandwidth requirements of your site. You can use a special robots.txt directive, crawl-delay, to reduce the speed at which our crawlers make requests to your site. This allows webmasters to manage their bandwidth without restricting content on their site from crawlers and is being used effectively by sites like Slashdot. A safe value for this would be a delay that would allow us to fetch every page on your site in about five days. So a five second delay (crawl-delay: 5.0) would be fine for a site with 2,000 pages, but not for a site with 100,000 or more.
What is Bubbler?
Wednesday, February 16th, 2005Bubbler is a new blog hosting company.
The Bubbler client updates text and pages in real time. Bubbler blog authors can post files of any type, including digital photographs, movies, audio, and other multimedia assets as well as business documents like spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations. Content can be presented in dramatically different styles through a rich set of high-quality designer templates. Bubbler has a group model that provides wiki-like collaboration for authorized users. The Bubbler hosted service is launching as a free public beta…
Free during the current beta period. Basic service will start at $4.99 a month.
Recycling Electronics is Free
Monday, February 14th, 2005I’ve talked about electronic recycling events in previous post here at BinaryWolf headquarters. There has been a change in 2005 so that individuals and businesses are able to dispose of electronics for free at their convenience.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) and the California Integrated Waste Management Board (CIWMB) are working together to compensate recyclers for the cost of environmentally recycling approved electronic devices (such as CRTs). The SB20 program [took] effect in January 2005 for registered recyclers and collectors of many CRT devices.
Previously, it was costly for businesses and individuals to dispose of electronic waste. As of January 1, IMS Electronics Recycling accepts electronic waste from the public for free at 2697 Main Street, San Diego. This material is then transported to and processed at the new facility in Poway. Businesses and nonprofit organizations with a large quantity of e-waste can arrange delivery to the Poway facility, or [a] pick-up service.
Many electronic devices are detrimental to the environment. Therefore, electronic consumers have an obligation to properly dispose of electronic waste, and now recycling electronics is free.
For more information, call IMS at 619-231-2521.
Google Maps
Thursday, February 10th, 2005Google Maps is an online service that allows users in the U.S. to find location information, navigate through maps, and get directions quickly and easily. Google Maps has several unique features:
- Draggable maps � you can click and drag Google maps to view adjacent sections; no more long waits while new areas download.
- Integrated Local search results � Google Maps integrates local search results from Google Local. So to find a pizza place, simply type in “pizza in San Jose”, and pizza places appear at various locations on your map, with phone numbers for each location on the right side of the page.
- Turn-by-turn directions � Type in an address and Google Maps plots the route for you, displaying it visually on the map itself, together with step-by-step directions for getting there (or back from there). When you click on one of these steps (say, “turn left”), you see a floating bubble with a magnified view of the area mentioned in the directions.
- Keyboard shortcuts � You can use arrow keys to pan left, right, up and down. The Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys let you pan out even wider. And you can zoom in with the plus (+) key and zoom out with the minus (-) key.
Under the hood of Google Maps:
For those to whom the implementation is less than obvious, here’s a quick breakdown. The top and side bars are (more or less) simply HTML. The center pane with the map, however, is a different beast. First, let’s address the map itself. It is broken up into a grid of 128×128 images (basically like an old tile-based scrolling console game). The dragging code is nothing new, but the cool trick here is that each of these images is absolutely positioned — and the ‘infinite’ scrolling effect is achieved by picking up tiles that are off-screen on one end and placing them down on the other end. The effect is kind of like laying track for a train by picking up track from behind it.
