Modern Ruins
I am absolutely captivated by so-called “modern ruins”. I’ve seen several galleries of modern ruins published online, and I am always sucked in by eerie photos of abandoned buildings and facilities. Surprisingly, many of these facilities give the impression that everyone just got up and left, and never came back. Abandoned asylums look amazingly creepy, especially with large chunks of asbestos-filled paint curling off the walls..and some of the rusty contraptions that they used to strap people into make my skin crawl. I recently came across a new site of abandoned Japanese buildings that has literally thousands of pictures. I really wish I could read the descriptions, but even without them, the images are truly fascinating.
Czech it out:
Japanese Abandoned Buildings (Click the icons at the bottom of each page to navigate to the next page in the series)
Modern Ruins
Chernobyl Tour
More Google Maps Goodness
As if it weren’t cool enough already, I just found another super-nifty google maps trick today when I decided to print the destination of a short trip. Google maps totally reformats the page for an extremely printer friendly page layout. Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps also do a decent job of this, but none as neat and concise as the google print layout.
For example, here’s what the google web layout looks like:
And here’s what it looks like on paper:
Totally sweet.
Now That’s What I Call A DVR!
The new Sony HD DVR sports all sorts of delicious features: It has both over the air HD tuners and CableCard tuners, a slew of input and outputs, and what is likely a 400GB hard drive for storing content. Unfortunately, most HD content gobbles around 8-12GB per hour, so you’ll only get around 60 hours of HD content. It’s a bank-breaker too, at $1000, and it doesn’t even have dual tuners!
So, let me see…..the Sony DVR stores 60 hours of HD for $1000, my current Comcast DVR stores about 14 hours of HD for $10/month AND it has dual tuners….I’ll keep the Comcast DVR (even though the guide sucks)!
First Official Review
The folks at mobiletechreview.com have posted my first “official” hardware review:
Apex MP-2000 Portable Media Player
Check it out, as well as some of their other reviews…they have sharp reviews, all hands on. They really put those gadgets to the test before they post their articles.
Update: Got mentioned on Gizmodo’s Afternoon Bits for April 6th!