Money. You work hard for it. You save. You look at how you can amass more of it. It hasn’t been since the sell an item on Ebay how-to of  ”Modern Day Alchemy” that Techlife delivered an article about money. (Editor’s note: “Modern Day Alchemy” was the most recent published syndicated Techlife column.) (Author’s note: The proceeding editor’s note is completely fabricated for artistic license, but it did look highly impressive.) So prior to the how-to on using Ebay, the last time I spoke of money was back in 2009 with “Freecycle – Give, Get, Save“.

One thing readers often comment about is their confusion after reading a column. Upon hearing this remark, like any good columnist I make plans how the next time I will just dial it back. Make it easier to understand. But then you get deep into a subject about online cartography, such as “Why North is No Longer Up” and realize, maybe there are readers who don’t know what cartography means or what how it would relate to immersive photographic cartography. And right there a reader says, “I’m lost, I didn’t realize I picked up the New England Journal of Medicine.” Clearly they are lost because cartography is the study and making of maps and likely would be a minor side bar in the New England Journal of Medicine. I wonder though; “Hey you, yes you, the reader. Your epidermis is showing.”

In an effort to bring a bit of fiscal responsibility to Techlife-  Wait sorry, in easier terms, in an effort to showcase how to save you some money I have a simple piece of advice for your online shopping. Don’t checkout. Of course I don’t mean, never. That would make it hard to get anything purchased. Instead it might be better to say, slow down when checking out. When you purchase anything these days, many people as suggested by an early Techlife column, are conditioned to read reviews. Learning from other users the positives, negatives and little tricks of products and services helps improve decisions and buying habits. This is being a smart consumer.

I specifically said “save you some money.” You are nodding your head, saying to yourself, “I stuck with him this long, let’s see where he is going.” There are many sites that exist to offer online shopper’s coupon codes, Retail Me Not is easy to use and user driven. The site has coupon codes for more than 150,000 sites. The strength of the site is the data around each coupon code. Users can rate the codes providing a success rate of each code. A recent search for Amazon.com coupon codes found the average discount was $40. There were 20 codes listed as “active” which means more than 50% success rate and recent usage. There were another 32 codes listed as unreliable, which is based on success rates less than 50% and age of the code.  What this means is with more than 50 coupon codes for just a single site, albeit a popular one, Retail Me Not is a site to visit EVERY time you are starting to make an online purchase on any web site. Be sure to share how much you have saved? To date I have saved over $500 using this site. Savings like that is habit forming.

As the new year begins, time to think about fall clean up. You know the clean up you said you would do to be ready for the holiday season. Oh yeah, now you remember. That one. Time to evaluate the 1980 toaster oven instruction manual and the -. Wait what’s that? You said the manual is garbage? Well have I got a story for you. Anything to procrastinate the clean up right?

In a previous Techlife, “Freecycle – Give, Get, Save“ I highlighted Freecycle, a service for getting rid of items to local community members. Many readers still refer to that column but add “their” items have value; like the gold plated fondue set, never opened? Or the slightly used collection of every MAD magazine that has Star Wars on the cover?  Easy answer, use Ebay or Craigslist depending on the item. Raise your hand if you have?

A Simple Ebay How To

Ebay and Craigslist both are 17 years old. Yes, really. Here’s the primer for a seller. Ebay gives your item view to a worldwide audience and handles the financial transaction smoothly while taking about 10% of the final sales price. The seller handles shipping.  Craigslist offers a sales tool with a more local focus and charges nothing for listing and selling relying on the two parties to meet and exchange cash and goods.

A friend had some Nintendo DS games which sell well on Ebay, so we collected the inventory. My friend had smartly kept the instruction books and boxes too. While reviewing things he realized he sadly had lost a game.

“Guess this instruction book and box are garbage.”

My simple reply was, “It costs nothing to list on Ebay.”

“C’mon this is garbage. The game is missing. I’m not going to list it. Waste of time.”

“Let me try.”

“Fine, have at it.”

We took a simple, clear photo of each game and the box and instructions, figured out a fair cost for shipping and clicked “sell” on Ebay. We built the listing page of each item by adding our photo and a clear easy to understand description. By starting  the listing price at a penny we hoped to generate some excitement and take what the market would bear. And yes we did this for the “garbage” too. We listed the box and instructions only, highlighting no game was included. The auctions began. It was fun and entertaining watching page views climb, seeing more and more people watch our auctions. (Watching is Ebay’s way of letting a shopper keep an eye on an auction without committing.)

