Gallery: 30 Years of Apple Gear: “Over the past three decades, the company has cranked out a boatload of breakthrough products, from the first PDA to the iPod — and lots of computers besides. Get lost in a monster gallery of almost everything Apple’s ever made. PLUS: Wired News’ full coverage of Apple’s 30th anniversary.”
Tag Archives: computers
Photos as passwords foil hackers
I can’t believe how simple, yet incredibly useful this is! Instead of using silly passwords, with even sillier password rules that give you headaches, just use this! Choose a familiar picture as the password, have the system pixelate the heck out of it, then pick it out from among a group of pixelated photos every time you want to log on. How cool is that? Also, kudos to Tracy Staedter from Discovery News – just about every time I stumble on a cool article at Discovery News, it’s written by her. 🙂
A short review of the .Mac service
I’ve been using .Mac since September of last year. I really like it, but it tends to be slow and I get errors when syncing files at times. I use it to sync my Calendar, Contacts, Bookmarks and Keychain across my two computers (my PowerBook at work and iMac at home.) It works great for that.
I also use to share photos with my family and friends, and to hold important files. I like it, but Apple should really work on making it faster and more stable. Until only recently, Apple made the bandwidth unlimited. Just last week, they stuck a blurb on the site notifying users that the bandwidth is now limited to something like 25 GB/month. More is available for an extra price…
A novel way to search music or movie files
I was in the bathroom, whistling a tune I’d heard in a movie last night (“Anchors Aweigh”, with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra,) and wishing I could find out its title, when it occurred to me. Why shouldn’t I be able to search for it?
I should be able to whistle that tune into my computer’s microphone, and have it search the audio and video files on my computer for similar sound patterns. It wouldn’t have to give me an exact match, a few possible matches would be fine. A desktop search engine, like Spotlight, or the Google Search Engine, or the Microsoft/Yahoo flavors, or whatever, brand isn’t important here, could index sound files for sound patterns – in its most basic form, it would search for inflections, and could then expand to more complex characteristics such as pitch, tone, timbre, human/instrument, etc. Wouldn’t this be an amazing thing?
Similarly, this could be expanded to movies. I could speak a phrase I remember from a movie into the microphone, and it would then search my movie files and find the movie and scene where that phrase is spoken. I know this is probably more difficult than a simple inflection in a sound file, but it is possible.
Just brainstorming… a possible offshoot could be searching movie scenes based on descriptions such as: male character dressed in a white shirt and grey pants, black shoes, hair parted from the right, in his 50’s, holding onto the side of Mt. Rushmore, bad guy stepping on his hand. This isn’t hard, it’s… Cary Grant in “North by Northwest”. The computer should be able to do that, too. I realize this may be some years away, but again, I think it’s possible.
Realizing that most people haven’t got extensive movie and music libraries, and sometimes the things they want to find aren’t on their computers, an Internet site could be set up with a large library of movie and music files. People could then whistle a tune into their microphones while they’re on the site, and could search its extensive library for the song where that snippet is found. They could choose to purchase that file afterwards. In a similar fashion, they could do all these other things I’m talking about here, eventually. Wouldn’t this be an amazing use of processing power? I for one look forward to this!
Music players should match genres with equalizer presets
This idea is so simple I can’t believe it’s not already in use! There I was during lunch, listening to my iPod in Shuffle mode, and it dawned on me how annoying it was that if I wanted to change the Equalizer present, I’d have to maneuver through several menus, then when it advanced to the next song, which might be of a different genre, I’d have to adjust the Equalizer once again. Since I didn’t want to bother, I left the Equalizer on None, but how much better would it be if these Equalizer modes could be automatically changed!
It’s so simple, too! They’re already named about the same as Genres, and so all the player would have to do is to look for an Equalizer mode that matches the Genre of the music currently playing. When I’m playing Pop music on my iPod, the Equalizer should automatically switch to the Pop settings; by the way, if you haven’t noticed yet, my last name is Pop. 🙂
There should be some level of tweaking though. I should be able to select different Equalizer presets for different genres, and I should be able to edit presets, as well as create new ones. These last two options are already available in most music players, but what I’m trying to get across here is that they should work together with the genre/equalizer matching.
I look forward to seeing this feature in upcoming versions of the popular music players like iTunes or WMP! I think it should also be integrated into the portable players like the iPods, which were really the impetus for this idea in the first place.
Raoul Pop 