CCX is Gonna Be Busy

With students coming onto campus in large numbers over the next three days, the Computer Connection will be exceptionally crowded and busy from Wednesday 9/1 through Friday 9/3.

If you need to purchase anything this week you should probably do it today or arrive at the store very early in the morning to avoid the heaviest lines. They'll be open each of the next three days from 9am to 6:30pm, over the Labor Day weekend from 10am to 5pm Saturday through Monday, and then return to normal store hours of 8:30am to 6:30pm next Tuesday 9/6.

A reminder, if you are planning to take advantage of the CCX Back-To-School Sale for an individual purchase, there isn’t much time left. They'll continue to accept orders for computers in stock over the next several weeks, but the special Apple promotion of a rebate worth up to $199 with the purchase of a computer and an iPod ends on September 7, 2010.

Letting Visitors Customize Your Webpage

I've really been enjoying the BBC website. If you haven't taken a look at it recently, check it out:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

What's so wonderful about it is that you can make it be the website you want it to be. No signing up or registration necessary (good luck talking corporate America into using that approach)--just drag and drop the different page elements where you want them to be--and it REMEMBERS the next time you visit. Don't like business news? Just click the X to remove it from sight. Focused on the weather? Drag it to the top of the page.

And suddenly that page goes from being the BBC homepage to being my own personal source of information, customized by me for me. Which also makes it much more usable, and makes me a lot more likely to go back to that page when I'm looking for news that I know I'll find relevant.

World's Largest Augmented Reality Marker

Ok, this is pretty cool. Many of you are probably already aware of "Augmented Reality," that uses those funny looking square barcodes to augment an actual view of reality with computer generated imagery. The computer can tell which way a barcode is oriented, and even which angle it's tilted at, and then display a correctly-oriented 3D object inside a video--in realitime!

Well, a Brazilian architect firm created a gigantic augmented reality marker to help their clients visualize what their planned skyscraper would look like in its planned setting--and set a world record in the process.

See the video below, and read the full story at http://www.augmentedplanet.com/2010/08/the-worlds-largest-augmented-reality-project/

Happy Friday the 13th!

Detexify

Not that I'm a big LaTex user, but I thought this was a pretty cool tool. Basically, you just draw the symbol you're looking for, and Detexify finds the LaTex code for it. See the example I did below.


Oh, and Detextify relies on HTML5 to do its dirty work, so try to stick with Opera 9.6 / Firefox 3.5 / Safari 4 or better.

Buy a Flash Drive

If you're in the market for a USB key/flash drive, or if you're still using a flash drive with less than 1 GB of space, please buy a new one. And here's a great excuse to do it: a Kingston 4GB USB flash drive for less than $8, with free shipping.

http://www.buy.com/prod/kingston-4gb-datatraveler-generation-3-g3-usb-flash-drive-white-gray/q/loc/101/216776270.html