Everything was getting bids except the “garbage.” I took my lumps and ribbing, always pointing out there were people watching the box and instructions so maybe a last minute bid. And then all the auctions ended. My friend was right. We did not get a single bid for the garbage. So I asked, if I might re-list the garbage. The laughing increased five fold, and the joking increased too.

Except suddenly it was I who was laughing with a few days to go someone had bid the minimum .01. Game on. When  the auction came to an end – $7.00 for garbage. Laughing turned to thank you.

Ready, set, get cleaning. Share with Techlife  your best Ebay and Craigslist stories in the comments. Good or bad, weird or zany, let’s hear it.

When you see a headline like “Drive for $1000, Alex” you may think Techlife’s electric car column is on its way. (Hint: Nissan, Tesla or Chevrolet when you drop one off, my outlet will power not just a review.) So if not electric cars, maybe this is about Google’s self driving cars that were on real roads with live drivers. Strike two. How about if you stop guessing and just let me tell you? No? You want to keep guessing? Bingo. That’s the “Drive” I am talking about.

We have covered so many unique folks to date, in just 2011; Connor Dunn of TabCloud, Jared Fanning and Michael Baldwin the cartographers, Josh Nimoy, Aleksandar Rodic, Chris Milk for coders of Open GL, Jeremy Young the amazing artist and let’s not forget my mom and her gmail hack. What did all of these people have in common? Ok, that was rhetorical – I set you up to say “Drive.” So as we explore a time in the calendar when some people take it easy, I wanted to share the story of drive. Instead of just sharing one person, learn about the passion two vastly different people bring to what they do.

Earlier this year I covered the amazing feat of IBM Researchers in “What is a computer overlord? Meet Watson.” Their goal was to have a computer be able to understand and beat the best human players of all time in a game of “Jeopardy!”  Well, be amazed again; meet Roger Craig, the all time Jeopardy! single day money winner.  He did it in just his second match, beating Ken Jennings record. Roger went on to become a Tournament of Champions winner as well.

This was no accident. This was pure drive. Roger details his dominance, with a look at his training methods. He used popular Jeopardy! site J-archive to build a private web learning tool around the data. Just to prove it works, he allowed three other friends to train with it. Each was a contestant who also crushed their competition (though they remain anonymous at this time.) His brilliant move, dismantling learning as he knew it.  His drive led him to re-learn, how to learn. Re-read that again. He taught himself a new way to learn.

You are sitting there nodding right now. Saying, yeah but Roger’s very smart to begin with and that helped in his quest. Drive has no barriers. Meet Kenny Brooks, door-to-door salesman. In just seven minutes he will have you wanting to buy his product.

“Yeah, right? I don’t think so,”  you are saying to yourself. For years you have been conditioned to  not trust door-to-door folks, and be a skeptic. Kenny does more than show his drive, he details it for the listener. He explains himself and his goals, along with his role models. His drive is clear and direct but the delivery gets you laughing and excited. With nearly 1000 comments some claim this video to be phony, even so Kenny’s methods and his style show the human drive to immerse yourself in the challenge.

As the year winds to an end, and we begin to look ahead, pick your passion, and drive it into next year.

“On thine day, in thine month, in thine year, it has come pass thy new The Tab King has been crowned.”

Is Techlife really declaring it is the king of something? Well of course not loyal subjects, I mean readers. Kings are people and Techlife is but a vessel to share knowledge. And what is it again that I rule you ask? Tabs? Sit back and let me explain the kingdom of web browsing and open tabs.

Modern web browsers all employ the concept of tabbed browsing. A tab is a way of storing many browsing sessions in a shared window. Need to look up something but want to keep search window open as well, just open the search in a new tab. Visiting Facebook and need to read an article in your stream, open it in a new tab . The advantage of a new tab is your existing window remains as you left it. There is no hard and fast data on tab usage but in a recent unofficial Twitter poll, my usage of more than 60 concurrently open tabs outdistanced the rest by more than 35 tabs. (As I write this there are 73 open tabs in two browser windows.)

Why so many open tabs?

I use tabs for Techlife research of course. As well as keeping tabs on news of the day, shopping takes a few tabs for research and reviews, another for price comparison and yet another for the actual online store.

“So it came to pass that The Tab King began to worry about losing all the tabs.”

With all the open tabs Google Chrome rarely crashes and even when it does restoring the tabs is pretty easy. But yet, there are times when restoring the tabs is not easy and tabs are lost. I’m sure the astute reader says, what about Xmarks, the solution from a previous Techlife column? Bookmarking each tab is more of a chore and less a solution for short and mid term tabs.

