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Happy Download day everyone! This is an exciting thing on all ends, because not only is this my first techy blog on good ole automaticable, but today is the Firefox 3 Download Day!! There’s many plans going on, the biggest of all, of course, is the ability to pledge to download the new update today, in the next 24 hours, to be apart of the Guinness Book Of World Records 2008! That’s right, with the new release of Mozilla Firefox is trying to have the most downloads in a 24 hour period. When I pledged, just moments ago, there were 1,683,932 other pledges just like mine! So head on over to www.spreadfirefox.com and make your pledge today! While you’re there check out some of the other cool things happening. You can plan an office or school Download Fest where you all meet up on your lunch breaks and download the new Firefox 3, join some of the great Download Day groups on Facebook, or Myspace, or become a campus rep for Firefox! All of these things are very exciting and I want to encourage ALL of our automaticable fans to head on over and make the pledge to download Firefox 3 today and be apart of the magic happening all around the world!

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Screen savers lost their utility as screen-burn preventers years ago, but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose. The main reasons I still use a screen saver are for privacy, through locking my computer whenever a screen saver comes up, and for aesthetic reasons. The latter is what I will be discussing here, and my favorite screen saver for aesthetic reasons is Electric Sheep.

Electric Sheep is an open source screen saver that is ever changing, and more importantly, ever adapting. It started as just a few video files, but through user ratings, evolution, and individual creations has grown to include a library of thousands of “sheep.” Sheep is the term used for each individual video file, while a flock is a group of video files you can get all at one time.

The best aspect of Electric Sheep is that your sheep evolve over time. Users can rate whether they like or dislike the current sheep that is playing with a simple press of the up or down arrow. This rating is taken into account when the computer, or more specifically everyone’s computers (Electric Sheep takes advantage of your computer’s downtime to run small computations instead of only using in-house servers), to take the higher rated sheep and breed them together. Through the magic of torrents, your computer also uses its downtime to constantly download small bits of the new sheep that are always being produced, thus you are provided with new and beautiful screen savers all the time.

I think I’ve missed the most important aspect of Electric Sheep while explaining all this technical stuff; Electric Sheep is absolutely beautiful. The videos that play are entrancing, dynamic, and vividly colored. I honestly have never seen anything like it before. The picture above is a single frame of a single video. As good as it looks up there, it can’t even compare to how it moves in video form, which I am lucky enough to have playing on my laptop currently.

Electric Sheep is free, open source, and cross platform. One suggestion I have is to download a mega-pack of sheep with your initial download, as the screen saver does not come with any videos at first. If you do not want to download a separate pack, it may take a few hours for sheep to start since they need to download, so let the screen saver run overnight so you will have beautiful sheep to wake up to in the morning.

When I am working away from home, one thing I hate is not having my media accessible to me, especially my music. Over the past few months I have taken the time to test out a few solutions to this problem and have had varying results. Below are the 3 streaming media players I have had the most success with:

Anywhere.FM: Anywhere.FM allows you to upload your music from your home onto a server and then stream that music to any computer with internet access. The interface is clean, fast, and fairly customizable, and uploading your music is a cinch. It takes some time to get started since every song has to be uploaded to a server, but you have the option of uploading your favorite iTunes playlists first so you can get started listening while the rest of your library loads. Once you have music uploaded you can instantly start streaming your music. Anywhere.FM also integrates many social features so you can easily find people with similar music libraries and listen to their streams. This web-app is still in beta, and for good reason. I had a few issues with playback skipping or stopping completely. This is kind of a deal-breaker since I would expect the streaming to be fairly consistent knowing the files are hosted on their own server. All-in-all, not a bad service, especially since it is free (for now).

