A photojournalism blog called The Big Picture on boston.com has a dozen amazing photos of the eruption of the Chaiten Volcano in Chile, including this one:

(Photo credit: REUTERS/Carlos Gutierrez)

If you want to see the landscapes and culture of rustic Pennsylvania captured and presented beautifully on an almost-daily basis, then check out the photoblog at A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania.  Many of the photos are simply breathtaking, particularly the landscapes; and every once in a while there’s an extremely cute one, like this:

That’s just a small crop -- check out the original image for the full effect.

When Kim bought me a TiVo a few months ago, it didn’t immediately occur to me that it was a great way to build a video archive.  But a month or two later when I discovered that you can point a web browser at the TiVo and download videos from it to your computer, it started to click.

I also started to realize that there’s actually a ton of good stuff on TV, far more than I have time to watch in fact: stuff like How It’s Made, Survivorman, Planet Earth, Most Shocking, Shockwave, etc, not to mention things we’d already been into like 24, Prison Break, The Office, and Heroes.

Those last few shows need to be watched in order, and usually on or near their original airing date, but the rest can be archived and watched any old time.  So for the past month or two I’ve been archiving shows; I’m up to about 250 episodes, taking up 150 gigs of space.

Back when I first got my TiVo, right away I thought about how it’d be great to be able to somehow watch its content on my iPhone.  The iPhone isn’t a home theater, just like it isn’t a full PC, but the thing is that it’s always with me, so having my favorite TV shows on it would be pretty sweet.  Still, it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I started to really think about this, and I discovered that it’s possible and not even that hard.  So I’ve written up a little guide on putting TiVo shows onto your iPod or iPhone, posted on my tech blog.

A 1-hour episode ends up using about a fifth of a gig on the iPhone.  Since my 8 gig iPhone is already full, I’ve had to cut back the amount of music that’s on it a little bit to accommodate a few TV shows, and that new 16 GB iPhone is looking better and better. 

I’m just continually amazed by this device; now in addition to being my phone, calendar, email & web device, music player, and podcast player, it also has my TV shows on it -- all automatically kept up to date by iTunes with minimal fuss required.

Here are a couple of images uploaded to the FileChucker upload demo this week.  I have no idea what the original sources of these images are; I’ve searched briefly for the first one, and didn’t bother for the second.

This first one is beautiful, evocative, and extremely well-executed; I’d love to have it on my wall if I could find a high-resolution version:

This second one is nothing special, just some chicks in a hot tub:

One of the coolest optical illusions I’ve ever seen.

Leo Laporte has multiple really cool weekly technology shows -- formerly on TV and now on radio/podcasts -- and he also apparently has this show called Jumping Monkeys that’s about "parenting in the digital age."  That’s not something that I personally am particularly interested in right now, but as I was browsing Leo’s site, the latest episode caught my eye because it’s about sleep.

I’ve always been fascinated by sleep, not least because I have a slightly freakish condition relating to sleep.  So I found this podcast interesting because it contains an interview with Ashley Merryman, a woman who is writing a book on cutting-edge sleep knowledge based on current research.  The main tenet seems to be that although we have always known that sleep is important, we’re only beginning to learn just how important it is, in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious.

The whole episode is worth listening to; the interview starts about 15 minutes into it.  But two things stood out to me as especially interesting.  First, during sleep, apparently the brain reprocesses the things that it learned during the day, and on some level it re-learns them and/or learns them better or in different ways.  And second, in a University of Pennsylvania study, there were two groups of people: in one group the people were kept awake for 24 hours straight, and were consequently cognitively impaired as you might expect.  The second group of people were allowed to sleep daily but for only 6 hours instead of 8.  After 14 days, the people from the second group were just as cognitively impaired as those from the first group, but they did not realize it.

I would say that "she all but said that a lack of sleep will make you fat and stupid," but she actually did say that.

