Happy Earth Day 2011! I was hoping to add solar panels to my home this Spring but the local vendor never got back to me. After crunching some numbers, with current solar panel prices/efficiency, electricity usage, and incentive rebates I decided to put the extra money towards the mortgage as a wiser investment. I'll be looking to install solar panels at a later date but for now … [Read more...]
Reddit is Down, Amazon Blamed 2 – This Time With Confirmation
Just a little over a month ago, a bit of controversy flared up as a result of Reddit's error message. They implied Amazon web services were to blame but the Amazon AWS status page didn't reflect the same problems. A nice, long article resulted from the incident to explain why Reddit was down for 6 hours out of 24. This morning, the popular site is down again and blaming Amazon … [Read more...]
Google Video Is Shutting Down and One Team’s Effort To Save the Content
Google had a period, and it still may, where it would try to build something internally to compete with a cool new project and then if it's product couldn't take the lead, it would acquire the competitor. That pretty much seems to be the story between Google Video (launched January 2005) and YouTube (acquired October 2006), respectively. Google Video never really had an … [Read more...]
Winners Announced For Data Viz Challenge – Visualizing How Federal Income Taxes Are Used
Google and Eyebeam created a challenge this year to make it easier for US citizens to understand where their federal income tax dollars go. Today, being the day federal taxes are due, made for a fitting day to reveal the finalists over at www.datavizchallenge.org. Every year, Americans fill out income tax forms and make a payment to the IRS. It’s an important civic duty, but … [Read more...]
Otomata – The Spirograph Of Making Music
Otomata, at EarSlap.com, is a fun, little Flash toy that allows you to create music by inserting living cells into a grid that then follow rules to generate a sequence of music. Since the rules allow the cells to interactive, you can create a random, evolving musical sound. It can make for quite a bit of fun and pleasant sounds. Each alive cell has 4 states: Up, right, down, … [Read more...]