Appraisal Podcasts

Ok this post is what I would refer to as narrowcasting to the extreme. I ran across a whitepaper that outlines a data storrage system that focuses on significant power reductions.

From the synopsis:

“This whitepaper explores the energy saving features of ETERNUS storage systems such as virtualization to improve capacity utilization. Fujitsu shows how its MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology enables significant reductions in power consumption.”

The whitepaper can be found here

50 Best Websites 2007

A serious pain to navigate through the 50 web pages they have the article on, but there are some gems in there.

From the site:

“Our 2007 picks are the best examples of what’s new and exciting about the Web right now. Here we honor sites with exceptional style and smarts, sites that offer new and improved ways to access and share content, generate our own and otherwise enrich the online (and off-line) experience. What do you think of our choices? Take our poll and let us know.” 

Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without

This post is a summary from another blog I follow. Each year the author does a post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here.

From the blog: “This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.” “Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho).”

 For the complete article click here

Productivity Boosters

Ran across a nice summary of 131 productivity boosters related to email, instant messenging, office applications, pdf-ing, phone and texting, and 23 “other” tools.  Is worth a look. There is bound to be something new to you on the list that may help manage your day better. From the blog post:

“Freelancers Appraisers often have to wear many hats: accountant, boss, quality control, marketing department, and beyond, which can leave you feeling like there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything you’d like. Fortunately, there are a number of tools designed to help you speed up the process of working. Check out these productivity boosters for documents, communications, and more.” 

Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites

On a Social Bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly. Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. Follow the link to the top 20 largest social bookmarking sites ranked by a combination of Compete and Quantcast data. For each site, they show unique U.S. monthly visitor data as well as respective rank. For entries where a wide range exists between the two data sets the highest numbers were used for ranking purposes.  The top 5 are:

1. digg.com
2. Netscape.com
3. Technorati.com
4. del.icio.us
5. StumbleUpon.com

Heat Maps Offer a Visual View Of U.S. Housing Prices

Trulia Heat Maps help you visually compare prices & popularity by state, county, city or neighborhood. The graphical interface is easy to use and gives a great visualization of what is happening in the real estate market. 

MojoPac | What is MojoPac? | Overview
MojoPac is a technology that transforms your iPod or USB Hard Drive or Flash drive into a portable and private PC. Just install MojoPac on any USB 2.0 compliant storage device, upload your applications and files, modify your user settings and environment preferences, and take it with you everywhere.
Every time you plug your MojoPac-enabled device into any Windows XP PC , MojoPac automatically launches your environment on the host PC. Your communications, music, games, applications, and files are all local and accessible. And when you unplug the MojoPac device, no trace is left behind – your information is not cached on the host PC.

Hacking Skype: 25 Tips to Improve Your Skype Experience

For those of you looking to use your computer to place and receive phone calls, Skype is the market leader and this article helps you get even more out of it. Call other people on Skype and it’s free - anywhere in the world.

I ran across this cool software package recently and like what it “can” do. I have not tried it but the accuracy makes sense  - you know the size of target you place on the building and you should be able to scale from that. I do not make a commission of the sales of the software, just thought it was a neat idea and thought some of the readers may be interested in it. From the software developer’s website:

“iPhotoMEASURE Standard Edition is a revolutionary software tool that enables you to measure anything in a photo taken with your digital camera. This is very useful when physical measurements are difficult or unsafe to perform or when you cannot physically be present to make these measurements.”

There is also a quick video you can watch to see how the software works. Website can be found here.

While perusing the Google Maps Mania blog, I ran across a post noting that shaded releif maps are now available for the Google Earth engine. According to wikipedia:

A raised-relief map or terrain model is a three dimensional representation, usually of terrain. When of terrain the elevation dimension is usually exaggerated by a factor between five and ten; this facilitates the visual recognition of terrain features.

These maps are useful in helping viewers visual recognition of terrain features all over the world. The site can be found at Shaded-Relief.