As an aside: since podcasts are basically just downloadable radio shows, you can listen to them on your computer; but naturally I listen to them on my iPhone, and that’s probably the iPhone feature that I use the most.  There are about 5 weekly shows that I never miss, and about 5 more that I enjoy but don’t necessarily always listen to, yet like having the ability to listen to them anytime anywhere if I want to.  And podcasts are so great while driving, walking/running, or washing the dishes -- basically anytime you’re busy with something relatively mundane.  The icing on the cake is the fact that iTunes automatically downloads the latest episodes of my favorite shows and automatically puts the 5 most recent ones on my iPhone whenever I put it on the charger.  The whole system requires no effort on my part, other than occasionally finding a new podcast I like and clicking on its iTunes link to tell iTunes to automatically download it.

This is one of my favorite screens on the iPhone:

Incidentally, it’s pretty hard to take good photos of the iPhone screen.  I don’t know if my 6-year-old camera is just having trouble, or what, but in this shot, on the green of the battery and near the top of the 2:46, there’s some distortion that might be a moire issue, or else I don’t know what... but it’s not there in real life.

On Sunday, Kim and I went down to the Apple store in King of Prussia and I got an iPhone.  Despite people lining up outside the stores for hours and even days before the 6 PM Friday launch (including Philly’s mayor John Street), most Apple stores were still well-stocked with iPhones by Sunday, and I had no problem getting mine.  We walked into the store and it was a mob scene: there must have been 100 people in the tiny ~1500 square foot store.  If I had wanted to check out the iPhones that were on display, I would have had to wait for quite a while, because people were three-deep around those displays.

Fortunately, I had been getting psyched about the iPhone for at least the past six months, so I didn’t need to play with one to know that I wanted to buy it.  I just walked up to an Apple store employee and asked, "Do you still have 8 GB iPhones in stock?"  He said he thought they did, and sent someone into the back to check; he came out with my iPhone, and I was out of the store in under 5 minutes.

No one knew for sure how many iPhones Apple was going to have available at launch, hence the thousands of people lining up 6-12 hours in advance across the country to make sure they got one.  It turned out that there were plenty of iPhones, at least at most Apple stores.  It was a different story at AT&T stores -- the only other place that iPhones are available -- with most of them selling out the first night.  All told, the estimates are that Apple and AT&T sold over half a million units during the launch weekend.

I’m not sure why I didn’t go out on Friday night to try and get an iPhone.  I guess I wasn’t 100% sure that I was going to get one right away, plus the word was that it was a hassle at AT&T stores, and the closest Apple store is an hour away from us.  But then as I read various bloggers saying that it did indeed live up to most of the hype, I caved.

One of the ways that Apple is redefining the cell phone business is that the account activation process is handled by each user individually, at home, over the internet, using iTunes.  You don’t need to spend an hour in the store with some clueless salesman getting stuff set up.  There were reports that some people who were already AT&T customers initially had trouble with the activation process, but for most people it was quick and easy: it took less than 10 minutes in my case.

Apple also managed to get AT&T to offer a plan that’s actually reasonable: $60 per month for 450 minutes, with free nights & weekends (and including rollover minutes), and unlimited internet access.  Many (most?) other smartphone data plans are $80-$100 per month, often with only limited internet access, and severe overage charges.

The iPhone itself is amazing.  It’s so thin, so solid, so industrial, the screen is huge and gorgeous, and the interface is so simple and useable it’s like a dream.  The decade-long nightmare of horrible cell phones is finally over.

For me, the combination of the real internet, email, and Google Maps in a portable device is just priceless.  The fact that it’s also got a cell phone, a camera, and an iPod, plus that it’s gorgeous, only make it more compelling.

The screen is about twice the resolution of most standard computer screens, which means that text as small as 5-6 pt is crisp and totally readable.  When browsing the web, though, you only need to double-tap on the portion of a page that you want to read (for example the main content column) and the iPhone automatically pans and zooms that area to be full-screen, with nice large text.  Scrolling up or down, and panning left or right, is as simple as dragging your finger across the screen.

There are a few things that need fixing: there’s no way to select/copy/paste text; you can’t save images (or any files) from websites; you can’t upload files to websites (the Browse/ChooseFile element is grayed out); the Google Maps app lacks the little scale image in the lower-left corner; the on-screen keyboard doesn’t always rotate into wide-screen mode, sometimes forcing you to use the narrower version of it.  But all of those are software issues, and since the iPhone is a computer running Mac OS X, Apple can (and will) simply issue automatic updates via iTunes to fix them.

