Make3D

The good folks of Stanford University came up with a software that converts single images to 3D versions.

From their website:

'Make3D converts your single picture into a 3-D model. It takes a two-dimensional image and creates a three-dimensional "fly around" model, giving the viewers access to the scene's depth and a range of points of view.

It uses powerful machine learning techniques (more details here), to learn the relation between small image patches and their depth and orientation. This allows it to model 3-d structures such as slopes of mountains or branches of trees.

After uploading your image, you can "fly" in the 3-D scene (requires VRML viewer or Adobe Shockwave), or watch a rendered 3-d movie (flash required).'

Official website

Video as Desktop Wallpaper

If you have experienced the DreamScene feature of Windows Vista you know the feeling of having videos displayed on the desktop as a wallpaper; what maybe you don't know is that it is possible to achieve the same in XP. How? Trough the VLC media player. Just go to the 'video' menu, click on the 'wallpaper' option and you are set.

Free Software Magazine, issue 21

In this issue of Free Software Magazine David Jacovkis reports from Colombia and explains why free software is an ethical choice. Colin McGregor interviews several key people in the GNU/Linux world as well as explaining how to get KDE looking fantastic. Then we have Terry Hancock covering the Open Hardware project and making a comprehensive list of Linux-friendly hardware. Steven Goodwin shares how much he saved by using free software for his great beer podcast, and Alan Berg entertains us with free software easter eggs, while Andrew Min will explain the basics of HTML... Monty Python style. Gary Richmond enlights us about touchpads and Google Firefox extensions you don't want to miss. For ultimate hackers, Gianluca Pignalberi manages to do sound filtering by using... the Gimp (!) while Yousef Ourabi reviews FreeBSD 7 and its graphical installer. Talking about server-side topics, Ryan Cartwright covers the installation of Exim and Spamassassi, David A. Harding explains how to create a mailing list from home, and Ken Leyba makes sure you know how to protect your server with Deny Hosts. Finally, Andrew Krause tells you all you need to know about C in order to create GTK applications.

Read it online.

Try Linux

Are you a Windows user that heard about this thing called Linux and want to feel what is this buzz about?

So you have to try Linux. There are plenty ways of doing it (besides buy a fresh installed new Linux box or format your hard drive to have a clean Linux installation):

dual boot;
virtual machine;
live cd/flash drives;
linux demo.

Dual boot means that you can have more than one OS in your computer and load one of them at boot time. To run Linux you need a compatible boot loader like Grub to do the task that will enable you to select which OS to load in memory at boot time. You can also configure it to start one of them by default automatically with no need of user intervention. See the documentation of your boot loader for more specific information.

A virtual machine enables you to emulate an OS inside another as a common application. It does this by creating an environment (API libraries) similar to the original one and translates this to instructions specific to the host. This is the same as the popular Java virtual machine do achieve portable java code or a native language compiler, the difference is that the java code is interpreted, although not necessarily, and a compiler create a native object specific to the host environment.

A live cd, like Knoppix, is an OS that is loaded to memory like a standard one but does not have disk access so it does everything from memory. This has advantages when you just which to try something without making permanent changes to your system.

A related concept is a boot from a pen disk. It does not however have the 'read only' limitation of a cd so you could save your documents; the limitation is that not all bios support booting from a removable media like a pen disk, but the good news are that unless you own a somewhat old machine odds are that your system supports this feature. Just enter bios setup at boot time and see for yourself if this is the case or you need an bios update.

A Linux demo is the most unobtrusive/transparent - a term borrowed mainly from web programing- of all; It's easy as open your browser and point it to the open source demo center at the open source region Stuttgart website, following their instructions and try Linux online with just a minor client installation.

BeOS

BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. Unlike some other operating systems of the time, BeOS was written to take advantage of modern hardware. Optimized for digital media work, BeOS made full use of multiprocessor systems by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a custom 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design. The API was written in C++ for ease of programming. It has POSIX compatibility and access to a command line interface through the bash shell, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system.

BeOS was positioned as a platform which could be used by a substantial population of desktop users and a competitor to Microsoft Windows and Linux. However, it was ultimately unable to achieve a significant market share and proved commercially unviable for Be Inc. The company was acquired by Palm Inc.

The Haiku operating system it's an open source BeOS inspired operating system currently being developed by a community of former and new BeOS enthusiasts.

See also Programming the Be Operating System, an O'Reilly open book

Elephant's Dream

Elephants Dream is a computer-generated short film. Except for Reaktor, a modular sound studio, and Mac OS X, the OS of the cluster used to render the final production, all software used in production was open source. It premiered on March 24, 2006, after about 8 months of work. Beginning production in September 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. Its name was later changed from Machina and renamed to Elephants Dream (named after the way in which Dutch children's stories abruptly end). (read full storie at wikipedia)

Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world. (official website)

New Firefox Ad Fight Against Boredom

Caixa Magica, the Portuguese Linux Distribution

Self explanatory... the title says it all. Visit their homepage (translated by google) at caixamagica.pt.

GNU Free Essay

Richard Stallman. He started it all; Linux, Open Source, Free Software, all this has roots in his vision about software, freedom and user rights. It's all in the first chapter of his selected essays about the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.

At the same time, when he was changing the world, and for the better, he do it at his own expense with the help of some earlier pioneers. He quit MIT AI Lab to dedicate his energy and effort to the cause, the cause of sharing, freedom and helping your neighbor, by his own words. Has a marginal gain, this movement also provide a solution for whom software cost of ownership his prohibitive.

Information is power, so they say, but without the tools for processing this information is lost as a dumb raw of meaningless data. And now is available to all (or almost). It isn't just free or open source software, it's SOCIAL SOFTWARE.