Category: Whats NewHave you heard of Chordify?
It’s a free online music service – made for and by music enthusiasts – that transforms music, from Youtube, SoundCloud or your private collection, into chords.
Check it out here: http://chordify.net/
On the ground, sometimes its easy to lose track of the fact that hundreds of airplanes are flying overhead at any given moment. A new company, FlightRadar24, is developing nice aggregation tools to observe the traffic jams in the sky. Before, live views of aircraft like this were the domain of aviation professionals. Sure, it may not be the most useful new app–unless you’re an aviation fanatic–but the real time tracking of aircraft is undeniably cool.
FlightRadar24 uses public Federal Aviation Administration data in the United States and pulls data from automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) responders elsewhere. Since only about 60% of passenger-carrying airplanes are equipped with ADS-B, there are some flights missing. Regardless, you’ll most likely be able to track where your friend’s flight is if he or she is flying a major American airline. Like most new internet services, coverage is best in the United States and Europe (the other continents don’t have as many ADS-B responders on the ground.) A glance at the continental United States through FlightRadar24′s website reveal a phalanx of crisscrossing flights.
Like most new internet services, coverage is best in the United States and Europe. Also, there’s a pretty cool iPhone app associated with the service. It provides the same data in a mobile package, but the coolest feature is an augmented reality trick that allows you to point your phone at a plane and learn all the associated details with that flight, such as flight number, destination, and expected landing time. Wolfram Alpha’s apps have allowed you to see flights overhead using the same data, but the augmented reality layer is a nice touch. Head over to FlightRadar24 to try it out.
New YouTube iOS app arrives, gives service a home on iPhone 5. YouTube is set to be without a home on the iPhone 5, so Google has released a new version of the service for iOS.
The app brings advertising to the service for the first time on iOS and is available from the Apple Appstore now.
Speaking about the app, Google said on its blog: ‘The new app is built by YouTube engineers, to give our iPhone and iPod touch users the best mobile experience.’
New features on the app include tens of thousands more videos, new YouTube channel guide, faster search functionality and better sharing.
At the moment, the app is for iPhone and iPod users but there will be an iPad optimised version ‘in the coming months’ according to Google.
Back in August, Apple confirmed that it was severing ties with YouTube and would no longer pre-load the app on to its devices when iOS 6 rolled out.
This prompted Google to create a new app and have it downloadable from the app store.
This isn’t the first time Apple has shunned Google – it also revealed back at WWDC, when it first announced iOS 6, that it was no longer using Google Maps, preferring to partner with TomTom for its own version of the software.
I wasted half an hour yesterday morning looking for my cellphone, only to find it and spend another twenty minutes looking for my car keys, which I had in my hands while looking for the aforementioned cellphone. Needless to say, I was late, my boss gave me an earful, and I had a pretty crappy day.
If you can relate, then you’d also probably be interested in the U Grok It.
It has a weird name but a pretty neat purpose. Here’s how it works: you stick a tiny RFID tag on objects that you lose on a regular basis, add them to your list of items, and locate them using the U Grok It receiver when you need to find them.
The U Grok It has a range of about six to ten feet and signals just how close you are to finding whatever it is you’re looking for with beeping signals. The closer you are, the louder and faster the beeps will be.
U Grok It plans to conduct an initial test run with 1,000 units, with full-scale production scheduled for 2013. No prices have been announced yet, but the devices is said to be around $100(USD) while each RFID tag will be sold for $1.
(Via Technabob.)
Just to get a brief idea on how much the Raspberry Pi computer was in demand, here is a statistic that you might be able to identify with – we are talking about 700 units per second. That amounts to 42,000 each minute, and it is no wonder that the demand for the Raspberry Pi during its recent launch actually led to the website crashing. This is truly a phenomenon, where a British-designed system that costs a mere £22 is in such high demand, at least according to one of its main distributors in the UK. Meant to make programming a snap as well as accessible for children, the Raspberry Pi also picked up plenty of envious glances over from a Middle East country that is outlining plans to furnish each schoolgirl with a Raspberry Pi. This is one unique case study that goes to show how the most powerful hardware necessarily “wins” in the long run, giving people what they want and need tend to ensure victory instead.
