Email is a convenient way to communicate, but some correspondence requires the extra effort of a printed letter. With Snailmailr, though, printed letters don’t actually take a whole lot of effort. Just enter an address, type up to four pages, and pay $1, and your letter will be printed and mailed for you. Does it still count as more personal than email when you don’t have to leave your computer to do it?
Snailmailr costs a little bit more than a stamp, but saves you the time of picking up stamps or printing them yourself. Including the cost of envelope and paper, $1 is a pretty reasonable price to pay. There’s a little bit of an extra cost, though, if you don’t want to be tacky: you can remove the Snailmailr logo from your envelope for an extra 15 cents. Everything else about Snailmailr looks good: they allow color images in letters, and they address environmental concerns by using recycled paper and buying carbon offsets.
Adobe is ditching the free version of Photoshop, the Album Starter Edition, and promoting its web-based version of Photoshop at Photoshop.com instead. The web app can be used from any machine, and offers 2GB of free storage. The free service also allows you to upload videos for hosting and sharing.
Storage is upgradeable for a fee, and there’s an AIR app to handle syncing between Photoshop.com and your desktop. Adobe’s also pushing a “plus membership” to Photoshop.com, with a few extra features, including templates. Photoshop.com is extremely easy to use for basic stuff like tinting a photo, adjusting levels, or removing red eye, but if you’re a slightly more advanced user, the upgrade to Elements might be worth your money.
Windows 7 will replace Vista shortly. The release candidate (RC) is out and available for public testing. Since it is a release candidate it is stable and safe for use. Ive been testing the beta since it was available and I am loving Windows 7
(This post is really just a test to see if I can post from my G1, I’ll fix it up later from a computer)
Some molecules possess “handedness.” They call these left and right handed pairs enantiomers, which are mirror images of each other. There are many examples of handedness. You may remember thalidomide. Thalidomide was given in the mid-50s and early 60s as a morning sickness medication. The form denoted as (S)-thalidomide is teratogenic and causes birth defects, while the other form ((R)-thalidomide) is effective against morning sickness.
My favorite example of enantiomers which everyone can relate to is the chemical which is responsible for the smell of oranges and lemons. The name of the chemical, limonene, comes from the lemon (obviously) but is present in many citrus fruit rinds.
D-Limonene (Orange) and L-Limonene (Lemon)
By the look of the way that molecular diagram is drawn, there is no difference between the two molecules. The picture shows the mirror plane but does not illustrate the difference. This does:
D-Limonene (or (R)-Limonene) (Orange)
L-Limonene (or (S)-Limonene) (Lemon)
The filled in wedge (D-Limonene) compared to the dashed-line wedge (L-Limonene) indicate whether that bond in the chemical comes out of or into the plane (i.e. out of your monitor or into your monitor).
Essentially all of the amino acids, used for proteins, in all organisms are in the L- form. While virtually all naturally occuring simple sugars, or monosaccharides, are in the D- form. The wrong form is often toxic if there is not a method to secrete, metabolize or isomerize the molecule. To isomerize would be switching forms (from L to D or visa versa) and a class of enzymes called isomerases would be an example of a potential role player in the switch.
In 2001 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to three individuals for developing methods for enantiomerically-selective reactions. Before these methods were developed, chemical reactions lead to an equal mixture of both forms of the molecule. Biological reactions are extremely efficient at selecting an enantiomer. Some of the molecules synthesized by these Nobel laureates which interest me are naproxen (Aleve) and L-DOPA. The movie “Awakenings,” with Robin Williams, is a popular movie in which L-DOPA is a major part of the plot. L-DOPA is converted into dopamine in the brain and is used as a treatment for diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. The following is a link to an article regarding the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry:
Originally, in the 18th century, the meter was described as the length of a pendulum with the half-period of 1 second! Which does base distance on time, but unfortunately also gravity. Which slightly varies across earth causing this to be inaccurate. This is when the French Academy of Sciences came in and took over the definition of a meter (damn metre). They described it as one ten-millionth of the length of the equator to the north pole. They used a longitute which passed through Paris.
There were many intermediary definitions of a meter between then and now (1983), see Wikipedia – Metre. Long story short, the General Conference on Weights and Measures defines the meter (as of 1983) as “the distance travelled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1⁄299,792,458 of a second.”
The subsequent definitions of the meter after the French took it over was essentially aimed at refining the precision of the definition no matter where you may need to be calibrating. I’m not clear on this, but it seems they made one refinement due to a miscalculation because of the assumption that the earth was flat. This made the meter 1⁄5th of a milimeter longer.
Have you ever seen one of those world maps that shades out the region of the world experiencing night? Well, I use an operating system called Ubuntu which allows you to set your computers location (and other locations you choose) and your system calendar displays the weather information and the map described above with pins in your location(s).
Here’s a interesting World Time Zone Map:
That made me realize that the latitudinal length of one’s country could be measured by time. I wondered if there was any non-astronomical units of distance measured by time (such as arch-seconds). Volume and Mass (~weight) measurements are based off of water (1mL = 1cc(cm3) == 1g | 1pint = 16fl. oz. == 1lb = 16oz). “Distance” is defined by Metric Space. Which seems like it can be independent of time and definitely independent of water measurements. What if a long time ago people happened to base all the measurements on time? Distance – time to travel, Volume – time to fill, Mass – time until balanced. One ruler might ask another ruler, “How much time does your land consume?”
In case you’re wondering, cause I was, the distance from the oxygen atom to the hydrogen atom on a water molecule is 95.84pm, the distance between the two hydrogens is 117.42pm with a “bent” angle of 104.45o. (By the way the partial pressure of H2O is 117 mm Hg oddly enough, I wonder if that is a coincidence). If we stick with a gram of water, we have 3.3426×1022 molecules H2O, which if spread out perfectly (measuring by distance between hydrogens) it would cover 3.9249×109km (for your reference the circumference of the earth (equitorial) is 4.0075×104km. That means that a gram of water, if spread out completely, would go around the earth roughly 98,000 times!
Anyway, I wonder what the common distance measurements, well I guess I only care about the meter, are based off of. All because of my computer’s system calendar…
After you simply plug in your iPhone/iPod touch, open itunes, and then open the ZiPhone installer. You should add sources to your Installer.app Sources List.
To do this click on the AppTapp Installer logo on your SpringBoard, here is the screen you should see
*This is an out-of-date screenshot but should suffice. Note the Installer Logo you should’ve tapped on your SpringBoard.
Tap “Sources” in the bottom right then tap “Edit” in the top right, now “Add” in the top left. Unfortunately you have to add one-by-one:
Check out http://www.ziphone.org/ , it is the blog for ZiPhone, an easy to use Jailbreak or crack for iPhones and iPod Touches. The download site is http://download.ziphone.org/ . The crack is compatibile with all firmwares up to 1.1.4. Unfortunately Apple is about to release the 2.0 firmware which will require a new iTunes as well. I would hold off on upgrading to that firmware. The ZiPhone guy says he probably wont switch til 2.1, if even then, but will release an updated ZiPhone that will work with the 2.0 firmware.
This allows you to unlock your iPhone and use it with any service that has sim cards! Also, there are loads of applications that are useful and available but for some reason Apple is currently blocking them.
*This is an out-of-date screenshot but should suffice. Note the Installer Logo you should’ve tapped on your SpringBoard.
