Instant Sproingification!

No, this is not a post about boners or Natalie Portman, sorry.

I make no apologies for being a geek who gets jacked up about geeky things. I love technology, I love new ways to use and innovate using technology to help educate, explore and entertain.

And I love me some sproingy visualization. Sites like Liveplasma or the Visual Thesaurus are just fun to play with and teach through visualizations.

Well, now you can make your own sproingy visualization via Text2MindMap. It is simple, cool and can really help to demonstrate the relationships between sets of things. Oh, and you can download the resulting sproingy goodness.

I can see this being really useful for a family tree to easily show how everyone is related or to visualize the complexity that is the school district I work for. Heck, it'd be fun to use it to categorize music but there'd be an awful lot of work in doing that.

I'm going to play around with it some more and, presuming I can create something worthwhile, will post my sproingy up here.

Play With This!

Check out PicLens and load up an image search and have fun sweeping along a wall of images, browsing to stop and look at just one for a moment before sweeping further along.

You can do Google and Yahoo image searches, Flickr and others too. It is mesmerizing and a fantastic way to explore.

In chatting about it with a teacher today, I had the idea of a Flickr search sorted by date for Burning Man to start at the beginning and go all the way through to the end. I'm sure the search would have to be narrowed down some as it's likely a rather large pool of photos. But its a cool idea.

I suppose it would even be possible to set it up to show photos live with a camera with a wireless card on board. How sweet would that be? Photos appearing on a wall of photos in near real-time of the event you're at? I loves the tech!

And I'm going to build a little demo slideshow now. Be back in a few, I hope.

Wired's Gift Guide for Multi-Colored Geeks

Gifts for Every Geek: Shutterbugs, Empty Nesters, Foodies and Urban Commandos

Which include some pretty darned awesome goodies depending on what makes you salivate. I'm a foodie, motorhead, urban commando, modernist, shutterbug and mediaphile. I tend to think that I'm the easiest person in the world to shop for and not just because I have an Amazon wishlist.

If its new, has flashing lights, flies, makes sweet noises or takes pictures or all of the above then I'm pretty sure to want it and have a great time playing with it.

Which reminds me, I should go and update my wishlist. With some new cool schwag like the new Leatherman Skeletool or the remarkably practical and very coolly named Cube Jigger (though I'd have to say that Unica's web site ranks among the worst I've ever been to, too much information-itis) and, of course, I'd love me an iPhone.

But I think this Christmas will be pretty low key given I was off work for 8 months this last year. It will be better than a Christmas with me still looking for work though, that's for sure.

I'm off to update my Amazon Wish List! Woot!

Ever Seen A White Tiger Underwater?

Now you have. And it didn't cost you an arm or a leg.

Mother Nature's Smile

Photographer spots rare heavenly arc which looks just like a rainbow flipped upside down or Mother Nature's Smile, the reality is that its not really a rainbow but is called a circumzenithal arc, it is created by sunlight shining through tiny ice crystals.

Mother Nature is still able to wing us a curve ball every now and again and this is definitely curvy!

Steampunk Keyboard

This is so cool that I might have to find out who built this and go steal it from them.

Check out the Steampunk Keyboard and, for more steampunk slickness, check out Technorati's Steampunk tagged blog posts.

I am just dying for that keyboard. Its so very 1984 and Brave New World-ish! I have steampunk lust!