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that the iPhone is probably the coolest product I’ve ever purchased.  I can’t put it down, and when I finally do, Kim picks it up and can’t stop playing with it.

Here are some iPhone photos including side-by-side comparisons with a couple of my old phones.

You probably have to be part programmer and part internet-speak-geek to really get LOLCODE, but it’s hilarious.  Examples:

FILEZORZ:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
	AWSUM THX
		VISIBLE FILE
	O NOES
		INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

LITTLENUMBER:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
	O RLY
		BTW this is true
		VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
	NOWAI
		BTW this is false
		VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
	KTHX
KTHXBYE

CatCam is something I think everyone can appreciate.  Some guy put a small digital camera on his cat’s collar and set it to take photos every few minutes automatically, and then let the cat wander around outside as usual, to find out what his cat does during the day.  He then posted the photos online.  The cat goes and hangs out with other cats, finds a snake, goes into the neighbor’s garage, etc.  The best part is the captions.  "Friend or enemy?"  "Secret cat den?"  Check out the photo pages: one, two, three, four.

They have done it.  Apple today unveiled the iPhone, which is actually the fulfillment of two long-running Apple rumors: it is the "true video iPod" because the ~entire face of it is a screen, and it is the iPod + cell phone as well.  It also has a 2 megapixel digital camera built in.  On top of all that, it actually runs Mac OS X and includes the Safari browser and an email client supporting POP and IMAP, and it runs on cell networks as well as wifi connections.  This thing is a huge dream come true for many, many geeks and Apple fans alike.

Some of the coolest features:

-multi-touch screen allowing you to operate the iPhone using 2 fingers at a time, so you can pinch/stretch items like photos and windows to zoom them

-orientation sensor so when you turn it sideways, the display automatically shifts

-location awareness built into the integrated Google Maps application

-ambient light sensor to save power by adjusting display brightness; proximity sensor to automatically shut off the display when you move the phone to your ear

...and many more.

Of course they would have gotten abysmal battery life (and would have had to make the thing too thick) if they put a hard drive in it, so it’s all flash-memory based.  This is better anyway, but the cost of flash memory means that for now the iPhone is only available in 4GB abd 8GB models, for $499 and $599 respectively, assuming a 2-year contract with Cingular.  In a year or two when there is a ~40GB model available, I will be all over this.

Oh, and Apple: please, please release a Linux version of iTunes!

Google Maps now supports intermediate destinations when mapping routes, or "multi-point directions" as they call it.  This is really cool; now they just need to add the ability to specify a point/destination by simply clicking a spot on the map.

Now I just need somewhere to go...

Last month, Kim and Maria and I went horseback riding at a place called Venture Farms.  It’s an out of the way place on a back-country road with lots of animals: llamas, donkeys, goats, more I can’t remember, and I think nearly 100 horses.

The only other time I’d gone horseback riding was in Colorado.  While the CO ride was through absolute wilderness that was often breathtaking, this local ride was still pretty scenic -- much more so than I was expecting for Pennsylvania.  It’s not that PA isn’t beautiful -- it definitely is -- but in some ways it just doesn’t compare to Colorado.  But we rode along some ridges with nice views of the countryside, in addition to going through some woods and riding on roads briefly.

One thing about the ride in CO is that the horses didn’t run at all: they walked very leisurely.  I was expecting the same thing this time, but to my surprise, at quite a few points during the hour-long ride, the horses started running!  My horse seemed especially eager and probably ran the most out of the whole group.  I would guess that my horse was moving at somewhere around 20-30 MPH, but it seemed extremely fast, and was easily one of the most exciting things I’ve ever experienced.

My only complaint about Venture Farms is that the woman who was the group leader seemed to be either in a foul mood or was just not very nice.  There were 5 other people riding with us, and the leader constantly told me to keep going when I would slow down to try and keep pace with Maria, whose horse was a little pokey.  And when the ride was over, we were hanging around a little bit checking out all the other animals, but we got the distinct feeling that they wanted us to leave right away.

Speaking of those other animals, one of them was a goat, which had a fresh baby goat with it, and the baby goat would jump up on its mother’s back, and stand up on it.  He just stood there while his mom walked around.  It reminded me of Mario standing on top of some of the bad guys as they move around in Mario 2.  It was really funny, and Kim got a video of it, which I’m hoping she will post on YouTube.