The Elegant Evolution

Faithful reader Rob who has emailed back and forth suggested a new tool he found, TabCloud by Connor Dunn, a student at the University of Warwick, UK. This amazing tool allows a user to save the current tabs. But it does more. It lets you save them to the cloud. (Quick sidebar: The Cloud is another way of saying the internet, or more accurately not saved locally on your computer.) By saving your tabs to the cloud, TabCloud let’s a user access them anywhere.

“So faithful subjects of the realm, The Tab King was worry free and the brave reader Rob granted knighthood.”

Epilogue

“As The Tab King began to prepare for sharing the discovery of the brave knight Sir Rob with the loyal subjects, the King made yet another discovery.”  

TabCloud has an Android application and an iPhone and iPad webapp! The apps allows a user to access their saved tabs on their mobile device as well and it is as simple to use as the Chrome and Firefox extensions.

Data can be beautiful. Upward trending profits, doubling your donut intake,  increased use of kleenex instead of a kid’s sleeve; each one tells a story. Then overlay that data with a map and suddenly you begin to see regional trends such as the combined donut intake and increased use of kleenex means  upward trending profits for stores in various locations that sell both these items. Pretty standard stuff.

Recently Techlife’s Facebook page shared one of these such maps titled “The United States of Football” by Jared Fanning as seen on Visual.ly.  But of course in my brain there was something that clicked. I had seen this before. Where? The internet is after all a big place.  So I promptly forgot about it.

As I was preparing the new column I was reviewing an interesting site called The CommonCensus Map Project by Michael Baldwin. The approach this political scientist took was removing zip codes from the question of “Where do you live?” Michael instead attempts to understand “Where do you think you live?” Using the idea your community is not always your town’s name or zip code was the premise when the site started in 2005.

The CommonCensus Map Project starts with a simple survey of just a few questions. 61,000+ have since inception have participated. Michal admits the sample size is tiny compared to the people counted in the US Census. Admittedly he has partially moved on and the project isn’t up to date. But the maps are still interesting to look at and provide some interesting commentary on people’s state of mind. Notice how large the geographic region of living “near” Salt Lake City and Denver is compared with anywhere else.  How could you use the map?

After adding my own data to the map project I noticed there was a spin off project – The CommonCensus Sports Map Project. Had we found The United States of Football’s data source by accident?

Michael tells the story how The CommonCensus Sports Map Project blossomed from the initial project and shows sports fan affiliation by sport across the US. He started by focusing on NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and NCAA Football. The NFL has had more than 35,000 contributing fans, with MLB right behind. Following is a small drop to near 32,000 NCAA football fans contributing.  The NBA has had near 27,000 and the NHL just over 25,000 fans contributing their views on which teams they affiliate with based on location.

So for the first time we have The CommonCensus NFL Fan Map and the United States of Football Map. Readers you be the judge what say you?

Sharing this corner of the world with you takes the effort of many. It starts with folks who make and do amazing things from a 15 year old artist to my mom’s hack of Gmail to IBM’s researchers who built a thinking computer in Watson. While Techlife shares some things you have seen, and some you haven’t the goal is always the same giving some focus to these talented people and their efforts. It’s great when organizations get behind sharing too. Often they do it to showcase their own wares, while providing a spotlight on the exceptional. So for all the print and mobile readers, spend some time with “GL doesn’t stand for Good Lookin’ but it could” in a full screen browser, it’s worth it.

Made to showcase Google’s Chrome browser and the advanced features it can support, Chrome Experiments is a site with a curated “best of the best in cool” all showing off user-submitted works. (Techlife ran some tests and some of the developers were kind of enough to still play nice with others, so the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera Browser might work just as well.)  In just over18 months the site has posted 277 works, starting with the first one “BallDroppings” by Josh Nimoy which has gotten nearly 5 stars from over 1500 people. It reminds me a lot of Line Rider.

Some of the best works involve animated water you can interact with in the browser, such as “Chrysaora” by Aleksandar Rodic and “WebGL Water Simulation” by Evan Wallace.  The first is a collection of jellyfish and the second is a simple ball in pool of water. But when you consider both are using just the browser to render and animate you begin to understand the genius behind these works.

As expected there is quite a collection of games, all of which aren’t built in Flash which has been a common building block of web based games.  ”Dots, the Game” by Nicolas Smith and Aviv Keshet, “Z-Type” by Dominic Szablewski, “Asteroids, Inc.” by Jarred Draney, and “Word²” by Massively Fun are all examples of the future of web gaming built right in the browser.

