After hearing Kevin Rose mention Photosynth on Diggnation, I thought it sounded cool so I checked it out. Photosynth is a project in the Microsoft Live Labs where you traverse through or look around 3D landscapes that are built using 2D images. The first downsides of it are quite apparent as you enter the site and use it. It requires you to install software on your computer to get this to work, and it is Windows only. I decided to go ahead anyway. I had a look at some of the featured Synths on the home page and they looked pretty cool.  It was cool to have a look around a city using this thing. It was also cool to see how it did this weird 3D dotty thing to represent an object from a 2D environment, such as a statue.

I decided I would try and make one. I spend a bit of time thinking of an interesting scene or object to take picture of that would work in Photosynth and look pretty cool. After a little while thinking, I remembered a spot close to where I live where I could see my whole suburb and the houses and surrounding. I decided that I would go up there with the camera and take heaps of shots, the way the instructional video said. I took 74 shots from up there. I decided to put them into Photosynth. It takes quite a while to do its magic and upload it to the internet, so don’t expect results straight away because it can take 1-5 hours. Mine took under 3 which wasn’t bad. I could wait.

After it had done everything, it was available for viewing online. I like to think I had done a good Synth, and the thing told me it was 100% Synth. You can check it out on the Photosynth site, it is publicly viewable. Photosynth is a really hard thing to describe. It is really something you have to see, and play with for yourself. This technology is really exciting and I look forward to seeing it evolve and get better, and then applied to useful applications, such as a mapping application or a virtual store or something of the sort. This is just the beginning of what this technology can offer and bring to the table.

It only took me one hour of playing with Google’s new web browser, Chrome, to realize that its just a web browser. I already have 2 web browsers installed on my machine (on good, the other not so much) so why do I need a third? The very short amount of time trialing Chrome was enough to give me a good feel for what Chrome is. To conclude here, I like the browser, but it just doesn’t offer me the same experience I get from Firefox, or the experience I expect from a traditional web browser. Although I have to say, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The things I like about Chrome is the way it manages tabs. Each tab is a new process. This is something I wish my main browser had so I can figure out what is causing it to use all my resources on the machine, and also protect the other pages I have open in case one causes a crash. Another thing I like about Chrome is its speed. It works pretty fast, although after importing my bucket loads of Bookmarks and History, it did effect the way Chrome handled, which could be why I have trouble with Firefox at times.

To be honest, I don’t really feel this as a true competitor in the browser space. I feel this is a spec browser which is to force Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and whatever to adopt Google’s features to make the browsers better. Google’s platform is the internet, so pushing out their vision of an ideal browser which enables access to their services makes sense that they want to make it a good experience from both the access program and the web service.

Even though I love Firefox and will continue using it as my primary web browser, I will still keep Chrome on my system. This is a perfect secondary browser for when you just want to quickly access a webpage without waiting for your browser to load and the two dozen tabs that come with it. Just click, wait a second and you’re all ready to zap onto a page. It’s really that fast and simple, which makes it the perfect quick and go browser. Other than that, it’s going to be interesting to see what else they will bring to the table.

Last week, I got accepted into the Live Mesh Tech Preview (also known as Beta.) I had only heard a little bit about it from various websites and podcasts and it sounded and looked like an interesting service. Live Mesh is basically cloud storage, with basically all the same functionality as Dropbox except with a bit more added.

When you download the client, which is around 2MB in size, the installation starts in the background. This took quite a while to install, and even other people I know have commented on that. There is no progress indicator or anything so you are expected to sit back and wait for it to just do its thing. The only reason I can think of for the lengthy installation time is that it probably downloads the actually application off the internet, similar to how the other Windows Live services do it. I really dislike this and would prefer to download the actual install file manually. This was the only issue I had with Mesh, everything else is pretty much positive.

You are again greeted with a new folder on your computer, except here it goes in your User directory. This is basically where you will get access to everything in your Live Mesh. When you create a new folder, it goes in there and any files synchronized between your computer and the cloud are put here. Another interesting thing is that any folders outside here that you wish to synchronize, their shortcut will appear in the directory. This is good as it makes it easy to manage what is going on in the Live Desktop and other computers that are synchronized.

Synchronization with folders is quite fast, with information on progress of the upload and download. If you only synchronize one file, it happens so fast you wouldn’t even notice it going on in the background. You get 5GB storage which is plenty of space for backing up Documents and a few other files. Its not ideal for video or loads of images, but if you had those types of files, you probably wouldn’t want to back them up online anyway (unless you have a fat pipe.) You can synchronize between your computer, the Live Desktop, and other computer. This is great because it means that your Documents folder can be synchronized between multiple computers, and the cloud.

The Live Desktop is the way you access your files and folders on the web. Once you log on, you are greeted with a very straight forward user interface. The thing that makes it so straight forward, is the fact it looks like a very basic Windows desktop, with folders on the desktop that are folders you have synced to the Live Desktop. Clicking the folder will open a window that looks and operates very similar to Windows Explorer does. From here you can view items in the folders as well as make changes, make new folders and upload.

