If you’re a fan of Ansel Adam’s iconic photos of Yosemite National Park, you’ll enjoy this multimedia feature from the New York Times. Ansel’s former assistant talks about the story behind nine of his famous photos.
Looking for a parking lot or transit stop in Toronto? Try Stopfinder. After you provide the destination address, the service highlights public transit stops. It also identifies the closest and cheapest parking lots in the area.
A few months ago, I heard about TripIt from a rave review in Joel Spolsky’s blog. Yesterday, I read another glowing review from Don MacAskill.
TripIt is a free web service that “automatically organizes all your travel plans.” Supposedly you simply forward each travel confirmation email to their the plans@tripit.com email address. Using the information in the confirmation emails, TripIt will then compile a personalized travel itinerary that includes weather, driving directions, maps, etc. They claim to support Canadian travel vendors including Air Canada, WestJet, and ViaRail.
I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for a few months now. It is the best Windows-based blog composition application that I’ve used. It works great with Wordpress and, apparently, also supports other blogging platforms like Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, etc. Best of all, it is free.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a Toronto start-up called Realosophy.
Their web site provides comprehensive profiles of Toronto neighbourhoods and tips for home buyers.
Each profile is an attractive "mashup" that offers information on housing prices, sales, styles, and taxes as well as performance reports for the local schools. They also include a directory of nearby entertainment, health, and shopping services that are plotted on a embedded Google Map.
I’ve been subscribing to RSS news feeds for a long time. It’s easy, saves a lot of time, and automatically keeps me up-to-date on Jeff’s crazy ideas, Finn’s latest photos, and other important news.
Personally, I prefer web-based readers like Bloglines or Google Reader. That way I can check-in from work or at home.
I use Google Analytics to analyze my blog traffic. In particular, it helps me undertand what search keywords people are using to discover this blog.
As it turns out, I’m not the only one looking for an 1.8 to 3.5 IDE adapter. A number of people have landed here while searching for this elusive adapter.
So for their benefit, I purchased an adapter from 1topstore.com. It was shipped from Hong Kong and arrived a few weeks later. The price was reasonable and the unit worked perfectly.
WebbAlert – If you’re hankering for a tech news fix and you only have 5 minutes, check out Morgan Webb’s new video project, WebbAlert.
Slacker – A few months ago my favourite Internet radio application, Pandora, closed the box to non-US listeners. I suppose their partners didn’t believe all those users claiming their snail mail was delivered to the 90210 zip code.
Since then I’ve been experimenting with Slacker. Although persistent personalized radio stations are not available outside the US, the service is free and the default stations can be customized.
According to CNET’s Crave blog, Slacker intends to differentiate itself from Pandora and LastFM by selling a portable device that will stream your personalized radio stations via Wi-Fi.
Frankly, I’ve never been very satisfied by the web browsing capabilities of mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs.
Lately, I’ve been test driving the beta version of Opera Mini 4 on a BlackBerry 8700 and so far it looks promising.
I’ve been most impressed by the zoom capability and `virtual`mouse. Both are demonstrated in this video.
One thing that makes Opera Mini different from other browsers is the fact that each web page is funnelled through a remote server for pre-processing. The Opera website claims:
Web content is compressed to reduce the size of data transferred, enabling handling on simpler phones and creating fast browsing at low costs.
I have experienced a noticeable delay while accessing the first website. I suspect this pre-processing is responsible for this. However, subsequent surfing doesn`t seem affected.
Slacker – A few months ago my favourite Internet radio application, 