Microsoft released the Zune today.  This thing looks totally sweet, but unfortunately it only comes in a 30 GB capacity.  I only have about 70% of my music collection copied onto my computer in MP3 format, but even that is 32 GB, already larger than the Zune’s capacity.  That would leave me a) no room for my existing collection, b) no room for future expansion, and c) no room for any photos or videos at all.

Once they release a new version with an 80+ GB hard drive, and with the ability to access the internet wirelessly (it already has wireless hardware, but only to connect to other Zunes -- lame), then I’ll really be excited about the Zune.

I think I’m officially switching from Gentoo Linux to Ubuntu Linux.  Despite having what can only be described as one of the dumbest names imaginable, Ubuntu (that’s oo-BOON-too) seems to have largely achieved the holy grail of Linux computing: it just works.

I downloaded its single-CD installation file, booted a system with it, and within an hour had a completely up-to-date Linux desktop.  Checking the "sync with time servers" box on the Date/Time dialog actually works, with no need to manually install/configure any NTP nonsense.  It comes with Firefox, Gaim, and OpenOffice right out of the box, and you can install new packages from the GUI with automatic dependency resolution.  It even auto-updates just like Windows and OS X.

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this, but for now I’m in shock and had to put something up quick.  It’s just so exciting to see a Linux distro that is both simple to install and simple to maintain.

Today I discovered that Planters sells a nut mix called "Pistachio Lover’s Mix" that contains just pistachios (shell-free no less), cashews, and almonds.  That’s what I call mixed nut perfection.  It’s about time somebody made some mixed nuts without all those weird nuts that nobody likes (filberts?? come on).

Also, while researching this post, I came across this gem of a webpage.  Be sure to read the whole thing.  It’s surely one of the most freakish pages there is.

Check out this optical illusion.  It appears to be spinning, but it’s not.  (The JPEG image format does not support animation.)

For a while now I’ve wished that Google Maps would let me create a route by just clicking on the map to create my own points.  Google Maps will give me directions from point A to point B, but I don’t always like the route it chooses; often I’d like to be able to say "Go from point A to point B using a route which goes through point C on the way."

Well WalkJogRun.net does just that.  You just click your starting point, and it creates a marker there; you then keep clicking (creating new markers) along the route you want to create, until you get to your destination.

It’s designed primarily for planning exercise routes as you might have guessed, but it does allow you to set the speed for your route, so it will display the estimated time properly based on the length of the route.

Apparently the site has been around since late 2003, so I’m pretty late on discovering it.  On the other hand it originally used Yahoo and Mapquest maps, and I think we can all agree that the old way of online mapping was barely worth using at all (i.e. non-draggable maps that require the whole page to reload every time you change your view) now that we know the One True Path.

If you live in or around a big city, then Google Maps provides you with high-resolution satellite imagery of your area.  But in more rural areas, the available satellite imagery is much lower resolution.

Terraserver on the other hand has always seemed to have high-res photos of nearly everywhere in the US.  They may be a little older and in black & white, but it’s better than having no high-res imagery at all.  But the problem is that after being introduced to the joy of the Google Maps interface, Terraserver’s boring old interface is such a pain to use.

Enter mapper.acme.com.  This site combines Google Maps with the imagery database from Terraserver.  Just use the "DOQ" link in the upper right-hand corner.

Well, I finally went crazy insane and bought an Apple computer.

The Mac Mini is actually pretty cool, mainly because it’s so small.  But in any case, I needed a Mac system so that I can develop and debug web pages in its Safari web browser, and that’s basically all I’m going to use the Mini for.

Within a few days of having it up and running, I was able to spend some time getting FileChucker to work properly in Safari, so it now works in all modern browsers.

Of course, a couple weeks after I buy the thing, Apple releases a big update to the Mini, most notably including the switch from the old PowerPC architecture to the x86 architecture: the Mini now runs either an Intel Core Solo chip or an Intel Core Duo chip.  Other fun upgrades include:

Quoting ARS:

...built-in 802.11g and Bluetooth support, 4 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, analog and Dolby Digital audio out, DVI video out, two slots for RAM, and 512MB of PC2-5300 DDR RAM (to go with its 667MHz FSB)...

