Crestock.com held a photoshop contest, the winner won a MacBook Pro. I wish I happened upon this in the beginning, not that my photoshop skills would have gotten me very far but I do love photoshopping. Check out the breath-taking creations. The one pictured on the left was the winner of the MacBook Pro.

An article on Wikipedia lists locations of satellite images that are censored on Google Maps. It also includes links for the coordinates to be viewed in Google Maps. Some of these locations are concealed for obvious reasons, being military related. Interesting, nonetheless.

Here are some of my favorite Google Maps Mash-ups for this week:

A World of Nirvana! This is awesome! Combining YouTube videos and Google Maps, you can revisit the journey of Nirvana from 1987 to 1994.

Who Is Sick - Keep track of colds, the flu, and other ailments in your city. This came in handy, since I caught a cold this week. I thought I was the only weirdo with a cold in Spring. As it turns out, there are other weirdos with colds in Spring.

Health Map - The common cold can be a little boring. Here’s a map keeping track of diseases, globally. I no longer feel weird about my cold in spring. I mean, I could have Dysentery in Spring. (Not safe for hypochondriacs)

Hotspotr - Find wi-fi hotspots in your area. You can view rate each listing for things such as wireless quality, food, outlet availability, etc.

US Incident Map - This map displays recent incidents involving police, highway patrol, etc. You can view right down to your local zip.

When it comes to keeping comments and conversations going, every weblog is different. Some reply through e-mail, others reply on the post, and some do both. I usually do the latter. But keeping track of all those conversations can be a pain.

I think I have finally found a solution to keep track of all the blog posts I’m commenting on. I came across co.mments today and thought I’d give that a try. Using the bookmarklet, Co.mments will bookmark the posts you want to keep track of and keeps tabs on any new comments that get posted. You can keep track of your posts by subscribing to your RSS feed, visiting your public page on the web, or you can choose to receive an e-mail notification when someone has posted a new comment. You can also add your tracking list to your blog so others can see where else your chatting.

I remember the days when 2 junk emails was enough to make me create a new email address.. Then over time, 10 junk emails in my inbox became, “Not that bad.” I complain about spam so much, it’s a wonder I even allow comments or have an email address any more. For years I’ve been relying on Spam Assassin and Thunderbird to help annihilate my spam problems with my domain email address, which has been effective for quite some time, but it just hasn’t been enough lately. I came to the conclusion that I would just have to create a new email address and merge. Fortunately, Gmail announces it’s ability to fetch mail from other accounts, so I decided this would be my last resort before starting new again.

I loaded up my Gmail account to fetch mail from my domain account. Within a 24 hour period, Gmail caught 485 messages in spam with 3 stragglers that made it through to my inbox, and 0 false positives. In that 24 hour period, using my regular method, I would have had to pilfer through at least 20 or so that would have made it into my inbox in Thunderbird. Now all I need is for CellTop to hurry up and release their Gmail widget for my phone and I’ll be set.

Gmail Theatre Presents: Why Use Gmail? (youtube video). Recently, I’ve noticed myself merging more and more to my gmail account, since my personal domain email address receives over 300+ spam a day. Although Gmail is great at separating spam from legit email 99.9% of the time for me, I long for the day when spam is annihilated altogether, no need for another spam/junk mail folder/label. Another thing that I’m loving about gmail, is the ability to check pop3 mail from other accounts. Oh, and it’s also open to the public now.

I suppose this is actually old news, but like most people, I never received an e-mail from TextAmerica to inform me they were no longer keeping free accounts. TextAmerica was a free MoBlogging service, allowing those with camera cellphones to send their pictures to TextAmerica and then have them published on a blog hosted at TextAmerica.

I just recently purchased a new cell phone and went to logon to my TextAmerica account only to find out that my account no longer existed and was completely locked out with no way to retrieve my photos. Apparently they will only support paying accounts. However, their site does not inform you of this. It simply states that they aren’t currently accepting new registrations.

All isn’t lost though. My pictures were still available on their server, as my RSS badge of pictures was still working and showing my most recent photos. So I was still able to go directly to my RSS feed for my account and get some of my pictures back.

Get Some of Your TextAmerica Pictures Back:
All you have to do is add “/rss.aspx” (no quotes) to the end of your TextAmerica URI, and you will be able to access your RSS feed of recent photos. However, you will not be able to retrieve ALL of your photos, but you will be able to get some back.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t have many photos published to TextAmerica and was able to get all but maybe 3 or 4 of my photos. Which I’ll be uploading over on to Flickr now, as they support pictures by e-mail, allowing me to publish my camera phone pictures once again.