The Techlife favorite of these Chrome Experiments is an interactive digital short using Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” by Chris Milk and Google Creative Lab. Sure the team works for Google, but it does not diminish the effort.  For online viewers we have embedded a screen capture of the interactive experiment, but trust me it doesn’t do it justice compared to typing in your own childhood address and it building a custom show for you. (Be aware not every address works.) This has taken music videos to the next evolutionary stage of development. And I like the direction.

As a final fun, enjoy the “Shaun the Sheep” by Google Chrome Team, clearly an entry by the team that has all the tricks at their disposal. They don’t disappoint.

As the future of browsing evolves into what we see here, the enjoyment and fun of even everyday work and entertainment should keep interfaces and applications from all looking and acting the same. I like the future.

*So what does GL stand for then? Nothing fancy, just “Graphics Library.”

We have an implied relationship. You the reader, me the writer. You the question asker, me the answerer. Techlife enjoys being your answer source, but dear reader you should know the world is one big three year old. With an endless supply of questions; Where do you turn for answers? (There’s another one.) While Techlife is great and Wikipedia is good (see what I did there?), sometimes your question can’t be answered by either fountain of knowledge. Enter stage left – Quora. (getting its name from Question or  Answer and a self created plural of the word quorum.)

Quora (rhymes with “nora”) is the resource for your inner three year old. It offers up questions by users and answers by really smart people. Quora has done a great job of allowing an expert’s answer to be voted upwards as the best answer to a question, while also allowing multiple answers in case a breadth of knowledge is what’s needed. Do we need some examples? Sure we do.

Is it fun for movie stars to kiss other movie stars on-screen?

So right away a great question. Even better the best peer-reviewd answer at the time of publication was by Ashton Kutcher who said:

It totally depends on the co-star. Seann William Scott in Dude, Where’s My Car?… not so fun. Natalie Portman… not an awful day on the job.

Right away you know this isn’t Wikipedia. What else you ask? Here are a few I have answered:

Has anyone in the public sphere ever reached the pinnacle of three entirely different disciplines like Arnold Schwarzenegger has?

The answers on this question have many luminaries in society listed with Leonardo Da Vinci leading all vote getters with Painter, Scientist, Engineer and Inventor.  My submission was Bill Gates who as a computer engineer developed the BASIC programming language, went on to create Microsoft and lead them as a business titan, has authored two best sellers and finally is the world leader today in philanthropy and getting other wealthy people to follow his example.

How do you know who is answering your question and their level of expertise? Each person has a profile page that can link to other social media profiles. On that page you can see what kind of questions they have asked and answered recently, what topics they follow and who else they follow.

Another one I answered is something that crosses physics with paleontology but I just applied a little common sense to get the second best answer to date.

Could a Tyrannosaurus Rex bite through a modern day tank?

My answer backed  up with some science was “NO” quite simply because the T-Rex couldn’t open his jaw wide enough  to take a bite. My counterparts in answering this question are Andy Lemke, a polymath IT Architect with knowledge of nuclear engineering and physics and Gary Stein a retired CTO.

So am I being replaced? According to, “What are telltale signs that you may be facing a mutiny and/or coup?” It looks like I am going to –

*Note that every question mark in this article has a question on Quora tied to it, comment on which one is your favorite question used. There are some unique ones.

Jeremy Young - Stare into Me

When you were 15, were you cool? How about humble? How about talented? Meet Jeremy Young, a digital artist from New Zealand who’s artistic talent had him winning awards as young as six. Techlife was lucky enough to sneak in an after-school interview with Jeremy. He has a ton to share, so less of me and more of him.

Techlife: How did you get started?

Jeremy Young: I have been doing digital art since 2008 but as long as I can remember, I have had a passion for designing with expressive use of colour. I won my first colouring in competition at age six and went on to win the next eight which I entered. I guess I’ve always loved colouring and design, using a computer enables me to create images which I couldn’t create using traditional drawing/painting methods.

TL: What is your main medium and why do you use it?

JY: My main medium is vexel. Vexeling is basically vector work done in photoshop. I love vexel because of the precision and clean lines which you can achieve. I prefer to vexel rather than vector because my knowledge of Photoshop is far greater than my knowledge of Illustrator. I also like it because it gives me more freedom to experiment and bring other elements in when I want.

TL: How long does it take from start to finish to complete a piece?

JY: It really depends. I will often go at my own slow and leisurely pace, working on and off on each piece. Because of this they usually take around  3-4 weeks. If I really concentrated and set myself a deadline then I could complete each one much faster.

TL: Many of your works appear to be painted, have you transferred any to canvas or even photo canvas?

JY: All of my works are made almost entirely in photoshop, I have had a few printed for family and friends  but apart from that they remain solely on the computer.

