Photosynth, a new development from Microsoft is available as a technology preview. As far as I can tell this is a sort-of “proof that we’re really doing this” release, which lets you navigate around pre-built images. Unfortunately you can’t add your own: that’s going to need a lotof computer oomph apparently.

Also, unfortunately I can’t load it on my laptop; it doesn’t have a D3D-capable card. I’ll have to wait until I get home before I try this.

Still, this looks like a very interesting program and I’m looking forward to putting my billions of miscellaneous photos on it.

Internet Explorer 7 is out, and one of the most noticeable changes is the absence of a menu bar. It still exists, but is hidden. Just press the Alt key and the good ol’ menu bar appears again.

For what it’s worth, I quite like the absence from a usability point-of-view. Office 2007 takes a while to get used to (most programs are missing a menubar, instead opting for a context-sensitive ‘ribbon’ of tools) but it’s definitely an interesting usability move. I have a feeling it’s definitely a love-hate thing though.

Chris is complaining in a round-a-bout way that I link to other websites in the same window. I do, because in turn I can’t stand websites that insist on opening links in new windows. I used to care more, but Firefox naturally lets you fiddle with the settings and force them to work the way you want to work.

Anyway, if you want to click a link on a website and have it open in a new window, simply hold down Shift while you’re clicking it. If you’re using a tabbed browser, like Firefox or IE7, hold down Ctrl and it’ll open in a new tab.

If you’re in IE, as far as I know there’s no way to do the reverse - ie. force links set to open blank to actually open in the same window but maybe somebody else knows of a way.

In any case, my links are (usually) set to open in the same window, so with the Shift and Ctrl keys you can control how you view the site and its outgoing links.

I have no idea why I’d never noticed this before. You can listen to a preview of a song in the iTunes Store by selecting it then clicking the Play button.

Right now you’re either shouting ‘what? Everybody knows that you great lummox’, or ‘amazing. I never knew that. This makes iTunes Music Store* so much better’

Anyway, for me it’s new! Tonight saw the following albums wind their way to my compootah:

• Vienna Teng - Waking Hour
• Matson Belle - Goodbye Juggernaut
• The Weepies - Say I Am You

All of which I’ve heard previously on Radio Paradise, and enjoyed enough to buy them. Previously, I’ve downloaded:

•  the new Eels album Blinking Lights and other Revelations (funky, but getting a little tired of the same sound);
• Zero 7 - The Garden,  a bit of a mixed bag but Throw It All Away is cracking.
• Conjure One - Extraordinary Ways - brilliant album, from the people who brought you Delirium.
• Various odd singles, including T-Rex - Jeepster; Nerina Pallot’s Everybody’s Gone To War; Johnny Cash with Ring of Fire; Scissor Sisters’ I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Bit of a mixed bag, then.

* The program is still awful. And DRM sucks.

A big warning (that I’ve already fallen foul of):

Don’t run Outlook 2007 Beta and the mail scanner of the virus scanner AVG. It wipes your messages - starting with the inbox and working its way through to the archives.

Thankfully I make backups quite regularly, but I’ve still lost a few bits of mail: they really are wiped empty.

You can turn off the E-mail Scanner in AVG by going to the Control Center, double-click Email Scanner then click Disable Plugin.

Many thanks to Beyond-Teck for having the information that led me to this

Oh no - the end of the Internet. Now what are they going to index?

Things that have been pissing me off recently (I feel like a bit of a rant):

• iTunes for Windows. It steals focus from your other windows, seems to crash all the time and refuses to close if the Store won’t load for whatever reason.
• The Mars bar advert in Lord of War Region 2 release that you can’t fast forward through. Is the DVD any cheaper in return? Like fudge it is, but they steal 30 seconds of my life every time I want to watch that film.
• RSS feeds that only show the first few words and make you go to th …. I get why they’re annoying now I’ve started using aggregators.
• Paper milk cartons. Bloody things are impossible to open properly.
• Call centres where… how shall we say this…. where English is not the first language. How much does your bank want your continued custom? They want you so much they slash their front-line customer support team and ship it offshore. That’s really saying something.
• Unnecessarily noisy cars. I get a hole in my exhaust sometimes, it’s not nice and I go to the garage to get it fixed. Some people make their car sound that way.
• Trackbacks mixed in with comments. So very unhelpful.

There we are. Much better

Some websites are just useful.

Recently I’ve had a need to watch file resources. I wanted to know why my hard disk was perpetually active (thinking the worst: a virus). Then I remembered a useful utility on a website called Sysinternals.com - it’s called Filemon and lists disk activity in real time (which processes are opening which files; it’s quite interesting in a sad way).

Sysinternals.com has a load of other freeware goodies, all for looking after your computer. As of this evening, Sysinternals looks like it’s been taken over by Microsoft which makes a lot of sense considering how many of their KB articles reference its very handy tools!

BartDart.com appeared on another dig, and hosts a bunch of slightly more obscure tools for various bits.

AnalogX is an old favourite: lots of useful applications for fun and work.

Any other useful (preferably free) sites crammed with the authors’ work around that I’ve missed?

While on some crazy hunt to find information about Random Number Generators on computers, I came across this page on Wikipedia about the Birthday Paradox.

Simply put, it’s the probability that two people in a room will share the same birthday. With just 23 people there’s a 50% probability that at least two of them will share a birthday.

I like to think about these puzzles in different ways to explain them to myself. I am usually fooled, like most people, when I first think about it (23 just seems sooo low…) Then I start to think about it more rationally… there’s a 22/365 chance that somebody has the same birthday as person A, and a 21/365 chance that somebody matches person B…and so on - they all add up (don’t quote me on the maths nor the theory…)

The other good one is the Monty Hall problem, which takes some explaining…

In fact - the helpful bods at Wikipedia have created a category of probability theory paradoxes - enjoy!

Flash Earth is a flash tool that allows you to compare the satellite photos of a number of online mapping sites, including Google, Ask, NASA and Yahoo (Ask do maps now?).

It’s very neat, incredibly responsive, but is taking the photos unofficially so it’ll be interesting to see for how long all those sources stay online.

Via Google Operating System