So that’s kinda stinky, but on the other hand, it’s cool to have one of the last PPC-based Macs too.  However, I wouldn’t mind having the increased performance of the newer units:

Quoting ARS:

Steve Jobs claimed that the new Core Solo Mac mini is anywhere from 2.5 to 3.2x faster than its PowerPC 7447 predecessor...

But that’s OK.  As I said, I’m not going to use the system very much anyway; I’m just glad to be able to have a system running Safari to debug web applications on.

Here is a really cool video that shows a hard drive running with its top cover removed.  (Of course, that particular drive is now worthless, since the tiniest bit of dust can cause the heads to damage themselves or the platters.  But it was surely worth sacrificing one hard drive for the purposes of making a cool demo video.)

One note of clarification: people sometimes use the term "hard drive" to refer to their entire computer (sans peripherals like monitor, keyboard, and mouse).  That usage is incorrect, though.  The big ol’ tower that you plug all the cables into is not the hard drive, it’s the computer.  The hard drive is an individual device -- the size of a small book -- that is found inside the computer.  And it’s the device shown in the video above.

Update: the first time I watched this video, I missed the first ~5 seconds of audio (I had my volume muted previously).  During that time the guy mentions that the hard drive has a transparent cover.  So they didn’t remove the cover from a disk, killing it in the process, as I originally stated.

But don’t let that dissuade you -- there are other benefits to killing your hard drive by removing its cover.  For example, the magnets that control the servo for the read/write heads are extremely strong and fun to play with.

You know how all the cool people you know always have one of those hard-plastic "Nalgene" bottles to drink out of?  I recently learned why they are so cool: they are made of special plastic that doesn’t retain odors, which means they don’t get smelly and nasty over time like every other plastic drinking bottle you’ve ever had.  It also means they’re much easier to clean.

So if, like me, you are fed up with drinking water out of stinky old water bottles, you’ll want to get one of these babies soon.

Kim’s aunt and uncle are nature photographers, and they have some really amazing photos on their website from their recent trip to Australia.

There are quite a few photos, but be sure not to miss the kangaroo fight.  That set contains some of the most freakish and funny and awesome photos ever, like this one:

They are even better if you imagine the captions being read in a super-calm National Geographic commentator voice.

Late Tuesday night, I created a post on digg.com about my AJAX File-Upload Progress Script.  It became extremely popular: in about 24 hours, it received 500 "diggs," and it spent most of Wednesday as #2 on the the del.icio.us "popular" page.  (It’s still #1 on the AJAX page.)

Encodable.com received 5800 unique visitors who were checking out the script on Wednesday.  At the height of the traffic, there were about 130 visitors online simultaneously at any given moment.  And since the demo version is here on nodivisions.com, there were 1800 unique visitors here yesterday, too.

(If you’re wondering why there are so few files in the file-list for the demo, it’s because the uploads were quickly filling my server to its full capacity.  I had to implement a cron-job that automatically deletes uploads older than 30 minutes twice an hour.)

Now at 11am on Thursday, there have already been 350 visitors on encodable.com, and 250 on nodivisions.com.  Much less than yesterday, but still going fairly strong.

This is unbelievable.

MillionDollarHomepage is a website started by a kid in the UK to make some money for college (or "Uni" as they say over there).  His idea: sell 1,000,000 pixels for US$1 each, in blocks of 100 (10x10 pixels).  Each buyer would send him a small image file, and he would put it on the front page of milliondollarhomepage.com, as a link back to the buyer’s website.

He started this two months ago, at the end of August 2005, and has made over half a million dollars in those two months.

I need to come up with a way to make my business do so well!

Over the past couple weeks, Kim and I have been a little busy, what with getting married and going honeymooning and all that  : )

We have a lot of wedding photos to sort through, and we’ll be posting some of them on AnthonyAndKim.com soon.

Back here at the NoDivisions ranch, posting will be sporadically unavailable over the next week or so, as I’m doing some pretty serious code refactoring to make way for a couple new features.

In the meantime, my mom got her picture taken with Emeril Lagasse in Florida last week!!  She also has a few movie clips of him in the kitchen of one of his restaurants.  Go see!