Quick little update. If you are a nerd but also care about the environment like we are here at Bored Mind you probably struggle with wanting to have cool tech toys but using too much energy. This little app for your computer will help with this issue.

It’s called LocalCooling and you run it on your machine. It is very light weight, not intrusive at all, just sits in the tray. From what I gathered it will help to effectively power down parts of your machine when you aren’t using them for a period of time. It also gives stats on how much energy, how many trees you saved and so on. Check it out. Pretty cool! I’m using it on my much under used, but always needs to be on, work desktop.

I really can’t describe this in any way that will do it justice, but Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft that you should check out. Watch this video, you will be amazed and then try it for real on the Photosynth site:

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that will change forever the way you think about digital photos.
Introducing Photosynth

Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

With Photosynth you can:

* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
* Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
* Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

Top 15 Google Street View Sightings

With the new “Google Street” feature come lots of new and fun things to look around at and ‘find’. This is a fun list of some of the cool things people have already found on Google Street. There will surely be hundreds more of these kinds of pictures in coming months.

My laptop is dead. D-E-A-D dead. I am bringing it back to Best Buy, AGAIN! As it is still under warranty and the last two times they did not fix it. Morons.

I am looking for a full screen RSS program. I want it to scroll any RSS feed headlines on the screen so that it can be read from a few feet away, either screensaver or not. Any ideas?

Well, as I said yesterday, my laptop died. It started yesterday afternoon, I was using it fine and then all of a sudden it started to make a horrible grinding noise. I hoped this was just from the fans, but as I listened and the computer froze, I realized it was not the fans, but the hard drive. I tried everything I could think of with my limited resources at home to get the machine to boot and the drive to work, but nothing worked. I had a 3 year extended warranty on the laptop with Best Buy, so I called them up to inquire about how long it would take to fix, it was clearly a hard drive issue, they told me 3-5 days. Seeing as how I needed some of the information on the laptop, as the work I had done last week was not backed up, I did not want to give them the laptop right away. I decided to leave home a day early and head back up to school, at least there I had my tools and another working computer to work off of. I got back up to school and tried a few things with no luck, I couldn’t get the machine to boot off the hard drive. I created a bootable linux CD with “Damn Small Linux” and was able to boot into that, from there I was able to mount the dying hard drive and luckily recover most of the data I needed. With that I felt much better and although I didn’t want to give up my laptop for a week to Best Buy, I didn’t want to spend the $100+ to fix it myself when they would do it for free. Today I gave them my laptop, told them of the issue and now I wait to see if they actually fix anything. Not a great way to end spring break.

On another note I created a Tumblog, you can see it here: http://boredmind.tumblr.com/. It’s not too much, basically a place where I can post quick little things, pictures, quotes, links and such without making a full blog post about it. I will integrate it somehow into the sidebar or the main part of the site so you won’t have to check two sites, only this one.

That’s about it for now, break is over, work has begun again. Back to working on things I don’t want to do.

My laptop died today. The hard drive is eating itself, I can hear it. More to come.