Author: ryan
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The Future of Conferences and more – This Geek in Review for 27 Mar 2020
How will society change in the future? Some of the dominoes have started to fall. The value of conferences has been debated far and wide, but this year the question is moot since every conference is canceled, and a lot are soldiering on virtual. O’Reilly Media is going all in on virtual conferences and canceling their physical conferences. I wonder how many conferences will be virtual in the future?
There are tons of reasons why being physically at a conference is beneficial, but I always wonder what virtual conferences would be like if employers gave employees time off to attend one. Let the employees stay home and attend a virtual conference. They can share what they learn when the conference is over.
I’ve heard of elections being decided with a coin flip, but FIFA pros settle match with Rock, Paper, Scissors after a server error.
Here are 2 hours of Seinfeld bloopers
The bloopers were apparently created for the cast and crew, and this particular copy made its way to a flea market.
Radiooooo lets you pick a decade and country, and will then stream the popular songs from your selection.
A 4k, 60 fps Trip Through New York City in 1911
After watching this video, I realized how lucky the people of 2120 will be. There will be millions of hours of HD footage of the early 21st century available, letting them essentially time travel to 2020.
Mastermind turns 50! We played the crap out of this game growing up.
SXSW, a major conference in Austin Texas shows off all sorts of pop culture, movies, and more. One big feature of the conference is the showing of up and coming filmakers. It was canceled this year, but Mailchimp stepped in to release the SXSW 2020 Shorts online for free.
How good is the Space Shuttle Insulation?
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Tara wouldn’t let me lick what looked like chocolate off of my watch so I cleaned it with a wipe. Now I’ll never know.
Tara wouldn’t let me lick what looked like chocolate off of my watch so I cleaned it with a wipe. Now I’ll never know.
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The Coronavirus Edition – This Geek in Review for March 20, 2020
What an absolutely bonkers week. We sent students home at the end of the day last Friday for 3 weeks. I put together an online learning program in 4 days. Going out is grinding to a halt while the stock market tanks. One bright spot was the sign language interpreter with Governor Dewine’s press conferences.
Unfortunately, she hasn’t been at the last few press conferences.
Another crazy aspect of this pandemic is the scarcity of toilet paper. But where humanity taken, the internet giveths. Howmuchtoiletpaper.com will help you calculate how many days your TP supply will last.
One of the greatest fears of the novel coronavirus is the exponential growth of the afflicted. These coronavirus simulations show how to flatten the growth curve. The simulations help explain why quarantines aren’t the best solution.
A lot of celebrities are doing their shows where they can, and Conan is no exception.
Handshakes are out, so why not put the Vulcan salute in.
A ton of movies are now delayed including the next Bond movie. Almost all of the theaters in the nation are closed, which is causing most movies to be delayed. You know it’s gotten bad when a few Hollywood studies are actually putting their new releases online early for $20 rentals.
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Taco Bell and more – This Geek in Review for 13 Mar 2020
When I was at Miami University, the up town Taco Bell closed, and we were stuck living life without having access to a Taco Bell. Even as it left, I never was as dedicated at these Penn State students holding vigil for closed Taco Bell. Maybe a literary magazine dedicated to Taco Bell would help?
Before Sony brought the Playstation to fruition, they were working with Nintendo for the next gen console. Nothing ever came from this joint venture although one Nintendo Play Station has been found and it recently sold for $360,000 at auction.
Do you think indoor smoking bans really protect you from 2nd hand smoker?Maybe not.
What do you do when you don’t have CGI? You film everything live action:
And finally, the Verge has put together a visual history of the Xbox Dashboard.
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My most embarrassing web search
I was trying to find a website I used in the past, so I dug through my Google search history. And, 11 years ago I performed this search.
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Amazon Prime members get free unlimited full-size photo storage with Amazon Photos
It was Saturday morning and I was going through my RSS feeds when I read an article talking about photo backups. That’s when I learned that Amazon Photos offers unlimited photo storage with an Amazon Prime membership.
Full resolution images
Google Photos offers unlimited photo storage too, albeit at a lower resolution of 2048×2048. While this is a pretty good resolution, my iPhone 11 can take images in the 4000×3000 range. You can purchase storage to save the full resolution images, but why do that when you can save them all to Amazon Photos.
Family vault
Another nice feature is the family vault. Currently we share a Flickr Pro account to backup and share our pictures in the family. Now we can do that at no extra cost over our Amazon Prime membership.
Family Vault offers the option of adding all pictures automatically or selecting the pictures to share. I’m going to recommend that Grace does not upload all of her pictures.
Videos aren’t free
Amazon Photos offers 5GB of storage for videos, of which I went over when I uploaded my phone. Amazon offers reasonable pricing, and for $19.99/year I purchased 100GB of space. That should do me for awhile.
Printing
Printing pictures starts at $0.12 a print with your choice of glossy or matte. I haven’t done this yet, so I don’t know the quality. The app makes it easy to order.
On the web
When you visit Amazon Drive on the web, all of your pictures show up in the
Picturesfolder, with a folder for each device backed up.
From there you can download or upload additional pictures.
Kicking myself
Amazon started this offer back in 2016. For the last 4 years I’ve been trying to make due with Flickr Pro. It’s a nice service, but doesn’t offer enough over Amazon Photos.
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Is Amazon Photos using MS-DOS to store your pictures?
I know I like to end all of my files with COM9, because that’s 9 times better than COM1.