Jeremy Young - Mindless Wisdom

TL: What would you define as your style?

JY: I aim to make my works vibrant yet clean lined. The structure of the designs is very minimal; I combine this with extreme colour which gives the works great impact. However I am currently working on a black and white piece.

TL: What other artists influence your work?

JY: There are really too many to name, I am influenced by countless artists I have found online, but also by famous artists in history such as Andy Warhol.

TL: Where do you draw your inspiration from?

JY: Even though I’m surrounded the beautiful landscape of New Zealand, nature doesn’t particularly inspire me. Instead, I am fascinated by objects that are man-made. I’m also inspired by other art, people and cultures.

TL: What does your studio space look like?

JY: Since I’m 15, I don’t have a studio but work in my bedroom, overlooking the sea.  My workspace is a very large desk clear of everything but my computer. I also like to surround myself with art I enjoy.

TL: Why did you choose DeviantArt.com as a place to showcase your work?

JY: It is a fantastic place to meet other artists and get feedback. It has a great sense of community where you can learn from other artists and let them easily see your works.

TL: Have you had any major news coverage, journals, magazines, blogs or other media?

JY: Yes, I was featured in Advanced Photoshop magazine last year and have just done an interview for a feature in the French edition of Advanced Creative Magazine. My work has also been featured on numerous blogs, sometimes without my knowing. I often will stumble across a website featuring me through googling the names of my works and my name. I have also had three main page ‘daily deviation’ features on Deviantart.com. They were Stare into Me, We’re All Mad Here and Mindless Wisdom.

TL: Have you shown your work in a gallery, museum, festival or other public place?

JY: Getting my work into galleries has certainly been a goal of mine but I have yet to approach a gallery and see if they would take my work.

Jeremy Young - We're All Mad Here

TL: Have you done any private, public commissions?

JY: No I haven’t done any commissions. I have had requests, but previously I have been focusing on my own style and wants. If a great offer comes my way I would happily accept.

TL: Are you making a living/spending money doing this today?

JY: I’m currently a school student and therefore don’t have time to be a doing graphic design as a living. It is more of a hobby for me at the moment. Who knows where it will go once I finish school though.

TL: What do your teachers, parents and friends think?

JY: My parents are obviously very proud of me and encourage me to keep doing design work. I don’t do any ‘computer design’ subjects so my teachers are unaware of my interest in art. I don’t like to talk about graphic design much with my friends, but I seem to have gained a reputation of someone who knows what they are doing when it comes to design. Only one or two of them know that I am in magazines, etc.

TL: What are the future plans for Jeremy Young?

JY: I’m definitely going to University but I’m unsure of what I want to study. I love being creative and that will always be a part of my life but I have a broad range of interests and I am unsure if I will take a career to do with digital design. My family is very supportive of my design work but they also are aware of my other strengths, so they try to keep me broad in my choice of subjects. At the moment I’m tossing up ideas of economics, medicine or design.

TL: How could someone contact you for more information?

JY: Flick me an email at navrasmail {at} gmail {dot} com or send me a note on my deviantart: http://navras2535.deviantart.com.

Here at Techlife we have had the pleasure of writing about many family and friends who needed technology assistance. Remember the reader who dropped his phone in the toilet? A fan favorite and a personal friend. How do I get so lucky knowing these folks?

As Techlife likes to pay homage to the greatest hackers, Moms, we have had past columns such as GeekDad happy for Mother’s Day and This Mother’s Day Tell the Truth. Well, now it’s personal. In a celebration of Moms’ ingenuity, I offer up How my Mom Hacked Gmail.

My mom plays this mental game with herself. Maybe you do too. “Technology is too hard, and I don’t get it,” she often exclaims. But in reality she does get it, just at her own pace. Which leads us to the recent multi-year process of getting a smart phone. Now you may be saying to yourself what special smart phone did she get that took a few years to arrive?

Well, once again this is my Mom. The smart phones have been here, it was her reluctance mentally that hadn’t turned the corner. She had a cell and a Palm and was eager to carry a single device.  After years her realization was,whatever she imagined as the perfect device still hadn’t been made apparently.

So she settled on a top of the line Android Powered G2 with Google. Immediately the questions begin. Her biggest was Palm Notes. She used the basic notes function and wanted something like it. A simple request. Searching the Market resulted in more than 1000 note apps. “But, son,” she said. Always there’s a catch, right? Hers was she wanted to access the notes even when in the basement of her work with no connection, she wanted changes to auto-sync, she wanted to search them, and wanted to organize them. So far there are still hundreds of apps that work, no problem Mom.

