New design. New features. Now in 8GB and 16GB. iPod nano rocks like never before.
Curved ahead of the curve.
For those about to rock, we give you nine amazing colors. But that’s only part of the story. Feel the curved, all-aluminum and glass design and you won’t want to put iPod nano down.
Great looks.And brains, too.
The new Genius feature turns iPod nano into your own highly intelligent, personal DJ. It creates playlists by finding songs in your library that go great together.
Made to move with your moves.
The accelerometer comes to iPod nano. Give it a shake to shuffle your music. Turn it sideways to view Cover Flow. And play games designed with your moves in mind.
Googlephone Will Cost the Same as the iPhone
Quoting The Wall Street Journal, Reuters reports that T-Mobile will price the forthcoming HTC Dream, the first Googlephone, at an iPhone-matching $200. More importantly, the WSJ says that "T-Mobile USA plans to release new data service plans in conjunction with the Google phone that will be 'aggressively priced.'"
This makes it clear that T-Mobile sees the the Android phone as an antidote to AT&T's exclusive on the iPhone. Whether AT&T sees it the same way is another matter. The hope is that competition will bring down the price of AT&T's iPhone plans, but really, if somebody wants an iPhone, they'll buy one. For instance, Creative's Zen MP3 players are great, and much cheaper than iPods, but just how many of them do you see around?
And frankly, the United States has it pretty good when it comes to iPhone plans. "Unlimited data" pretty much means unlimited. In Europe, "unlimited" means you get your data rate cut after a few hundred megabytes. It's not cheap, either: You'd better have your wallet with you when you bend over and say "Please, sir. Can I have some more?"
We have hopes for the Googlephone, but an iPhone killer it ain't.
Tag Clouds, you have seen them on delicious, Technorati or Flickr, are an easy way to get people explore your site deeper. Here's a sample tag cloud that uses Google AJAX Search.
Tag Clouds (provided they are not cluttered and display just the relevant words) help visitors quickly visualize what your website is all about since the topics you frequently cover are mentioned in bold or relatively bigger fonts.
WordPress community already offers some excellent plugins for generating tag clouds (like the Ultimate Warrior) plus the upcoming release, WP 2.3, has inbuilt support for tagging.
digital inspiration tag cloudHowever, if you are on Blogger or have a non-blog website, there's no reason that you should miss Tag Clouds.
Here's how to add a good looking tag cloud to your Blogger blog:
1. Type your Blogger feed address in RainMaker
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xyz/posts/default?max-results=999
Remember to replace xyz with your Blog ID. This URL will retrieve your latest 999 posts and supply that for analysis to RainMaker.
2. For the word link, type the following (where xxx is your blog name, e.g. labnol)
http://xxx.blogspot.com/search?q=%%enc_word%%
3. You can change the default font size, tag cloud dimension background image and colors to fit your site theme.
4. Now the tricky part. Once you have generated the tag cloud using RainMaker, right click over your tag cloud and click "View HTML source" - that the code you need to copy paste in your site.
Tip for Tag Clouds - If you really want visitors to spend more time on your site via Tag Clouds, always keep the number of words in Tag Cloud to an absolute minimum and that there is sufficient space around each word.
When I click on Send and Receive in Microsoft Outlook I started getting the error Interface Not Registered. This error started to appear after I installed some video editing software and also ran some updates to the software. I searched around the Internet and found this solution from Microsoft which fixed my problem.
You receive the “Interface not registered” error message when you try to send or to save an e-mail message to the Drafts folder in Outlook 2002
SYMPTOMS
If you use Microsoft Word as your e-mail editor in Microsoft Office Outlook 2002, and you try to send e-mail messages or to save e-mail messages to the Drafts folder, you may receive the following error message:
Interface not registered
Or, you may experience the following symptoms:
* You receive an error message.
* The e-mail message is not sent.
* The e-mail message is not saved to the Drafts folder.
CAUSE
This behavior occurs if the Ole32.dll file that is located in the %Windir%\System32 folder is not registered correctly in the registry.
RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, register the Ole32.dll file. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, click Run, type the following command in the Open box, and then click OK:
2. Regsvr32.exe %Windir%\System32\Ole32.dll
3. In the RegSvr32 dialog box, click OK.
This solution was taken from Microsoft’s Knowledge Base
A physicist with more than 40 patents to his credit would seem to have his career clearly mapped out. But Robert J. Lang’s first love is…folding paper. One of the world’s foremost artists in origami—Japanese paper folding—Lang creates creatures of such realism and complexity that it seems impossible that each is composed of a single sheet of paper, no cuts, no glue.
Inspecting Lang’s eight-inch-tall ibex, for instance, you can see its beard, ears, horns, even its cloven hooves. His grizzly bear has teeth. His insects—Lang’s favorites—have fat bodies, twiggy legs, antennae, sometimes even spread wings.
And some of Lang’s origami creations are life size, like his eight-piece orchestra commissioned by a European paper company, or the Pteranodon with a 14-foot wing span created from a single, four-meter-square piece of paper. It flies on permanent display at the Redpath Museum of Natural History in Montreal, Canada.
No wonder Lang is swamped with commissions and commercial projects. His are not your children’s flapping birds.
