I want to get my parents a digital picture frame. But at the moment I cannot. That’s because I don’t want my somewhat less-technical parents to have to fiddle with memory cards, choosing and transferring photographs or running Vista. My ideal digital picture frame for them would be one sitting in a living room or a bedroom with new photos to delight my parents every so often. Such a device would have to be:

Obras de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer - Tomo Primero is a collection of stories in Spanish available with recording and text (both plan and PDF). It was produced by Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse that has a lot more audio/text stories in English in its Lit2Go project. MP3 recordings can be downloaded individually, but nice iTunes interface is also available from the home page of the project.

I have seen plenty of visual illusions - both static and moving - but I have never seen a rotating human figure as an optical illusion. Took a while to even convince myself it was not a joke. I did work it out in the end (after a hint). The secret - at least for me - was to concentrate in the bottom-right corner on the feet shadows and force my eyes to track the outer foot’s shadow the way I wanted it to go.

From time to time I experiment with GATE NLP toolkit. Just now I tried to upgrade to the latest version (version 4) and run into really strange problem with ANNIE system not loading correctly. Later, when I uninstalled older GATE version, it stopped loading at all. The problem is the user configuration file gate.xml that is stored in the shared location, usually home directory. On Windows, that is _C:\Documents and Settings[ProfileName]_.

Use case Many people come to the foreign countries and feel lost/confused traveling around and/or getting services. If possible, they like to go places with a local friend who will point out the best features, explain how things work and/or translate the requests into the local language. This is a service for those who do not have such a friend. Basic business flow A service kiosk in the airport (visitor’s center) would hire out he mobile phones with GPS/Camera built-in.