I also tried the image viewer. As I clicked on a picture in Firefox, I was in for a rude awakening, you need Silverlight 2 to use the photo browser, and at this stage, you cannot get SL2 for Firefox. I understand this is in beta so its not much of an issue and shouldn’t be for too long. In Internet Explorer however, it looked and worked pretty well, it had the thumbnails at the top, and you could see the image and use the familiar forward, backwards and play buttons to go through the pictures and start and stop a slideshow. I did find it to be a little slow to load a bunch of relatively small images, but that could have been due to a number of factors.

There are a whole heap of options that are not available yet and at this stage it is Windows only, but they do plan for a Mac client for synchronization. I was very happy with this service and it was done really well. If it is this good at the beta stage, its going to be one hell of a service when it is out of beta and open to the public. There are a few things that I have missed do talk about such as syncing to two machines and remote desktop and such, but at this stage, I have yet to play around with that. You can hear about those from other people, when I cover this again when it is out of beta with more features and functionality, or you can go and try them yourself. I would highly recommend this service to every Windows user out there because it is that great.

SugarSync (formerly known as Hummingbird) is a service from Sharpcast that allows you to sync and access your files and media from anywhere” on different computers, on the web, even on your mobile phone. SugarSync securely backs up all your computers online and synchronizes them automatically so you always have access to your files. Best of all, SugarSync takes care of everything automatically in the background, so you never have to make backups or email files to yourself. Say goodbye to CD burning and emailing files to yourself; say hello to SugarSync.

I have been using SugarSync for a few weeks now. You install a program to your computer and it will automatically backup everything in your user folder, or folders of your choosing. I found it useful to backup a few important folders, but I did find the software to be a little restrictive. First off, you are limited to 1GB (but you get 10GB more for the beta) which is hardly enough space to backup much. You also cannot pick which files not to backup, which means it is all or nothing.

I did have a problem with accidentally deleting a folder that was backing up. What I thought it would do is delete the folder from the backup, but what it really did was delete the folder from my computer. Then after I managed to restore the files, it went and deleted them again. I don’t think it is right to let a piece of backup software do that. That is probably the killing point in this software for me.

If you want to try out this software, the first 7 people to comment below will get an invitation to this service.

Twenty days ago I got an email through Flickr saying four of my photos have been short-listed for inclusion in the third edition of Schmap Christchurch Guide, to be published early September 2007. I was pretty excited and honored that my pictures were considered to be included in a random online guide. I sat here for a while waiting for a verdict and to see if my pictures were or were not chosen.

Yesterday I got another email saying two of my pictures were chosen and included in the guide.

I am delighted to let you know that two of your submitted photos have been selected for inclusion in the newly released third edition of our Schmap Christchurch Guide.

I then went to the site to see my pictures included in the guide, with credit to me. You can see the pictures here under the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. It is positioned at the right hand side of the page and you can click the arrows to see both pictures. Most of you guys will be like “So what? Its a stupid little online guide and doesn’t mean crap!” and you can be like that if you want but I don’t care, I’m honored to be in that guide!

There are a few new features on Pownce. I don’t use Pownce much but I do read what people post on it. I generally don’t see any compelling reason to use these micro-blogging services. People use them for short messaging a wide amount of people but that is not something I have any reason to do, let alone have anything to say, therefore these services are somewhat useless to me.

One of the new features on Pownce is the showing of upcoming events on the right side of the page. First off, generally the event don’t have anything to do with me or are of interest. I don’t care about an event happening in America or Canada or any other international country. I don’t live anywhere near there and wouldn’t travel to those countries anytime soon so this new feature is irrelevant to me.

Another new feature was the automatic embedding of Videos and Pictures. In my opinion, this is what services like Tumblr and Soup do. This feature is more for blogging and mini-blogging services and not for the micro-blogging ones. They are moving into a field half way between mini and micro blogging by taking the best of both worlds and merging them together but not focusing greatly on these features to make it a hybrid type service.

The last new feature was linking of other web services. This is somewhat useful because now people can see links to the services I actually use, for example Digg, Flickr and Last.FM. You can also put your IM addresses and links to other websites, for example your personal blog. But this feature is not really original, just taking something that another service uses and taking a different angle.

I would only use these features if I had a way to connect to these site away from my computer. Some services offer this but they generally cost money, money I am not willing to spend on them. I still keep my eyes on the sites, reading what people are up to and interesting things they post. I read what my Pownce contacts have to say on the website and I also still read what people have to say on Twitter via the RSS feed. Am I still a user of these sites, even though I don’t contribute?

Pownce - http://pownce.com/yum9me
Twitter - http://twitter.com/yum9me

As you should all know, Apple has dropped NBC Shows on iTunes because NBC wanted to increase the cost to $4.99 per episode. Thats an insane $100 plus for a whole season. You can get the DVDs after the season has aired for a quarter the price of that or get it on TV and only have to pay the provider subscription. This is a stupid move and can only lead to a loss for NBC.

In fair honesty, why not pirate it. You get a higher quality than iTunes provides, it’s incredibly cheap to download and you have the freedom to watch it where you want. I admit to downloading TV shows and I don’t think its doing any harm. I don’t have time to watch TV so I end up downloading my shows and watching it before it airs in New Zealand. I also get the freedom to watch a show when I want to watch it and on what device. I am not restricted in any way (except for the speeds I can download at.)

As a Digg user said, “In other news, every BitTorrent site in the world has announced that they’ll still be carrying NBC shows. Enjoy the revenue drop you greedy shits.” No one could have said it any better than that.