Tag: desktop

  • 50 year old infographic shows NASA’s first manned forray into space

    NAS­A’s Image of the Day Gal­lery provided this cool infograph­ic show­ing Alan Shep­ard’s brief flight into space — Amer­ica’s first. It appeared magic­ally on my desktop cour­tesy of John’s Back­ground Switch­er — a cool win­dows desktop wall­pa­per applic­a­tion that man­ages and dis­plays many image sources.

  • Need a mic? Find a Yeti.

    In the last few years it’s got­ten a bit easi­er to use a micro­phone to record audio on your home com­puter — USB head­sets with qual­ity micro­phones have been avail­able for a while, but only recently have USB desktop micro­phones oved out of the niche and spe­cialty retail­ers into the main­stream, driv­en mostly by the…

  • Dilemma: Offloading old tech

    Ok, so here’s the deal. You want a new com­puter, or iPad, or BluRay play­er or whatever. But your old one is still work­ing per­fectly fine. Yet, the fea­tures of your next tech­no­lo­gic­al acquis­i­tion are so good, so cool, that really, that new tech item will make your life much better. Great, so you go…

  • Tablets will be the story this holiday season

    The iPad has been out for a bit now, and it’s the tab­let that all the oth­ers will be com­pared against as they jockey for pos­i­tion going into the hol­i­day season. But over­all, I think this is the year that tab­lets finally start to make some head­way into the mar­ket­place; a mar­ket­place already crowded with…

  • Desktop, mobile or web app?

    Twit­ter is in the midst of rolling out it’s new, all-encom­passing inter­face, and I’ve been able to take a look at it in ‘pre­view’ mode. My ver­dict: quite nice, but it won’t replace desktop twit­ter apps for me, just yet. Tweet­deck and See­smic Desktop both offer great­er func­tion­al­ity than the new Twit­ter interface. Though I’ve not…

  • Damn those are pretty…

    Earli­er this week NASA release the first series of images from the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Sur­vey Explorer) project…and they are hot! Since WISE began its scan of the entire sky in infrared light on Jan. 14, the space tele­scope has beamed back more than a quarter of a mil­lion raw, infrared images. Four new, pro­cessed pic­tures…

  • Cool Desktop: Spectrum of a Tree

    My wife has been using this image as a desktop back­ground for about a year now, but recently I took a good look at it. Ini­tially I thought this was simply a photo of a tree in sil­hou­ette, sliced, col­our­ized and laid out as you see it. But on closer inspec­tion, it seems that these are shots…

  • A collection of my desktop images

    Recently I’ve been reor­gan­iz­ing my image lib­rar­ies, and came across a few that I’ve used as desktop images. I don’t claim to have shot all these, just mod­i­fied them from their ori­gin­al size to fit my desktop. Rather than hav­ing them all over the blog, I’ve built a page to host them So if you’re inter­ested…

  • 3 windows applications improve your desktop’s appearance

    Lately I’ve been try­ing to keep my win­dows desktop icon and clut­ter free. In my case, this has meant that I’ve been sav­ing less to my desktop (my default save-to loc­a­tion) and more to work­ing dir­ect­or­ies. And, since a cluttered desktop reflects a cluttered mind, I like to think of this as a bit of…

  • Cool & free Space Race icons

    I found these nifty free icons while surf­ing this morn­ing, and am think­ing they’re the per­fect com­ple­ment to some of my space themed desktop images I use. If you’re inter­ested, here a quick list of my desktop image posts: Atlantis on the sun — desktop Earth­rise — desktop And check out these icons at The Icon Fact­ory.…

  • Atlantis on the Sun — Desktop Image

    I felt the need for a new desktop image for my com­puters, now that the Apollo 11 excite­ment has died down, and I was tir­ing of my Apollo 8 Earth­rise image. I found this neat shot of Atlantis trans­it­ing the Sun, by Thi­erry Legault. The fol­low­ing sizes at the NASA site: Full Size 1024×768 800×600 And…

  • Alberta Winter on the Desktop

    Happy New Year. I’ve been hav­ing more fun with Pho­toshop and with my new Wacom Bam­boo draw­ing tab­let, and decided to share the fruits of my labour. Here’s a new 1280 x 865 win­tery-themed image, taken one frosty morn­ing out on the trail near the Waska­hegan trail at the Cook­ing Lake-Black­foot Recre­ation Area, just east…