Cool Stuff from Scout Report

Today’s Scout Report had some great items I thought I’d pass along:

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.
“On this site you will have the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound.” I listened to a couple. Way cool!

The Eubie Blake Collection. “While jazz pianists such as Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and others may be more well-known today, Eubie Blake predates them all.” I haven’t explored it yet, but it’s gotta be good.

Dioramas: American Museum of Natural History. I mention this one mainly because of the following sentence: “After a long period of decline, there was a recrudescence in these seemingly simple and straightforward pedagogical tools.” Say what?

Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture. On the sitemap, I was intrigued by the first category of materials, captioned “PreTexts”. I never thought of the word in that context, but, it’s obviously corrext! Amazingly, I’ve never read the book!

Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts. The sort of thing that would’ve been required reading for English class at Country Day School.

TEDTalks. “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and this acronym is familiar to those in the know as an annual conference that brings together talented persons from each of these fields every year to Monterey, CA. The price of attending the conference is a bit steep, but never fear, as this site will give users access to some of these provocative and enlightening sessions presented at their various gatherings.” Yeah, well, it might be interesting.

JetPhoto Studio 3.2.1. Looks like it could be a very nice program for cataloging and organizing digital photographs. Besides a nice list of features, it meets my first criterion for judging programs: it’s free. :thumbup:

S’More Pics

I continue having a little fun, when I can work it in, playing around with internet photo sites like Flickr. It’s kind of cool being able to upload little collections of photos, albums if you will, and invite others to have a look. It’s really easy to upload the pics, and as far as I can tell is easy for others to have a look.

My latest little collection consists mostly of some photos taken at Golden Gate Park not too long ago, that I use for “wallpaper” on my computers. It’s nice using one’s own pictures for this. Kind of personalizes the computer.

So, if anybody wants to have a look, they’re here on my Flickr page, the “Golden Gate Park” set. I recently upgraded to a “pro” Flickr account. Costs something like $30 for a year with unlimited uploads and storage, or something like that. If anybody sees a pic they like, feel free to use it. I cropped these to be on the wide side, on account of one of my monitors being wide screen. Ordinary wallpaper photos left blue columns on right and left of screen.

(You can click on the pic)

California and More Photos

I offloaded photos from the camera and uploaded a few in case anybody would like to have a look. I ought to have taken more pics during the recent California visit. Actually, I did, but some of them are on the cell phone and I haven’t offloaded those yet. You can see the new photos on my Yahoo 360 Page (which I’d forgotten existed but it still does) by selecting “Cool Photos 2006” and “Palace Aug 07 2006” or, alternatively, go straight to the pertinent albums by clicking on the following thumbnail images. The “Palace” pics are, obviously, recent California pictures. The “Cool” pics are mostly Kansas, actually, except for a couple of pretty cool shots of Stephen’s new ride.

For Cool 2006: For Palace Aug 07:

Also, in setting up the photos it occurred to me that everybody ought to have a Yahoo account. As it is, these albums are viewable by the “public”, meaning anybody who stumbles across the URL can look at the photos. However, they can be set to be viewable only by “friends”, who can access them using their Yahoo account login. There are similar things that can be done on Google where people can “share” something by using their Google account login. Of course, in the case of Google, I’ve set up the Chappell Famly google account that I recently sent emails about. Hmm, maybe I’ll set up a Chappell Famly yahoo account. That would take care of it, as well. Hang tight, I’ll let y’all know.