I don’t think TextAmerica will be around much longer. Seriously, you can’t charge for something that you were just giving away for free! You add a pro account!

Thanks for nothing TextAmerica!

CellTop is a new open-source app that Alltel recently launched for its mobile phones. CellTop is essentially widgets, called cells, for your cell phone, and is an Alltel exclusive. CellTop launched with 10 different cells, including my personal favorites, News Feeds and Weather.

The best part of this new app is that it is OPEN-SOURCE! Which will allow anyone to make their own cells. However, I’m assuming that it will have to be pushed through BREW/Qualcomm/Alltel first. Celltop is only available on one phone at the moment, the Samsung u520, but will soon be on the RAZR, KRZR, and the LG-AX245. Oh, and it is also FREE. The only charge you incur is when you refresh your cells, such as news or weather; it will count against your minutes, a whole 1 big minute to refresh your cells.

I purchased the Samsung u520 over the RAZR, specifically for the new CellTop app, however it comes packed with a ton of features that are very comparable to the RAZR. The Samsung also doubles as an Mp3 player with external control buttons, and an expansion slot for MicroSD memory cards. It has a ton of other features and it only cost a mere $50.00. (I’ll post a more in-depth review of the Samsung u520 later)

There are plenty of cells in the works, quite possibly a Digg.com feed and a Gmail cell.

I’ve become quite attached to CellTop, as I constantly find myself reading the news on my cell phone throughout the day. I look forward to hopefully a customizable RSS cell.

This is by far the coolest thing to hit cell phones, in my opinion.

I love my Mac Mini. It took a bit to adjust to OS X at first. My only memory of being on a Mac prior to my Mac Mini was playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? when I was just wee one in elementary school. Once I learned to stop resisting and allow OS X to work for me, it wasn’t long before I became very attached to my Mac.

While I was still adjusting to OS X, my 40 GB hard drive seemed almost like too much space. But then the more I used the Mac the more it started to become my default desktop. I passed my 15″ FPD from the Mac to my Debian box and gave it share rights to my 19″ FPD with my main PC desktop. In a matter of weeks my 40 GB hard drive shrunk to 8 GB of available space. :gasp:

Where the hell did all that space go? Using this handy tool, Disk Inventory X, I was able to see graphically what was clogging up my drive. Obviously: music, videos, pictures, and software.

Much of my music and videos can be burned and deleted to free up space, however, having a more permanent place for such things is beginning to be more appealing than the infinite number of disks that I have that get stuffed into drawers.

It was time for an upgrade. I love taking things apart and I’ve wanted to take apart the Mac Mini since the day I got it, but have never gotten around to actually doing it. But instead of just upgrading the hard drive and having another spare drive used as a paperweight, I decided an external drive would be a great solution. Not just to free up space on the Mac but essentially freeing up space for all the computers on the network and keeping all of our media in one place.

Thanks to Danielle, for Xmas I received the LaCie 160 GB fire wire hard drive. The LaCie drive is designed to be stacked under the Mac Mini. Brilliant.

Keeping the LaCie drive formatted with HFS+ Mac format, I used MediaFour’s MacDrive on my Windows computers to allow the new drive to be seen under windows and the ability to read and write to the disk, I now have a drive strictly for media storage that everybody can use.

Now that I have a central storage place for all of my different media files, I needed to change my library location for iTunes and iPhoto so that everything will now be stored on the external drive. An easy task for iTunes:

Changing Your Library Location for iTunes:
I just copied my original iTunes library over to the new external drive, deleted the original folder, then in iTunes under Preferences->Advanced-> Change folder location. Or you can do it the proper way.

Changing Your Library Location for iPhoto:
In iPhoto, there is no option for changing the default folder location. I have no idea why. But if you hold down your Option key while clicking on iPhoto from the dock, it will prompt you to create a library or choose a library. So first, I copied my iPhoto library to the new location and holding down the option key and launching iPhoto, I chose the new library. Ta-Da!

The LaCie drive is an excellent solution to maximizing storage space for both Windows and Macs, more specifically, the Mac Mini. I recommend it to anybody looking to expand storage space.

Southwest is giving away a coupon good for one free movie download from Movielink.