Life got in the way of the family helpdesk, a few days later the smart phone vs. the toilet and other tech foibles speaking circuit concluded, I checked in with Mom again and asked her how it was going.  Expecting to hear how she still had had 48 more apps to test drive in the notes. She said, “I just decided to use Gmail.” I cocked my head to the side like a dog does upon hearing an unfamiliar sound. Slowly I replied, “How does that work?”

My Mom’s Gmail Hack

1. Visit Gmail on Desktop and log in (not all Androids can do this on the device)
2. In the upper left click on Contacts
3. Under the New Contact Button, scroll down to “New Group”  and click
4. Enter a name, I chose “Notes”
5. Click the “New Contact” Button
6. In the “Add Name” field add a category such as Work, Home or School
7. Click the button with the “…” and enter the Note’s subject as the last name
8. Now begin entering your notes
9. Upon completion, click on the groups pull down and select “Notes” and leave “My Contacts” selected
10. Repeat for all your notes
11. Notes are searchable on desktop and handheld and synced to Google’s back end servers

Yep, my Mom took the simplest, easiest method she knew and adapted. Creating Gmail Notes, proving once again simple beats fancy every time. If you know her, call her a geek. She earned it. Happy Mother’s Day to all those moms.

Renaissance. The word conjures up images of painters, sculptors, scientists, builders, writers, politicians all working side-by-side with one area bleeding into the next. While the word renaissance literally means rebirth, it also connotates cultural shifts and applied learning. In today’s digital realm we have access to information at our fingertips and the ability to sort and shift that data, as Techlife covered in recent columns like “What is a computer overload? Meet Watson.” and “189 Paradoxes” and “700,00 Archives to Listen By.”

Body and Seoul

Google Earth originally debuted in 2001, under a different name. In June it celebrates 10 years of helping people understand our Earth. The applications have been wide reaching, being used in many media and educational settings to help better explain the world around us. We have gotten use to the flyovers, layers, zoom, rotate and ability to see how the world has been affected by hurricanes, tsunamis or earthquakes. Now Google Labs has applied a digital renaissance thinking to this technology in the new Google Body.

Google Body uses the same navigational tools to make exploring the human body familiar and informational. With unique tools to rotate, zoom and uncover layers of own anatomy. Labels like in maps can be turned on and off, allowing a clear understanding of the muscles, bones, organs, and much more. A friend who was a doctor was blown away, then I dropped the final nugget. It’s available for Android too. Digital Renaissance indeed.

Eye ful Tower

A few weeks ago the weather was inclement, and a case of the sniffles was running through the house. A perfect day to have a museum come to me. Go ahead, read that again. Good. So the only question was which museum? Thanks to Art Project by Google we could explore not just the real Renaissance, but any other period of art covered at currently 17 different art museums in places such as Moscow, Berlin, New York City, London, Prague, and Madrid.

Students who want to explore paintings can now do so with the highest resolution imaginable. Architects who want to get a feel for some of the most famous buildings can do a virtual walk through. And best of all, you, can curate your own favorites from all the museums, useful for art fans, teachers and artists.

I decided to visit the Palace of Versailles where I was treated to vast galleries with ornate opulence at every turn. A nice change was a tour around the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Here I spent time lost in The harvest a painting by Vincent Van Gogh; “he considered this impressive vista one of his finest works.”

Continue to learn, stretching your mind across seemingly vast spaces. It is only this effort that will result in true personal renaissance.

“Danger, Will Robinson!”  Attention, science fiction writers, time to find new material.  Reality has arrived. In the form of a supercomputer named Watson. Most Techlife readers probably heard about the Jeopardy! match between Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the game show’s all time champions and a machine built by IBM named Watson after the founder of the company.

Since there have been science fiction storytellers, there have been sidekicks and stars, villains and heroes, useful and funny characters who were created by humans but took on a life of their own. What made these characters so endearing was not their intelligence which was often portrayed as super human, but their inability to “get it.”

In Star Wars, when C-3PO mistakenly understands his owner Luke Skywalker is being crushed by the garbage compacter, but in reality Luke is cheering loudly at being saved and is happy.

In Terminator 2:Judgement Day, when John Connor attempts to explain how to lighten up and joke to a cyborg, who is able to mimic but not truly get the human idea of a joke.

On three consecutive days in February 2011, Watson, a computer competed and crushed two of the best Jeopardy! human contestants of all time.  Ken Jenning’s even joked in Final Jeopardy with the famous meme quote, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”  (from The Simpsons “Deep Space Homer”)

What is Watson?