(Via Ubergizmo.)
If you ask me, 3D printing is the future of small-scale and short-run manufacturing. Assuming that the technology can come down in cost and increase in speed, many of the smaller items we use will eventually be 3D printed – at least custom stuff, like these awesome 3D printed guitars by Olaf Diegel.
Raspberry Pi, an innovative $35 GNU/Linux box in a tiny package, launched yesterday — sort of. Demand was so hot that all the company’s retail partners collapsed under load. From Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul:
The product is a bare board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It’s roughly the size of a deck of playing cards and has a powerful GPU that is reportedly competitive with that of modern smartphones. Developer prototypes of the product have been shown running impressive graphics demos and decoding high-definition video…
At the time of publication, the Farnell website is still spitting errors. The RS site has been partially restored and is intermittently available, but isn’t currently allowing users to purchase the Raspberry Pi. Instead, it displays a screen where users can register to express their interest in the product. The Raspberry Pi foundation managed to withstand the traffic by temporarily replacing the contents of its official website with a static page.
Alongside the launch, the Raspberry Pi foundation also announced that the cheaper $25 model, which will be launched at an undisclosed future date, got a spec bump and will have 256MB of RAM, just like the $35 model. The $25 board was originally expected to have only 128MB of RAM. The cheaper model will still lack several of the features found in the $35 model, such as the built-in ethernet controller.
(Via Boing Boing.)
(Via Tybee Guy.)
Do you get more email than you know what to do with? You’re not alone. I get multiple, daily corporate emails that I routinely delete without so much as opening. Or, at least, I did, until just now. I used Unsubscribr and stopped those messages from getting to me. You should too. This free tool lets you unsubscribe from the stuff you don’t care about without having to actually read any of the messages and look for the “Unsubscribe” link or instructions.
You know the emails I’m talking about. They’re not quite spam, but not really useful email either. Some people call it “Bacn”, and it’s an entire category of emails from companies and services you’ve used in the past. If they’ve added up to take up way too much of your mental space, it’s time to clean them out. This simple website can help.
Gmail’s priority inbox helps with this, but you still need to delete the unwanted emails every day. Not if you run Unsubscribr a couple of times though.
Head to Unsubscribr to get started. You’ll need to provide your email address; the service will then figure out how to access your email. If you’re using Gmail you’ll be asked for permission:
Other services provide other ways of getting at your data, so give it a shot. This is practically a brand new service, so every email scenario under the sun may not be covered. Let us know if yours is or isn’t in the comments below.
Once you get the service logged in, you’ll see your email folders. The free version of this service will scan your Inbox and your Trash.
Note that the service can only scan 30 days worth of email, but that should be more than enough to catch the worst offenders. When the service is done scanning you’ll see a list you can respond to:
Click the “Unsubscribe” button and one of two things will happen: you will be automatically unsubscribed or you will be directed to the page where you can unsubscribe yourself.
Are you concerned about security? That makes sense. This is, after all, your email we’re talking about.
Be sure to check out the Unsubscribr FAQ, because this service is designed to be secure. Email access is, whenever possible, accomplished via OAuth, meaning the service never actually records your username and password. Also, all traffic between your email client and Unsubscribr is encrypted.
If you don’t use Gmail, OAuth can’t be used. Don’t worry though, your username and password will be quickly deleted from the Unsubscribr servers. Trusting the service or not is up to you, but they seem to have thought through security quite a bit.
I get enough email every day, so this service is awesome to me. It lets me lessen my daily email load without a lot of work on my part.
How many emails did this service manage to find for you? Did you unsubscribe? Let me know in the comments below, along with any recommended apps for cleaning out your inbox. Thanks!
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
Recent Comments