everystockphoto

everystockphoto is a syndicating/search engine for stock/free photos. Photos come from various sources, e.g. Flickr, stock.xchng, Wikimedia Commons, photoXpress, and fotolia, and their usage is subject to their corresponding licenses.

ClaroVision.NET Platform Videos

My company, Oy ClaroVision Ltd, has been developing a media center (how we understand and see it) since 2006. What you get is:

• Digital Television PVR Record up to 6 channels and watch one more simultaneously
• Photo Album Organize your photos in a way most convenient for you thanks to extensive support of playlists (and, of course, you can view your photos too!!! :)
• Music (including CD) Take control of your music collection thanks to playlists and CD-ripping function
• Video (including DVD) Watch and organize all your videos, including DVDs (Blu-ray coming)
• Web Browser Access exciting Internet services on the living room TV (it is not a walled-garden browser!)
• Videophone Stay in touch with your family and friends

It is networked, so you can access content stored on your home PC/server as well. The main accent was made on usability – whole thing is very uniform and is controlled using remote control’s arrows, OK, Menu, and Back buttons.

We reached the beta milestone some time ago, and now we are ready to go to the public with our product. Here are some demo videos (all of them have HD version, so they are a bit bandwidth-demanding for proper watching) that make it easier to understand what we are talking about. You can find these same videos on our completely revamped website together with more detailed information about the platform and our company. Your comments are very welcome!

Iconfinder

Iconfinder is to icons what Google is to the web – a search engine.

CHDK: Canon PowerShot++

We were looking into supporting RAW images in our product, and purely by accident I bumped into CHDK (the name stands for Canon Hack Development Kit). It is a free firmware addon for Canon PowerShot cameras, enabling/adding many cool features, e.g. recording 10-bit/color RAW files (including experimental support for the open DNG standard), overriding camera parameters, bracketing for exposure, aperture, ISO, and focus, controlling video quality/bitrate, scripting, motion detection, live histogram, etc., etc., etc. Will definitely try it out as soon as will get some free time, but people are very excited about it. The risk is minimal, as it is not overriding the original firmware, but rather loading these extra goodies from the SD card.

|=uCl<1/\/9 Acrobat Reader!!!

Arghhhhh! The newest Acrobat Reader sucks big time!!! Its Content Preparation Progress/Please wait while the document is being prepared for reading dialog is something beyond my understanding. It is “processing” the document with the speed of 1-2/pages per second, and stays on top of e.g. browser; plus, you cannot do anything with the document while the dialog is there, e.g. no searching.

How could older Acrobat Readers show me my documents without displaying this beautiful piece of “contemporary PC art”, and the newest reader cannot!?

UPDATE There is a way to turn it off! There is the Reading > Screen Reader Options > Page vs Document option in Preferences, and it should be set to Only read the currently visible pages. No idea, why it had different value, as I have never touched it. Anyway, I am not alone in this – many others had the same issue, when this setting got somehow changed.

Visible Body – 3D Human Anatomy

My son was asking all kinds of question about human anatomy (he is 7 :), so I decided to find some interactive software that would help me to explain things to him. Pretty much by accident I bumped into Visible Body web application (still in Beta) featuring an interactive 3D model of the human body. It is, according to its developers, the most comprehensive human anatomy visualization tool available today. From what I have seen so far, it looks really cool and promising, although not all content will be available for free.

Work Chair

I am thinking about a new work chair for myself, and found two very interesting options (gosh, both are not cheap!) – Bambach Saddle Seat and Aeron chair by Herman Miller.

The Periodic Table of Videos

This is not software-related, but cool nevertheless… The Periodic Table of Videos has a short video about each chemical element. This is work-in-the-progress – videos are constanly updating with new stories, better samples and bigger experiments.

Microsoft-related Info

Mary-Jo Foley’s All About Microsoft and Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report have excellent “insiders’” information about Microsoft – its plans, problems, technologies, people.