I was puttering around various laptop site today specing out various systems today and got a nice surprise when I hit the HP website. There on the front page was Mike Rowe from quite possibly my favorite TV show: Dirty Jobs.

I had to click on it to see more.

The page loads and I’m treated to a Mini Mike riffing some funny one liners at the top of the screen. Be sure to sit on the page awhile and see what Mike does. Make sure to revisit the page as the spiels change. Kudos to the team that put this together.

But we’re not even to the best part yet: the mini clips. There are several video clips on the page that at first I thought were just deleted scenes, but to my surprise are new “episodes”. Ol’ Barsky even made it (”Poo equals viewers” - Funny stuff Dave) They’re short sketches with Mike using the new HP tx2000z in various settings. You’ll see him working on the HP tx2000z in various “off-site” locations like the doctor’s office (”…stitches before I get cut?”), in his filthy motel room answering fan mail, lounging by the motel pool writing on the tx2000z, working with Barsky deciding which dirty job to do next and signing head shots for fans.

I’ve embedded one of the clips below, but be sure to check out the site and view the rest. They’re hilarious.

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The little media viewer with the funny name: Irfanview. I don’t know how I could get by without this program. I use it every single day and some days I uses it probably a over a hundred times.

IrfranView is a freeware media viewer, and is it fast! When I started using it years ago, it was just for viewing images. It would do some manipulation of image files, but nothing fancy. Stuff like crop, rotate, things like that. The reason I started using it was it’s sheer speed in opening even the largest image files. I had some files that were just huge (very high-res) and with the computer I had at the time, it took forever to open them with Windows’ default viewer or most of the other viewers out there.

Over the years, the programmer has expanded IrfanView’s capabilities immensely, all the while keeping it’s file loading time as fast as ever. He’s added so much to the program, that it’s become more than just a simple image viewer. It’s capable of opening and playing video & audio, drawing on images, effects, batch conversion (super fast, easy and with lots of neat options), and it even includes a side thumbnailing program now. Just to show you how ahead of the curve the programmer and IrfanView are, take a look at some of its history:

• IrfanView was the first Windows graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple (animated) GIF support.
• One of the first graphic viewers WORLDWIDE with Multipage TIF support.
• The first graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple ICO support.

And check out some of the features in the current version:

• Many supported file formats (click here the list of formats)
• Multi language support
• Thumbnail/preview option
• Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
• Toolbar skins option
• Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
• Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
• Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
• Fast directory view (moving through directory)
• Batch conversion (with image processing)
• Multipage TIF editing
• File search
• Email option
• Multimedia player
• Print option
• Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF
• Change color depth
• Scan (batch scan) support
• Cut/crop
• IPTC editing
• Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
• Capturing
• Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
• Lossless JPG rotation
• Many hotkeys
• Many command line options
• Many PlugIns
• Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like “I Agree” or “Evaluation expired”
• No registry changes without user action/permission!

I can’t rave enough about this program. If you haven’t ever used it, visit the official site: http://www.irfanview.com, bookmark it, download, install and run the program. You can thank me later.

And don’t forget to show the programmer some appreciation, by giving him a donation. One note on the license, if you want to use this commercially (say at work, where using the IrfanView helps to create profit) , you’ll need to register it. Do it. It’s inexpensive and it’s the right thing to do.

I’m gonna start posting short reviews on some of the various software packages that I use everyday and can’t live without. Most of them have been tested throughout the years and most are free (’cause the “man” don’t pay me squat!). I hope these postings will be useful for you guys.

Remember when AOL dropped the ball and accidentally released three month’s worth of search logs of their users…

It amounted to about 20 million searches of its 650,000+ users. Oops.

Well, the fellas over at Something Awful.com went through the log with some scripts and found some interesting users. It’s scary…

When people post on any forum, whether it’s a serious Mozart discussion forum, Something Awful, or PayMeToHumpThings.net, they usually act in a manner that’s presentable to the outside world. Of course they do, because someone else is going to read that and they wouldn’t want to look like a fruitcake in front of everybody. But behind that relatively normal exterior there are things they’re wondering about and want to know, and they type these things where they think nobody will ever see them, like into search engines for example.

Read the whole mess here.

When you wonder around YouTube as I sometimes do, you find some “interesting” stuff. Today I found a parody of those stupid Head On commercials. If you don’t know which ads I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky that you’ve been spared.

For your viewing pleasure, I present a parody that’s actually better than the original:

I checked out the URL at the end of the video (www.dickhats.com), and it’s a real product. Hmmm, might make a good valentine’s day surprise for the wife.

Here’s an article detailing how a dedicated fan built a robot out of LEGO Mindstorm parts that solves 3×3x3 Rubik cubes.

Technorati Tags: LEGO, mindstorm, rubik, cube, solve, automated

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