Saturday Round-Up

Riya is a visual search engine that lets you upload, tag, and search your own photos or any other photos in their index.  Pretty normal, right?  The neat part is that it has some capacity for recognizing objects, including individual faces (with some margin of error).  Once you've taught it to recognize your friends, it will automatically tag your photos that those friends are in with their names, making it easier to search for them later.  Riya can also breakdown searches into related tags, letting you jump to similar interests or narrow down your search.  The main downside right now is that all large images are automatically resized to 800×600 pixels.  And let's face it, in today's digital photophile age, that's a pretty big downside.  Adult pictures are removed, though it appears that they may rely on user-policing to mark "adult content", and I was able to find some without much effort.  In the name of science, of course.  All in all, it's a neat idea, definately in beta, but worth keeping an eye on.

The ButtKicker LFE Electromagnetic Transducer has a fancy name and a fancier purpose: to make sound move you.  Without creating any additional audio, it can be placed below or attached to your couch or chair to make you feel the bass.  At $200, I seriously need to get one of these.

Table of Malcontents is a daily read (when I have the opportunity), and has enough good stuff over the past few days that you should really just hop over there and check it out.  But if you need my encouragement, I particularly enjoyed: Pirates and Treasure,  Modern Living/Neurotica Series (though it's super-creepy), and 787 Cliparts.