Jukefly: Similar to Anywhere.FM, this works-anywhere music player is still in beta. The main difference (and it’s a big one) between Jukefly and Anywhere.FM is with Jukefly you do not have to upload your songs to an independent server; they stream directly from your home computer. Obvious downsides to this are that your home computer has to be running the server so you can grab your music from it, and if your network at home goes down you’ve lost access to your files, but it is also nice to have instant access to your music and know that someone somewhere doesn’t have all of your uploaded files on their server. The interface is a bit clunky and loads slow at times, but it looks more polished and has more potential than Anywhere.FM in the long run. A quick and easy install of the Jukefly server will get you up and running in minutes.

Orb: I am fairly new to Orb so my experience is limited, but I’ll give you my opinions so far. Orb is a full-fledged media center that allows you to access not only your music, but also your pictures, movies, and documents from anywhere you have internet access. Orb also integrates with your digital TV tuner, so you can schedule and record live TV and stream those shows as well. Much like Jukefly, you install the Orb server on your home computer which lets you stream your media anywhere else. The interface is very clean and fast, and looks very similar to Windows Media Center (they might be a Microsoft affiliate, I’m not 100% sure though). One of the best features of Orb (and the main reason I installed it) is it integrates seamlessly with your Wii, Xbox 360, or PS3. Since I have a Wii I can comment the best on the integration with that. Orb has its own interface specially built for the Wii, so navigation is simple with the Wiimote. The quality of the streaming music was high and there was little to no wait for the songs to buffer before playing. On the other hand, video on the Wii was terrible. So terrible, in fact, that it is almost useless. Because the Wii has to transcode the video before it is played, it lowers the frame rate of the video significantly. Luckily, playing the streaming video on another PC does not have the same issue. A cool bonus for Orb on the Wii are Wii-specific games. Orb has a ton of flash/java games in its library, most of them are popular browser games already, but it is nice to have additional games that support the functionality of the Wii specifically.

To sum this all up, Anywhere.FM and Jukefly are both decent, but I wouldn’t recommend them as your primary music player until they both get a few more releases published. Orb, on the other hand, seems like a great way to stream your entire media library across the net, as well as add a little more functionality to your video game console.

I’ve only covered 3 streaming media players here, so if you’ve had any experience with anything similar, let me know in the comments. I am always looking for new toys to play with.

My recent changeover to Ubuntu Linux has had me searching for easy replacements for all of my Windows programs. The Linux community has made this a pretty easy task, especially with Ubuntu. Ubuntu provides you with Gimp (Photoshop), Firefox (Internet Explorer), Thunderbird (Outlook Express), and the OpenOffice Suite (Microsoft Office Suite). One thing they do not provide you with, however, is an easy replacement for Adobe Flash. Adobe Flash was one of my commonly used programs on Windows, because I do a lot of intro movies for my youth group. Not having a replacement for it was a major downfall for Linux.

Seeing this problem, for about two weeks I searched around for a good replacement for it. I ran across programs such as Flash-4-Linux and OpenLazlo. I heard good things about both of these programs, but found that the install was a bit difficult for a Linux newbie. Then I ran across a program called Synfig. It looked like it had good documentation, and a pretty easy install. All you had to do to install was open up a terminal and put in:

sudo aptitude install synfigstudio

After installing Synfig and opening it (Applications > Graphics > Synfig Studio), I found that I really liked the interface. The synfig interface is broken up into multiple windows, much like that of GIMP. This makes it very easy for me to customize it to my specific needs and project. I also noticed that it had a very easy tool selection menu. Choosing a brush, color, and all the other properties of the brush is very simple.

One of the main features I found in synfig that I have come to love is the different keyframe setup from Adobe Flash. Instead of having the keyframes, time, motion tweens, and everything else all bunched up onto a single window like Adobe Flash, synfig seperates all of these components. This means that creating keyframes is a much simpler process, and is much easier to get them at the precise moment you want.

The only downfall, however, is that Synfig is not made to do intense visual editing. Synfig only allows you to go about as complex as creating a simple gradient. Anything greater than that, such as opacity, blending, or even just adding text is not implemented. This means that if you want to make a very nice looking flash movie, you’ve got to couple Synfig with GIMP.

