Google Earth 5

You know Google right? Its that company that plans to index all information everywhere in the world. They’ve outdone themselves again this time with Google Earth 5. The main new features are a time machine (way cooler than that Apple invention) and a way to see under the sea.

The sea now shimmers, though the picture does not show it.

The depth of the ocean is now represented.

You can now see through time.

Some imagery of Cupertino from 1953.

One interesting thing is that if you zoom out a lot, the star field changes with the date. They seem to be accurately calculated star positions for each date.

Areas of scientific interest (Antarctica for one) seem to have lots of older imagery.

You can see an ice shelf that broke off a while ago on Antarctica.

I’m not sure if this is a new feature, but right clicking gives this:

Moving the mouse up while right clicking zooms out, down zooms in, and rotating the mouse around it rotates the view. All operations are centered around it, so zooming in zooms in on the point where you right clicked.

Overall this is a really cool update to what is already a really cool piece of software.

Images copyright Google 2009

pureSilicon 1TB 2.5in SSD

puerSilicon has announced a 1TB 2.5in SSD. It has a data density of 15.40gb per cubic centimeter, three times greater than that of any other SSD. It is also compliant with military requirements for operation in extreme environments and provides 256bit AES encryption onboard. This drive will be available in the third quarter of 2009. No pricing details are available yet, but with 30GB drives costing over $100, this thing will not be cheap.

MacWorld Rumors

With MacWorld just a few days away the Internet has started its Apple Rumor Machine.

A new iMac with four cores, a new cooling system, and an NVIDIA graphics card is probably coming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new Mac Mini with dual display support, an updated processor, the same graphics system found in the macbook, and possibly a new look.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Apple Media Server, much like the Time Capsule and running on the ARM processor found in the iPod Touch and iPhone.

 

 

 

 

An iPhone nano, with a predicted price of $99 and AppStore compatibility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A large-screen iPod Touch, to be announced for October, with a 7ish inch screen. In addition, Apple may just give us an updated iPhone/iPod Touch software version(cut and paste please!)

 

 

 

 

 

A new iLife suite with the option to run in the cloud(and tie in with MobileMe), and a demo of Snow Leopard. The Apple TV and the Mac Mini may(not sounding likely) be combined.

Aside from all of that the iMac and Mac Mini will include display port support and lower power usage. The iPod Tablet will probably get a large boost in battery life over the iPhone/iPod Touch. Steve will talk a lot about iTunes sales, and iPhone sales. Fortunately if you watch the online feed after the show you can just skip all of that.

Leopard Stacks in Quick Launch

Now you too can enjoy you wonder of the Leopard Stack in Windows. The program is called Standalone stack. I can't try it out on my usual

test machine(windows 7 doesn't play well with it), but it does work on other machines and it works well with a small memory footprint. This is great if you want stacks, but don't want a dock.

GMail Backup

(Screenshot from GMail-Backup)

GMail Backup is a tool that performs backups of your GMail account. It can also restore the backup to your account. It can be run from the command line(instructions here), and is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux.

GMail-Backup

Neat math trick

Lets say you need some random numbers, or at least ones that exhibit statistical randomness, and you don't have a calculator or computer will you. You know that 7=2*3+1. One divided by seven will give a series of semi-random numbers, six of them. This can be done for many different numbers. Here are the requirements:

Let a be a prime number.

Let b be a prime number such that b=2a+1

1/b will produce a string of semi-random numbers. The string will have length b-1.

I found this in the Wikipedia page for the multiplicative inverse. Happy pseudo-random trails!

Console controllers

(Image from Chewingpixels)

So its true, console controllers have become more complicated over time. The hands in the image remain constant in size so that relative sizes between controllers are preserved. The size of the controller seems to have peaked with the old X-Box controller, and is now something more reasonable. Its just interesting to see how things have changed.