Simply a computer with a focused problem to solve.  The ability to answer questions posed by anyone.  At first this seems relatively easy until you begin to dissect the vast knowledge humans have amassed, and even more so the sinews of connection between something that we know and something we are trying to process in a new way.  As an example asked today, “What do they sell at the Apple store?” Most 5 year olds in the civilized world, will answer “iPods, iPhones and Macs.” 25 years ago most 5 year olds would say, “Apples.” Both answers are right, in the context of time.

To be able to understand a question, the programming team had to take into account millions of variables of this type. To assist them they begin feeding Watson with data.  At the time of the match Watson had 200 million pages of information and was not online during Jeopardy! Watson itself is housed on 90 high end IBM servers with nearly 3,000 processors.

What now Watson?

Speed is the killer factor in computing.  People write into Techlife asking how do I make my PC faster. The number one answer I give people, add more RAM. IBM added more RAM, than repeated until they had 16 terabytes. (1000 gigabytes) I venture to say most readers don’t have more than 2 terabytes of hard drive storage, and this was RAM, the fast stuff.  So now Watson moves the tassel of graduation to the right and starts careers — with an s. First up, and fitting is Dr. Watson to aid in patient diagnosis.  Next Watson’s employer might be legal eagles using the brainpower as a research computer. And of course Five Star General Watson, as IBM counts the U.S. government as a big client, where Watson will be asked to do who knows what.

What would you do with Watson at your beck and call? Share with me.

Before Techlife or BT people asked me all sorts of questions both tech and non-tech related.  The questions were often, “How do you send an email to Bill Gates?” or “How do you hook up your modem to a pay phone like in War Games?” or “Will this version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? work with my first Mac?”

Then we entered the Techlife Era or TE and while the volume of questions has increased, the range of questions has become more varied. Many questions have shifted to opinion oriented as Google handles the more mundane tasks. Let’s answer a few of these today and make sure to take the quiz at the end of the column.

What’s the best way to save my bookmarks? – Erica L.

Probably your 250 links all dedicated to velvet Elvis won’t really be missed, but I understand each person has their own curated set of important links. For years I have been a big proponent of NOT saving them in my web browser. I once read a column by writer Jim Coates (great guy who I met early in my writing career) and his advice to his readers was a simple text file saved to a thumbdrive with all your bookmarks. Today I have transitioned to Xmarks. A free service to store all your bookmarks, let you sync them to any machine and back them up.

How could I save time when taking a photo and sending it to my friends? – Jeff K.

Stop taking them. If I get another picture of Mr. Pooky dressed for Halloween I’m calling animal cruelty. But if you are taking those oh-so-creative photos on an Android or iPhone then use a smart photo sharing tool. I prefer picplz because it can post to foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the picplz site simultaneously. That time savings coupled with filters to play with your photo adds a bit of richness. Of course I think I just made it so you can now just take more costume photos didn’t I?

Could I have a smartphone without a data plan? – Carri K.

Only if you actually are willing to buy a smartphone already! But assuming you are finally ready to make the plunge, there is a little known way to legally and ethically hack the wireless carriers. Go unsubsidized and without a data plan. Likely you have a plan today that gives you a new phone every so many months. “Maybe now I will upgrade to the smartphone,” you are thinking. Don’t. Instead be willing to shell out full price (or go on Ebay) and get a model that will work with your carrier. This hack works well for SIM card users who put their old SIM card in the new phone. Now enable wifi at home and work, and a few other frequent haunts. Your smartphone will make calls and send texts but only use data when in wifi range. Your win, no data plan costs. Also no data “all” the time.

Quiz time: Microsoft has started a catchy campaign where users trumpet, “To the cloud!” Where did this phrase originate? Leave a comment if you know. No using the cloud to find the answer.

Critically speaking, there are few ways people name companies and products; literally, descriptively and memorily. Ok I wanted you to remember the last one. By memorily I of course mean distinctively. On the internet these days all three kinds abound from TV.com to YouTube to Hulu.  Each does video on demand albeit in various ways but their names each speak to a different way we interpret them.

Which bring us to a site that wears a name so bold it could be the considered the only site you would ever need, at least that’s their hope at Find The Best.  According to them:

FindTheBest is an objective comparison engine that allows you to find a topic, compare your options and decide what’s best for you.

Maybe they could start with finding the best description of their site.  Techlife’s view is:

FindTheBest is a mashup between search, Wikipedia, and data sets organized in a sortable spreadsheet, with the added of twist of a do-it-yourself sheet too.