I would say that, if you are a fan of Adobe Flash, you should definately give Synfig a try. It is a great alternative for Linux, it’s got plenty of documentation, and the interface is very simple. Check out the website to get started, or use the terminal command above.

One of the key reasons blogs have gained popularity is because they are a constant source of new material. Because of this, a system was put in place for people to easily aggregate all of their frequently updated blogs (and many regular websites) into one place. Blogs, news sites, message boards, podcasts, and pretty much everything in between create “feeds” which send information every time something is updated on their site. The nice thing about these feeds is you, the user, can import them all into one place using RSS, or real simple syndication. Using RSS, you can import all of your frequently updated sites into one place, such as Google Reader (my favorite, among a plethora of other options), so you don’t have to go and check all of your favorite sites individually in case they have new content. More than anything, it is an efficient way for you to scour the web for updates on sites that you frequent anyway.

One of the drawbacks of using RSS is you don’t always see the author’s intended formatting of each story since each RSS reader translates the data a little differently. Also, if you are a fan of participating in the comments on different sites, you will still need to visit each site to do so, as the comments are generally not included in each feed.

Anyone who frequents even a handful of blogs will be able to tell you of the benefits of using the RSS feed on sites. It saves you the time and energy or scouring the internet for new content and will also allow you to cover a lot more content in much less time. If you’d like to subscribe to automaticable’s RSS feed, you can click here or on the red button in the upper right hand corner of your screen. And just FYI, that button (usually orange) is the universal symbol for RSS, so any time you see that symbol you can click on it and have updates imported to your RSS reader automatically.

So I just made the most who-woulda-thunk-it discovery. Stumbling around the internet, I came across this blog with a tip on mason jars. It turns out that the opening on an average mason jar is sized and threaded just right to fit on your blender. Simply unscrew the bottom of the blender’s normal pitcher, and screw it right on top of your mason jar. Flip it over onto your blender base, and voila! This would make a terrific food processor, or a single-serving smoothie. In fact, you could call this a DIY Magic Bullet blender, on the cheap.

According to the article, this isn’t just coincidence, but dates back to a time when blenders were sold with a mason jar “attachment” included. A local bar around us gives out logo mason jars as mugs, and we’ve got about a dozen of them piled up in our cabinets. Now I’ve found a new use for them!

Yesterday I found myself at the Chicago Auto Show. I can’t say that I am extremely interested in cars, or the up and coming technology when it comes to them, but the auto show is definitely an experience. Car fanatics and people who just like to look can find themselves loving the experience.

For me, the coolest part of the auto show was probably the concept cars. Concept cars show me which car company has vision, and which one I should be looking at for my new dream car. The three cars that popped out at me were the Toyota A-BAT, the Jeep Renegade, and the Saab Aero X. Now, Toyota, Jeep, and Saab have never really meant anything special to me, but their concept cars showed me they are thinking in the right direction.

Let me get one thing straight, I’ve never been much of a fanatic for trucks. The Toyota A-BAT changes everything. It fits all the functionality of having that truck bed on the back, yet dosen’t make it appear as if the cab and the truck bed are two separate entities. I’m all about sleek looking cars, and if Toyota can make that happen while still giving me the storage space of a truck bed, they get my vote this year.

A main theme of the auto show this year was how to make every car environmentally fit. The Jeep Renegade is one of the best examples of doing this, while still making a very functional car. The Jeep Renegade boasts of 110 mpg, and it still holds all of jeep’s awesome perks. The Renegade’s lightweight design, matched with large tires make it very easy for all of your off-road adventures.

The Saab Aero gets my award for being the by-far best looking car in the auto show. The lack of windshield pillars gives the Aero a very smooth look, and at the same time gives the driver a full uninterrupted 180 degree view. The Saab Aero’s revolutionary design is sure to get second glances when seen cruising down the street.

Unfortunately, the Chicago Auto Show is now finished. If you still want to see what all of the concept cars, or any of the other cars, look like you can check out the website.