Mozilla has finally announced the release date for Firefox 3 – Tuesday June 17th – 5 days from now. Mark it in your calendars folks!
It’s taken 34 months to develop Firefox 3 and anticipation is high. I tried out one of the preview versions when I was helping out a developer with his new Firefox extension and the browser seemed to be quite nice.
Mozilla claims that FF3 is faster than its predecessor but I didn’t notice any startling difference. But the interface is much nicer to work with and that matters if you work with the browser all day.
I particularly like the drop-down address bar and how it shows the favicons of where you have visited :
The question though is whether all of the extensions will be compatible in time for the 17th. All of the extensions that I have installed are ones I need on a daily basis, and discovering they are incompatible will mean I will have to continue using Firefox 2. But from what I hear, developers have really been hard at work to ensure that most extensions will be ready. So I am hopeful that everything will be fine and ready to go.
So put a big circle around the 17th on your calendar and get ready to make that day a world record in downloading and to say a big Adios to the *ahem* buggy and unreliable Firefox 2!!
Unveiled at the Hershey Park in Pennsylvania late last month, the Fahrenheit Roller Coaster promises to make people who love extreme experiences jump up and down in glee. The ride features a 97-degree slope (7 degrees past vertical!) and will make its passenger feel up to 4Gs of pressure during acceleration, more than what NASA astronauts feel during the launch of a space shuttle.
Being a Brit in Germany, I am constantly learning the German language and I know a lot of Germans constantly learning the English language. So Lingro is a perfect web app for all of us.
It’s a translation tool but with a nice difference. Normally if you want to translate a word on a foreign language webpage, you would open up another browser page and look up one of the many online foreign dictionaries (my preference for German is dict.cc). But it’s a lot of hassle and time wasting doing all of that, when what you would much rather be doing is reading your article!
So, if you know there’s a high chance that you are likely to find words in your article that you will have problems with, put the URL into Lingro and choose your languages :
This then makes each word in the article “clickable”. So if you come across a word that you don’t know the meaning of, just click on it with your mouse and up pops up a box with the translation in the other language :
Lingro also offers browser tools such as bookmarklets but I found the Firefox one to be a bit buggy. I tried it on a BBC news page which had a video on it and the bookmarklet refused to open.
Lingro supports six languages – English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Polish. The site is an open-source project and not all the dictionaries are finished though.
I’m sure as time goes on and the site is further developed, more languages will be supported. So this is a site to watch if you are a language teacher or a language learner.
In what must be the biggest tease ever on the internet (9 months and counting), the new Delicious 2.0 is still not available, leading me to believe that one of the following scenarios applies :
Delicious is missing, perhaps dead.
Delicious has been put into deep stasis and blasted off into outer space (Captain Picard will find it floating around Borg space in a few hundred years)
Delicious has been turned into a top secret military project and the staff hermetically sealed into a bunker
I love Delicious and I use it every day. But you have to agree it’s starting to show its age and could use a bit of spit and polish to bring it into the Web 2.0 age. So when are we going to see it?
Do any of the GAS readers actually have one of the 2.0 beta invites (or are they just a myth)? Have you been inside the “Holy Grail” to see Delicious 2.0? What is it like?
Any word on when we will actually see it live and in action?
The following picture illustrates the proper way to lock your bike for maximum security.
Ok, maybe this is just a bit overkill, but if you think that locking both of your wheels will keep bandits from stealing your beloved bicycle, think again:
If you’ve missed Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote yesterday and don’t have the patience to watch all 107 minutes of it, the folks at Mahalo Daily resumed the whole thing in precisely 60 seconds. Gotta love people who know that our time is precious. Thanks Mahalo Daily!
I’m sure you’ve all seen Google’s new icon by now. Instead of the nice smart looking Google icon that has been around for the last 8 years or so, we now have this ugly looking stringy blue “g”. The person who designed it should slapped behind the head and the one who approved it, strung up by the big toe.
But saying that, considering the other alternatives, it could have been a lot worse. It looks like the designers were tripping on acid when they were designing these!
Even then, it seems that not even Google is content with the stringy G-thingy because they are now inviting people to submit their own designs. All you have to do is design your own Google logo then upload it to the Googly Googlers. Best design wins and gets their logo next to the Google URL and gets seen by countless millions every day. Fame and fortune awaits.
I’ve been wracking my brains thinking about this – has Google ever out-sourced a job like this to the public before? I can’t recall a time when they have issued a request to people outside of Google to help them out with something like this. This has to be a first… right?
I think I may have found the perfect — albeit, somewhat unlikely — match.
I’m a musician, a drummer with more funk than Flavor Flav after a week without showers. But I also live in an apartment, which makes drumming a bit difficult — at least, unless I want to get shot by my neighbors.
