Dennis P. Osorio’s Blog
Technology, E-Activism, and Other Items of Interest
April 19, 2008 at 7:38 pm · Filed under music
This is my latest obsession for free music consumption. Zamzar.com is a free online service that does file conversions. Like doc to pdf, jpg to png, flac to mp3. You get the picture. Well, they now do videos from YouTube and Google Video.
Why is this cool? Let’s say you like a song (from the public domain, of course), but not enough to go get an album. You’ll probably be able to find it on YouTube. You can listen to it and grab the url. Go to Zamzar.com. Enter the url. Ask that it convert the video to mp3. Boom! There you go. You can now listen to it on your mp3 player.
April 19, 2008 at 7:35 pm · Filed under music
Here´s a cool free service. Free, streaming radio available online. Why is this cool? Well, they have a ton of music for starts. What you do is pick an artist or a song that you like. This creates a “station”. Then, it will find artists kind of like the one you started off with. As if Prince and all similar artists had a dedicated radio station. In fact, it´s kind of interesting to read the description of what you´ve entered. I entered Patrice Rushen and received a description of harmonies and vamping.
You can create a ton of stations. You can even shuffle among them all. When a song comes on, you can give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. This will refine the station to your tastes.
There´s ample opportunity to click on a link for a commercial transaction if you desire. This is easily ignored too, so it´s not like you´re bombarded with advertisements. This is, I´ve found, a nice way to hear music I wouldn´t have heard otherwise.
It all appears to be Flash-based. I haven´t found any urls for the music, so I haven´t made any attempts to download it.
April 19, 2008 at 7:28 pm · Filed under the built environment
Here is a walkability index. Find out how you rate.
It´s about leaving your home and having access to goods and services without having to rely on a car. It´s about density. And community. And connectivity. Diversity. Public spaces.
It´s about challenging the dominant paradigm fed to you by the auto and real estate industries.
April 19, 2008 at 7:14 pm · Filed under spreadsheets (Excel or Calc)
Here´s the scenario: you have two related datasets. Let´s say one is a list of name with phone numbers, and the other is a list of names and email addresses. The two datasets have a unique id in common (like a Social Security number). You should be able to merge the two, right? You´d be surprised at how difficult some folks find this. Well, I´m here to tell you, it´s surprisingly easy. Read the rest of this entry »
April 19, 2008 at 6:56 pm · Filed under web design and development
I found a cool CSS technique on this web page. Basically, it involves taking an image, slicing it into horizontal strips, stacking these strips up & floating them.The result is text that wraps around these images in a curvy, rather than a block-like, manner.
Inspired, I implemented something similar here.
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