Putting Math to the Fold
In his pleasant garden studio, Lang uses his MacBook Pro, TreeMaker and ReferenceFinder—two freeware programs he created—and Wolfram’s Mathematica to conceptualize his creations and and map them out for rendering in paper. On a shelf above a 30-inch Apple Cinema display connected to his laptop, a zoo of origami critters stands watch.
Lang, a lanky scientist with a boyish face, salt-and-pepper beard and the inevitable Birkenstocks, says “The cool thing about origami is that it is a very mathematical art. In many arts, there’s pure artistic skill. In origami, it’s almost half and half. You can do things with pure art, you can do things with pure math, but if you put them together, you get far more satisfying results than either one alone.”
Applying mathematical principles to origami, he adds, has enormously advanced the art. Though origami is several hundred years old, Lang explains, it has been limited to simple creations such as paper cranes or boats. “The modern art form,” he says, “was born in the 20th century when a Japanese artist named Akira Yoshizawa started creating new figures of artistic beauty that inspired other origami artists to expand their horizons.” Yoshizawa also created an instructional language that then enabled them to share their creations and build off of each others’ work.
Still, the idea of creating a fully detailed insect—say, a dragonfly with all its legs—from a single sheet of paper was often dismissed as an impossibility. But the art has advanced enormously; “In fact,” says Lang, “now, not only can we do dragonflies, but mosquitoes and spiders and even centipedes.”
Computer-Aided Origami
Lang acknowledges that one of the watersheds in the development of origami as an art form came from his own work, which includes his software contributions: TreeMaker and ReferenceFinder. These two freeware programs convert simple stick figures into full-blown origami crease patterns and even detail portions of the folding sequence for artists to follow.
Using TreeMaker, for example, Lang draws a stick figure of an animal—say the legs, body, head, antlers, ears of a deer—on his Mac. Then he enters the desired length of each stick. TreeMaker constructs a set of equations—in this case about 200—to describe the graph completely, then performs an optimization and analysis and creates the crease pattern for the deer. ReferenceFinder analyzes individual points and lines in the crease pattern and spits out the folding sequence for those elements.
“If you fold the crease pattern, you get a shape, called a “base,” that is a collection of points. You then apply shaping to make the points thinner and turn them the right direction,” Lang says, “and you get the folded deer that you set out to create.”
Lang began developing TreeMaker using THINK’s Lightspeed Pascal on his Mac SE/20 and then migrated it to subsequent machines and languages as the Mac and programming languages evolved. Today he uses Xcode for his primary programming environment and C++ for his programs. “I started on a Mac,” Lang says, “and while I’ve used other OSs in my career, I love Mac. On the Mac, I can shift effortlessly and seamlessly from program to program, whether it’s designing a figure, analyzing its underlying mathematics, creating folding instructions for a book, or documenting it on my website. The Mac simply becomes an extension of my hands and mind.
“But probably the biggest reason I’ve stayed using tools on the Mac is that, in my origami work, I use a lot of programs. There’s no giant origami program. You have to use lots of programs for bits and pieces of it. And Mac programs just cooperate with each other.”
Folding Paper for Fun and Profit
For Lang, every day is different. He creates origami insects for fun, and once was commissioned to make one for an entomologist, but he confesses “there’s not much commercial demand for insects.”
The call for Lang’s commercial work comes from advertising agencies commissioning interesting images for ads, artworks for private individuals, and communities that commission bronze versions of his origami for permanent display. What Lang considers remarkable, however, is that computational origami has a surprisingly wide range of practical applications—from space telescopes and automotive applications to medicine and consumer electronics.
For a project such as the entomologist’s favorite insect, Lang begins by taking measurements from photographs: How long are the legs? How are they connected? He measure distances manually so he knows exactly how long each leg should be. In many cases he shoots his own pictures in a corner of his studio and pulls them into iPhoto, where he organizes images by subject or job for his website and client presentations.
Then Lang fires up TreeMaker and sketches a stick framework for the insect. “The first thing,” Lang says, “is to get a sense of how to allocate paper on the page and to decide whether I want the symmetries of the creases to be square, hexagon or irregularly oriented. One of those is going to be a more natural fit for the subject, and I want to use the paper efficiently.”
He works on the 30-in Cinema Display to handle the many windows he has open at one time. “I love this display,” he says. “It was my little splurge present to myself a few months ago, but it has more than paid for itself in productivity. I can show many windows that show lots of code; I can put five different projects visible at once and cut and paste and move things around. I just hadn’t realized how much time I was spending scrolling around or hiding windows in order to accommodate all of my projects and programs.”
Working in TreeMaker on his Mac, Lang can set up and specify all of the relationships for the patterns in less than 15 minutes. “I can take that exact pattern and start folding,” he says.
For other projects, Lang uses the TreeMaker pattern as a starting point. “I might refine the pattern in TreeMaker,” he says, “or I get out pencil and graph paper and sketch the pattern to adjust dimensions or proportions. Or—if the subject is really complicated—I’ll do the same drawing in Macromedia Freehand so I can precisely select shapes, move them around, and adjust their positions. That way I end up with a pattern where all the paper is used, all the parts of the insect have a corresponding region of paper, and the creases from the legs line up perfectly with the creases from the body and each other.”
For small shapes, Lang prints out the pattern and tests it. If he’s transferring a pattern to a large sheet of paper, such as the four-meter square for the Pteranodon, he exports his Freehand illustration to a generic format such as eps and imports it into Mathematica.
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