I’ve discovered my solution, though, and it’s got great geek appeal whether you’re a musician or not. So I propose to you the perfect match: gadgets and rock ‘n’ roll.
Quiet Noise
When I realized I wouldn’t be able to pound the skins in my current abode, I started searching for other options. Sure, you can play on practice pads — they’re great for working on technique — but that only goes so far. I wanted to capture the feel and the sound of a real, hardcore drum kit — just in a way that no one else would have to hear.
Then I discovered the world of virtual drumming. Now, I’m not talking Technotronic-era beat machines. I’m talking high-tech, studio-quality machines that could convince you you’re sitting behind Tommy Lee’s rig. Let me give you a tour.
The Electronic Experience
There are several major manufacturers and models around, but I’ll focus on the one I know: the Roland V-Drums. I have the TD-12 model. From a distance, they look like a regular drum kit. When you get up-close, though, they appear more like a futuristic factory of sorts — and they have the same level of power.
The configuration will be familiar to anyone who’s played a standard drum kit. You have a snare in front of you, a couple of toms, a ride and crash cymbal, a hi-hat cymbal, and a kick drum attached to a normal pedal. Of course, the main difference is that hitting any of these surfaces produces only a minimal sound.
The heads of the drums are made of mesh and the cymbals of a kind of rubber. The wires, though, connect all these contraptions to a centralized “brain” that interprets your strikes and turns them into sounds. The drums can actually detect how hard and where on the drum or cymbal you’re hitting — and then translate accordingly to produce the same kind of sound your movements would on an acoustic kit. The sound comes through either headphones or an amplifier that you plug-in to the computer.
Virtual Versatility
The coolest part, aside from the practical function, is the customization. With a few clicks and tweaks, you can change from a standard rock drum kit to an expensive jazz setup, from a marching band rig to an African percussion collection. The combinations are infinite. You can configure any part of any drum or cymbal to have any almost sound imaginable, and you can define every nuance of that sound and how it responds to your touch. My kit has room for 50 different settings, so with the touch of one button, I can toggle between any number of different configurations.
That makes the kit great not only for practice, but also for playing. You do lose a bit of the warmth and body of an acoustic kit — obviously, you aren’t going to feel the same kind of vibration as when you bang a loud drum — but you gain a kind of versatility that would cost thousands to create in any non-electronic setting. Want to throw a cowbell into your kit? No problem. Need a gong? You got it. Even oddities like whistle sounds and clapping can be arranged.
Real-World Rocking
You might be wondering if these things are limited to electronics nerds sitting in apartments with headphones on. There are some of those — especially sexy ones with initial-based first names — but there are plenty of real-world rockers putting this technology to use, too.
Drumming legend and Rush member Neil Peart rocks the virtual kit. Other well-known names in the world of percussion like Gregg Bissonette, Thomas Lang, and Jason Bittner also go for the electronic experience. And remember Rick Allen, the Def Leppard drummer who lost an arm? He uses all electronics to play single handedly these days. Tons of other famous drummers incorporate the technology into their regular kits, too. Look closely next time you’re watching and you just might see some mesh surfaces mixed in with the regular drums.
Now, it should be mentioned that these kits aren’t cheap. You’ll definitely pay more for a good electronics kit than you would for a basic acoustic one — somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand dollars, depending on the model and how many bells and whistles you add on. But for a drummer with an appreciation for electronics — or with a need to keep noise to a minimum — they bring the best of both worlds together and open up your playing to a whole new set of experiences.
Oh, and they also seem to impress chicks. Take that, Tommy Lee.
The folks at Blizzard have been hard at work for the last few months on a new WOW expansion pack named “World of World of Warcraft.” The add-on will allow you to play a character that is himself playing the game, bringing a whole new level of realism to the WOW experience.
Mortal Kombat’s “Finish Him” moves are among the most gruesome and gory scenes in the history of video games. I mean, have you ever seen Sub Zero rip the head (along with the spine) of his opponents? That’s pretty darn disgusting! Now if you think that gratuitous dismemberments is one of the worse thing you could see in a video game, think again and watch the following video. You won’t consider that big evil voice commenting your game the same way ever again.
Mozilla has finally announced the release date for Firefox 3 – Tuesday June 17th – 5 days from now. Mark it in your calendars folks!
Being a Brit in Germany, I am constantly learning the German language and I know a lot of Germans constantly learning the English language. So 
I’m sure you’ve all seen Google’s new icon by now. Instead of the nice smart looking Google icon that has been around for the last 8 years or so, we now have this ugly looking stringy blue “g”. The person who designed it should slapped behind the head and the one who approved it, strung up by the big toe.
