I may not be a Microsoft fan however I do realise that they (or their money) can go into producing something that is truely new and unique.  Search for Notre Dame on flickr and you will find thousands (190 thousand in fact) of pictures of the cathedral.  Photosynth has really taken that to the next level and allowed a true 3D map to be built from these 2D pictures.

For me, this is straight out of Star Trek.  Saying that, Ironically this is almost impossible without the sort of basic tagging that is only now starting to be done with photos.  I am looking forward to seeing where this technology takes us.

See the TED Talks video on Photosynth for a much better example and demo. 

I have just finished spending this weekend completely replacing my backup process. Seeing as a few people have asked and it's all fresh in my head I'll try and write down some key lessons/decisions I came across along the way... OK, OK, I want to show off a bit too :-p

I have a lot of very old boxes at home so the brief was to build a system that I could use as a web & mail server at home (I have pro hosting out on the internet for big projects), a file server (NAS) for home machines, a music server for home entertainment and a backup server to back up *all* my machines. I decided on an AMD 64 with 4 x 400GB SATA drives and an Adaptec hardware RAID controller set up as RAID 5. I chose CentOS for the OS and the now opensource cobalt GUI for mail & web (for those of you that don't know there is a very nice combined installer). A combination of Ampache and mt-daapd work brilliantly as music servers.

But anyway, back to the backups!

I would love to know the percentage of cars in the UK that have these things!?  The scary thing to me isn't that cars have them but that people are driving around in cars and don't know they have them.  I may be wrong but I would imagine that it would help prevent accidents if you knew that your car could prove your driving... saying that, I can see that that may not be a selling point!

It was only a matter of time...

Digital channel FX premieres a new ad format tomorrow, one that it claims to be the first television advert preventing PVR users from skipping through commercial breaks.

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