I am sure that a lot of you have seen the Google maps project, which allows you to not only see regular maps, but it also allows you to switch to Satellite view. To boot, the interface is just great! Google had this product to release because they bought a software company that offered keyhole satellite data. The company also had a standalone viewer for seeing these images, but Google decided to continue charging for that software, until yesterday. On Tuesday, Google officially released the software free to the public. You can find more information at the Google Earth project.

Let me take a moment and comment about how much Google has done for the Internet. I believe that they have revolutionized so many different parts of the internet, starting with the search engine. But they did not stop there, they are constantly working on products to better help the Internet surfing world, some of the ones under development can be found on the Google Labs site. They just have done soo much for the Internet and I commend them for trying to make as much of this information free as possible.

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com

This weekend was the second annual meeting of the Learn Cousins from Laceyville, PA. Most of the people are descendants of my grandfather and his four other brothers with a few more people from my Great-grandfather’s brother’s side of the family (I hope that makes sense). Many of the people live in or near Laceyville, PA, where my grandfather and his family all grew up. This was a great chance to get together with family that I have not seen in or a while or, in some cases, ever before.

I have not gotten the pictures from this reunion posted, but I do still have the ones from last year here. It is always good to get together with family and just sit around talking and having a great time.

I want to especially thank Dick and Lucy Forth for hosting this get together at their house, and everyone else that helped get things together. Hopefully this is not going to be the last one of these, but if history serves as a predictor we will have twice as many people next year, so that will be quite a few (probably not, since there are not many more people in that area to invite).

Information about the larger Learn Family reunion near Cookport, PA can be found here

As always, look for those pictures sometime soon…

-Matt

Update 7/6/2005: Pictures have been added here

So right now I am connected to the internet on Cindy’s laptop in the middle of PA… She is driving and I am playing. I have my cell phone connected to the laptop, and I am connected through that. What is ever cooler is that I can still play my media from my home computer via Orb while driving down the road.

As you may have read in my other posts, I am using Orb to connect to my media on my computer computer. I thought that I would be able to get Audio, but to my suprise I was also able to watch Video sitting on my computer at home. Thus, if I had my TV tunner card in that PC already, then I would be able to watch TV on this Laptop, on i-81 in PA through Orb connected to my computer at home…. Ahhh Technology!! (Best part, since it is after 9:00, connecting to the net through my cell phone is free!!!)

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com

So while reading through Engadget, I found an article talking about the Gigapixel project. So while Nikon and Cannon are fighting with cameras that are producing 12 or 16 mega pixels, this group has one that will do 1,000 megapixels, just image how much detail is in that. The project website had this to say about it:

It would take a video wall of 10,000 television screens or 600 prints from a professional digital SLR camera to capture as much information as that contained in a single Gigapxl™ exposure.
The Project’s near-term goal is to compile a coast-to-coast Portrait of America; photographing her cities, parks and monuments in exquisite detail.

How about they let me borrow one, and I will go wild taking pictures all over the place. I guess I will have to go back to my small like 6 mega pixel camera I am sure that I can manage for a little while, until they can get this gigapixel camera down to a handheld size…

And I thought that I had storage problems with my pictures, I have a 100 GB drive that I have more than filled with my pictures. With this camera, each picture, in uncompressed form, takes 24 GB. That is one large file, I guess I would not be doing as many snap shots with that camera as I do with mine. I think I would also get rid of a few more of the images that I do now

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com
Photography

So I have been using Orb from work to access my media at home for the past week, and I have been very satisfied with it. So let me tell you a little about what I have, so that there is a point of reference.

First of all, my computer at home is an AMD 1600, which means that it is about a 1 GHz processor, not too fast in this day and age. At home, all my computer are connected via a switched 10 Mbit network, not too fast either. About hlaf my contnet is on my the computer running Orb, and the other have is located on my SageTV Server. The entire house in connected to the net via DSL, yet again something that is not too fast. Finally, my computer at home is usually connected to a few torrents, so the entire bandwidth is not taken up by Orb.

On the other hand, my connection at work is a lot better, so the weakest link in my setup is my home computers and network. I have been mainly listening to MP3’s most of the time, which this does fairly well. There is a slow startup time after I select my initial song, while things get buffered. But if I let the player play through a directory, it does not have to buffer agian between tracks or anything like that, so it makes it nice to listen to directories. The sort functions on Orb are not that great, very few and far between. I have always watched an XviD video over the net, the image is not great but it is still fairly good. Since Orb is converting the file on the fly, I would have expected my computer to have trouble with it, but supprisingly I have not noticed any problems but I am sure that if I was working on the computer at the time, I would have problems.

Because I do not have any TV cards on my host computer, I can not try the whole TV stuff, but I might move one of my cards over for a little while so that I can try some stuff out. I do not know yet…

So what is the bad part… First of all, orb has a lot of processes running, even one that continues to run after I shut down orb, CabDirectory.exe or something like that. I know that I have heard several people complaining about the 8 processes that orb starts, including one for weather even though I have turned off the weather feature on my orb homepage. I also worry about what information Orb might be collecting about the people connecting through their service, but I guess only time will tell…

In the end, this is a nice peice of software, but I am always hesitent relying on a service provided by some other group, I would much rather have a way that the Orb serve has no information about my stuff at home and instead just provide a portal that connects directly to my machine, I would feel a little better, but I guess they have to secure a revenue stream some way.

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com