Web Cam Sets You Ablaze!

If you have a web cam you have to try this. I was reading the RSS today and I never had any idea people were doing this sort of thing, or why…

But it is cool that people are doing this because so far this evening I have set my hand on fire, my whole body and the cat and nobody got hurt.

Grant Skinner has written a Flash 8 demo that interfaces with your web-cam to give special effects based on movement. Anything that moves looks like it is on fire. My web-cam lighting is not that good in the screen shots mainly because it is night time. But it gives you the general idea.

It has no purpose other than being plain fun and cool. There is also another demo based on movement that makes it look like you are being snowed on, but for that one you need to sit still for a few minutes to get the effect. Still cool fun though.

But remember you need a web-cam and I can think of no better reason not to go out and get one! Anyway they are getting pretty inexpensive now, so you don't have an excuse. Remember to have fun and not to really set the cat or yourself on fire.

But you can pretend…Brawh haw haw haw…

Grant Skinner's Blog

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Make Your Own Logo With Mikons

I have been really frustrated lately due to the fact that Sebastian and I have struggled to either find or create a logo for Global Geek Podcast. I have even considered buying a logo but it would not be an original and it would not be exactly what we wanted. Not to mention expensive for what you get. Then I found a great site called Mikons.

Mikons is another site based on a Web2.0 philosophy. That is users come together with a common purpose, to meet, interact, share and in this case create. With what is dubbed on the site as the “Mikon Machine” you can create your own logo’s, emoticons, or visual “tags” that are unique to you; the creator. The Mikon machine is in fact a Shockwave flash application that allows you to create vector graphics on a WYSIWYG interface. I actually do not know of any other website that offers such a service as this.

The editor also offers pre-designed pictures that you can put into your own design. Once you have created an account you can then save your design, edit it later, export them and share them with other people. If you want you to keep them all private you can do that too. The “machine” has absolutely heaps of options, such as copying images, resizing, resizing to scale, fill, custom shapes, group, hide, bring to front and many, many more. My only criticism would be that there are not enough fronts to choose from, there are only three at this point in time. I hope that there will be more in the future.

Having said that I actually exported my created Mikon, put it into Paint Shop Pro and add some of my own text and saved it in a different format. I also added colour to the logo that I have done for the Global Geek Podcast, and it looks awsome. But you will have to stay tuned for that one. The logo or Mikon that you see at the start of this post is as it was when I finished it on the site. A nice feature that is built in is the fact that all your original work is copyrighted for you being part of the site under a Creative Commons Licence. Nice touch.

There are some exciting things that you could use your Mikon for are endless in my opinion. I am thinking of things like an avitar, logo, mood message for your blog. Lots of things.

So please check out Mikons.com it is a very cool site and it is fun as well. I could not do it the justice that it deserves here so please check it out, in beta as usual with everything on the net these days so it can only get better. People have created some great mikons that you can download and use yourself if you are not too creative.

Note: This site is untested with “Site Advisor” that great Firefox extension that tells you if a site is nasty. That is that it is a grey site. But I did give it the thorough going over, there are no pop-ups or nasty code to worry about, I am sure that it will get the green light eventually. I have registered for the site and it comes highly recommended.

You Know It Might Not Be Safe When…

Yesterday Adam sent me this picture that he took, what a laugh! He took it "five mins run away", I am guessing from his place. Not sure how far away that is and you can go run for five minutes to find out because I am not.

Anyways the alarm bells would be ringing if you saw this sign. Not a place to take the kids for a play in the park.

You have to laugh though, this is typical Council management. Although I think that for some people this might be a completely reasonable day: Get up (from the park bench), have a few beers (or fifty), go pick a fight or two and win some and loose some, after all that actvilty have a sleep, get up and do it again tomorrow. That day might be so good they get up and do it all again the next day. That means setting up a campsite!

Given that mentality I don't think that the persons that this sign is directed towards give a rats what it says. But at least the Cairns Council can say that they are managing the problem!

That's Council for you!

As a note; this is not a reflection of Cairns as a whole.

POPURLS dot com: What a Great Site

I was cruising the RSS today and although I had heard of POPURLS in passing I had not visited it until today. I was pleasantly surprised.

This site is a sort of a aggregator for sites that are updated frequently or have RSS feeds associated with them, or some other kind of community contribution on a regular basis. POPURLS summarizes this data into a “all-in-a-view” style. I don’t think that it is everything that comes out of these sites but it is a nice summary. The site has a very nice single page design and you can swap the default white on black to black on white. You can also make the text larger for those of you who are blind. The other cool option is that you can expand the headings to include more feeds or data. Lastly you can hover over a title of an article you get a summary of the article, click on it and a new tab opens with the full text from the site, cool.

POPURLS covers a huge range of sites: digg.com, del.icio.us, furl.net, flickr, reddit.com, tailrank.com, fark.com, youtube.com, news.google.com, news.yahoo.com, newsvine.com, video.google.com, shoutwire.com, slashdot.org, wired.com, odeo.com, nowpuplic.com, metafilter.com.

You will notice that not all the “feeds” are text based. There are video feeds as well and that’s something that average newsreaders don’t do. I think that is a nice addition, so is the fact that there are Flickr photo’s as well. I am not sure what the relationship between POPURLS and the contributing sites is but it makes you wonder how others might get on the list. Just something to think about.

That aside I think this is a great idea and one that finally puts RSS feeds into the hands of “regular” users. While it does not unleash the true power of RSS and aggregation it is a taste and might spark some interest for some people, it also connects you with the information that may enable you to better utilize RSS fully. In addition to these points, even if you were a super geek; it is just a fun site and a great way to have a quick catch up with what is going on in cyberspace and beyond, a cool distraction from whatever it is you are meant to be doing. Have a look you will end up staying a while.