The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling Available for Pre-Order
Image via Wikipedia The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling is now available for pre-order on Amazon. This book of fairy tales was written to supplement the Harry Potter series and will be published in two new editions on December 4, 2008. The Standard Edition features all five fairy tales from the original The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a new introduction by J.K. Rowling, illustrations reproduced from the original handcrafted book, and commentary on each of the tales by Professor Albus Dumbledore.
Amazon’s exclusive Collector’s Edition includes a reproduction of J.K. Rowling’s handwritten introduction, as well as 10 additional illustrations not found in the Standard Edition.
Photosynth – Virtual Tour
Have you ever visited Taj Mahal or Pyramids of Egypt or the castles in England? Nope? Haven’t you worried about it? What you gonna do about it?
Don’t worry Microsoft has come up with an idea to solve your problem. You may not be able to afford a trip to Washington DC but you can afford to browse online rite? (Just like me)
So saddle up and visit http://photosynth.net. This site will provide you virtual 3D trip to famous locations in the world. Now I’m browsing through Pyramids , bit excited and wondering how big it is.
To view these virtual locations you need to install a plug-in which enables you to browse them in browsers. You don’t need to install any new standalone applications.
How does it work?
Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.
Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.
Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.
Even you can use your images that you took from your digital camera and make such virtual tour. This application will help you to synchronize your images and make a 3D virtual object. Imagine you moved to new home and wanna share it with your friends, isn’t it a wonderful idea????
Tamil Interface for Blogger
Blogger is one of the most popular blog portal owned by the internet giant Google. As per Google’s initiation to provide their products in local languages, they have taken steps to give Tamil interface for Blogger.
Currently you can check out the Tamil interface in Blogger Draft. A translation seems ok.
So far we have Good number of Tamil interfaces from Google including Orkut, Gmail, Main Search Site, Google News and Google Docs. Soon Blogger.com will also join with this queue.
PS: Tamil Interface for WordPress is already available.
Web Hosting Geeks
People some time get annoyed by their existing hosting service and look for new hosting services. I was searching for hosting advices over the net and found this wonderful web site. This web site is giving tips on how to choose new web hosting services.
If you wanna know cheap web hosting, then a list Top 10 web hosting services of 2008 is available on Web Hosting Geeks site. Read more
NHM Writer – Indic Unicode Writer
NHM writer is one of the most famous Tamil Unicode writers. It lets you type in Unicode Tamil format, which is a globally recognized encodings.
Recently NHM writer released their new version with support to several languages such as ssamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil & Telugu.
I prefer NHM writer over Keyman for Three reasons.
- It’s really a small software and less than 1 MB
- It supports 5 layouts (including Tamil 99 and Bamini)
- It enables Regional Language support in Control panel without Win XP CD. Read more
Blog Action Day ‘08
Are you a blogger, who worries about the issues around you, and wanna make some awareness about those issues? Then you gotta join this Blog Action Day 08. On 15th of October (my birthday as well) you need to write a post about Poverty. Last year Blog Action Day made awareness about environment.
Check out this cool video. It’ll explain you more about Blog Action Day.
Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day
If you believe in change, and wanna make some change join this initiation and support them.