Of course as with most things the easiest way to understand is simply to experience.  Find it Best in a bit of confusion, calls each of their data sets an app. For example with the NFL heating up a good example is the National Football League Franchises App, letting user sort by 14 different criteria for 85 different active and inactive teams.

The red spots indicate where each person in the shot was standing, identifying them for removal.

Can you remember the Techlife column from 3 years ago? “I can’t even remember what I had for lunch yesterday,” you are probably thinking. If you can remember, you probably have what is known as a photographic memory.

Back in the column, “Image Resizing and MS Paint – Techlife TV Double Feature” I covered the amazing video by Ariel Shamir talking about image resizing or retargeting. Simply the idea of cropping and scaling are not always the best ways to keep the key parts of an image intact while allowing it to fit the space required. The video from the column gives plenty of great visual examples of using an algorithm to remove or add content to an image.  Another name for this process is seam carving.

After targeting the people, the final shot looks serene and peaceful.

Recently I came across code ninja Gabe Rudy’s work in the same space. (pun intended)  Gabe has created software to allow Mac and PC users to easily run the unique CAIR (Content Aware Image Resizing) algorithm on their own machines. I easily downloaded it and tried quite a few different images using the many settings the software provides.  Included for your review are two successful images that used only Gabe’s application Seam Carving GUI for Windows.  No Photoshop, image editors or other special tricks were used to create these unique images.

Bonsai Tree after Seam Carving with all elements vanished with the push of a button.

Bonsai with a few key points in red to target for removal. They could easily be targeted to keep as well.

So the challenge Techlife readers, download the program, and try it out.  If you get a few good shots leave a note in the comments with a link to your before and after shots. And the next time someone says they have a photographic memory ask them if they can selectively edit, retargeting the important memories and seam carving with the best of them.  Enjoy the blank stare. Whom just carved whom?

This original shot had people dotting the landscape, what if we could remove them?

The original shot prior to any seam carving and retargeting.

It is always surprising (yet really never all that surprising) when a reader contacts Techlife with a problem that leads to a massive discovery. In this case the problem was “How do I burn this?” from our friend Allan over at Scubaology.com. He had found a Grateful Dead concert he wanted as a CD.  But herein lies the surprise, it wasn’t the concert being online that surprised me, it was the location, The Internet Archive.

Ominous sounding?  Yes. Intriguing, even more so. The Internet Archive is an astounding non-profit all digital library. Like any good library, it would take hours to begin to explain the vast array of collections and how to access them.  So for this column we will stick with our aural sensibilities and examine the audio section of the Internet Archive. If you were looking for some new material for a workout, a long drive or flight around the world how does over 700,000* free digital recordings work for you?

How is that staggering amount of audio organized? I’m glad you asked:

• Audio Books and Poetry – 5,604 items
• Community Audio – 506,998 items
• Computers &Technology – 510 items
• Live Music Archive – 84,082 items
• Music & Arts – 2,203 items
• Netlabels – 23,970 items
• News & Public Affairs – 6,133 items
• Non-English Audio – 628 items
• Podcasts – 18,099 items
• Radio Programs – 1,947 – items
• Spirituality & Religion – 1,439 – items

And of course to add to the quirky yet completeness of this library The Grateful Dead is given their own top level category with 7,780 items; more items than 7 of the main categories as organized!

Within each category is of course plenty of subcategories.  I quickly sought out the Radio Programs category, which had a sub-category of Old Time Radio. I clicked on Browse by Title “A” and found 4 different collections of Abbott & Costello and in less than 10 seconds I was listening to the famous, “Who’s on First?” routine.

As with most libraries, this one appears understaffed.  It has 17 contributors for the entire audio section, which is likely why there were four Abbott & Costello collections with some repeats and some files with no descriptive text or titles.  But they also offer context for the content in the form of Top Downloads, Top Rated and Top Reviews. Each added piece of user-generated content makes the library all the more useful.  Plus there are many encyclopedia type entries along with great user generated tidbits while you listen.

Finally getting to Allan’s  request of burning a CD; Audio Player? Smartphone? CD? Streaming? However you listen the choices today of carrying your audio collections with you have made it easy to store, listen and access content. The Internet Archive’s Audio Archive Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain for example is available on the site to stream, in both low and hi-fidelity M3U format, two quality versions of the MP3 format and in an Ogg Vorbis format. Oops…did we forget to tell Allan how to burn that CD?  Ok, I’m just going to listen to one more song, I promise.

* Numbers as of 10/18/2010.  Note total item numbers might vary as with the example of Radio Programs – 1,947 items at the top level. There were eight sub-collections with a total of 4,195 items.  That is more than double the top level’s reported items.