A Moment of Wisdom

Google does … just search for time. Personally, I trust Google’s answer on the simple question of “What Time Is It?” But then they start weirding me out a little when they tell me where I am. They list the city and state right by the time display which is cool but how accurate are they in locating my actual position? My guess is that they use the IP lookup and resolve that back down to the ISP. Does anybody out there know the inside scoop on this technology?

I saw this over at SlashGeo:

Basically, a guy walks into a green screen room and is rendered on the fly as polygons with textures and then placed into whatever 3-dimensional environment desired.  Ok, that’s cool.  Then they go on to show that this not-too-shabby rendering of a person can interact with with this virtual environment by kicking over some vases and beating up a clone of himself.  Now that’s pretty darn cool.  I wouldn’t say amazing yet but still a rather neat accomplishment.

I would say that amazing would be when the virtual world can start to interact back with the real world.  For instance, if I could enter the virtual world with that other guy and pick up one of those vases and throw it at him … and he would feel it hit him.  Now that would be awesome!

If you like Piña COLLADA,

Then you should be rather happy because the next release of SketchUp will provide much better support for the COLLADA format. According to the SketchUp blog:

In our next release, we’re going to make COLLADA an official first-class format for all modelers. You’ll be able to import and export COLLADA models, as well as COLLADA models wrapped up in the KMZ format for Google Earth, with any version of SketchUp.

Sounds like good news to me as an open standard is being support more fully by a great free tool like SketchUp.

via Coming Soon in Google SketchUp….

From the nice folks at Lifehacker,

If you ever needed to rebuild a machine or for whatever reason needed to remember the license keys to your software … well, most likely you forgot to save this valuable tidbit of information and don’t know how to easily get it back.  Wouldn’t you know that some friendly computer geek out there has already solved this problem and made it freely available!  Have you hugged your geek today?

LicenseCrawler Retrieves License Keys for Backup