By mike
Last weekend I got sucked into one of the most interesting and cool features of Picasa, Google’s Mac and PC application for organizing photos: facial recognition. Last year, my father began scanning all of the thousands of family photos that he has stored using a slide/negative scanner and a flatbed scanner for prints. I ended up coming home last Christmas after a family visit with 40+gig of digital imagery – and that’s roughly 1/3 of what he thinks he has left to digitize!
As soon as I got home, I simply dumped the collection into my Picasa albums folder and let the software crank through it. But only a few days ago did I stumble upon the facial recognition features of Picasa – and it opened up an totally unexpected world of family history for me. You see, in sorting through all of the faces and tagging them with names either from my already-imported contacts list or by adding new ones on the fly, I’ve begun to gain a deeper understanding of my family history. I’ve always known the basics, such as my grandparents and some aunts and uncles here and there. But putting names to the faces of people like my father’s aunt, sitting down to dinner dressed to the nines in the 1930’s with her dapper husband Jack, has just brought a whole new level of appreciation to where I’ve come from and how deep my roots – and my own growing family’s roots – are and will continue to be for generations to come. And yes, that’s my father leaning out of the back of that 1960’s Beetle, not me. Something about the apple falling somewhere in close proximity to the tree…
By mike
It’s good to see Lifehacker focusing on backup tools. After literally years of struggling with backing up various computers and laptops I’ve owned over the years, and having learned my disaster-recovery lesson the hard way when I lost the hard drive on my desktop in 1996 or something, I’ve recently settled into a very cozy relationship with Mozy. I signed up for the yearly Home Unlimited plan ($50/yr per machine) and have been nothing short of pleased with it’s performance.
Check out other options over at Lifehacker, but whatever you do? Make sure you’re backing up your data…
By mike
Click for larger image
Took a ride yesterday looking to traverse Trail Ridge Road while the rest of the Front Range baked in 90+ temps, only to be turned away by 12 miles of oiled gravel laid down in preparation of the Park Service resurfacing the classic 1920’s 12,000-foot-high scenic wonder. I even brought my winter gear.
So I turned back around to head back through Granby and down the slightly less scenic Berthoud Pass when I passed this curious camouflaged AMG Somethingorother. I can tell you a few things about it: it was definitely a Benz, the seats had AMG on ‘em, the two dudes that were walking out while I was taking these photos were not very happy with me, and that’s about the longest V10- or V12-hiding hood I’ve seen in… well… ever. Any ideas? Click pics for larger images of the MysteryBenz.
By mike
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’cause I’m dead-set on an iPhone, and I’m dead-set against T-Mobile. But how cool of a feature is My Tracks?
Many GPS receivers require you to plug a separate device into a computer, install software, transfer, convert and upload your track to the web. With My Tracks, this has become a whole lot simpler. I no longer need to carry multiple devices when I go out for a ride, and I can easily share my rides on the spot with anyone I’d like by recording and uploading my track right from my phone and then sharing it out via email or even Twitter.
Granted, I think that Twitter is utterly stupid, but how useful would this be for motorbike rides, 4-wheeling, mountain biking, proving just how many tracks you got in last weekend at Mary Jane? So cool…
EDIT: The folks at TheAdventureLife.org have posted up their top 25 outdoor iPhone apps. Maybe “Trails”?
By mike
Click for larger, more confusing view
Virtual Geek has an amazingly insightful post combining multiple presentations and points from representatives from EMC, MVWare, NetApp, Dell/Equalogic, HP/Lefthand, and some other folks in the business. As you can see by the names involved, we’re talking about most every major virtualization storage player in the industry today – and they’re here to help us make heads or tails of iSCSI storage. You’ll even be able to make sense of that diagram above after reading:
As discussed earlier, the ESX 3.x software initiator really only works on a single TCP connection for each target – so all traffic to a single iSCSI Target will use a single logical interface. Without extra design measures, it does limit the amount of IO available to each iSCSI target to roughly 120 – 160 MBs of read and write access.
This design does not limit the total amount of I/O bandwidth available to an ESX host configured with multiple GbE links for iSCSI traffic (or more generally VMKernel traffic) connecting to multiple datastores across multiple iSCSI targets, but does for a single iSCSI target without taking extra steps.
Here are the questions that customers usually ask themselves:
Question 1: How do I configure MPIO (in this case, VMware NMP) and my iSCSI targets and LUNs to get the most optimal use of my network infrastructure? How do I scale that up?
Question 2: If I have a single LUN that needs really high bandwidth – more than 160MBps and I can’t wait for the next major ESX version, how do I do that?
Question 3: Do I use the Software Initiator or the Hardware Initiator?
Question 4: Do I use Link Aggregation and if so, how?
Here are the answers you seek…
By mike
Tilt-shift photography is the process by which an ordinary photo is manipulated to look more like photographs of models. And I have no idea how to do it. But using TiltShiftMaker.com,you can simply upload one of your photos to their website, adjust some things like the area of focus and color enhancement, and then download your (voila!) tilt-shifted photo. Cool stuff:
View of Ouray, CO from my birthday trip last year (click for larger version):
Tilt-shifted version (click for larger version):
via BoingBoing.net…
By mike
…and imagine finding it pop up on Toolmonger!
Some Toolmongers can open a bottle with practically anything: this Appalachian Trail pocket knife, for instance, or the edge of a bar. For myself, the choice of tool is critical — so I opt for a pope bottle opener, which makes a great conversation piece as well as a functional answer to my need for refreshment. If you want a popener for yourself or for your favorite beer drinker, you can find at least one online.
Our friend Justin brought me back one from Rome in 2002 or so. Since then, it’s become indispensible around the house, holding it’s own little place in our silverware drawer.
Last weekend I got sucked into one of the most interesting and cool features of Picasa, Google’s Mac and PC application for organizing photos: facial recognition. Last year, my father began scanning all of the thousands of family photos that he has stored using a slide/negative scanner and a flatbed scanner for prints. I ended up coming home last Christmas after a family visit with 40+gig of digital imagery – and that’s roughly 1/3 of what he thinks he has left to digitize!
