Items: technology and art
A few items before I go to sleep:
- Speculative Literature Foundation announces Technology Exchange program. You can donate your spare equipment, and the Exchange will find an sf writer who needs it. The SLF is just matching up donors with recipients; it doesn't take possession of the equipment, and it doesn't supply tech support. But if you make such a donation in the US, you can write off the donation as a tax deduction. See the exchange program page for more info.
- Zoom Quilt is an astonishing Shockwave piece that lets you do an infinite zoom-in on a particular image; it's a series of gradual transitions that reminds me somewhat of Escher's Metamorphosis, only you're moving into the image instead of across it. You could think of it as traveling around and around the inside of a torus with fantastic murals painted on the walls, I guess, but that wouldn't do justice to it. Go take a look. (Unfortunately, probably requires the Shockwave Player plug-in.)
- Interesting web browser market share information; at that site, Internet Explorer accounts for only 73% of traffic, as opposed to the 95% that some sites are still seeing. I imagine some small part of the difference can be accounted for by the recent upsurge in popularity of Firefox as an alternative to IE. When the Firefox public preview release first went up, they had a goal of reaching a million downloads in ten days; it actually took only about five days. Now, less than a month after the preview release went up, they've had over 3.5 million downloads. See Spread Firefox for more info. Stop by, download the browser (available for Windows, Linux, and Mac), give it a try, see if you like it. And remember that the next version of IE won't be out for a long time yet. (I should note that this is still a pre-release version of Firefox; the final 1.0 release will come later this fall. But by most accounts, the preview release is quite usable in its current form.)
- Okay, while I'm pointing to applications, a couple for OS X: Mellel, a new word processor for OS X "designed especially for scholars, creative and technical writers, and anyone seeking an agile, small-footprint yet feature-rich program," created by a small Israeli company. I haven't done much with it yet, and I have no idea whether it'll be adequate for my needs; it imports and exports Word files, but I don't know how good a job it does with them yet. It costs only $40 for a single-user license, or $60 for a five-pack for one family or site, or $30 at the educational discount rate. I've been lamenting the lack of word processors for OS X (other than MS Word), so I plan to give it a try. I also plan to give TextMate a try; it's an OS X text editor with a lot of interesting-looking features, for only $40. I'm quite satisfied with BBEdit (just upgraded to version 8.0, in fact), but I use only a fraction of BBEdit's power; seems worth looking at other options. Though BBEdit is so fast for most things that I don't have much need for a lighter-weight text editor.
- Finally, for anyone who needs to calculate the destructive potential of a given quantity of antimatter, Edward Muller has just the thing: an antimatter calculator.
