Vincenzo Carabillo' » Websites

TiltViewer

Vincenzo Carabillo' — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 07:26:54 +0000

From the author’s website:

TiltViewer allows you to browse Flickr’s most interesting images in a 3D space. It’s designed to provide a fun, intuitive user experience. Images are pulled from Flickr’s Interestingness list.

The most useful freeware

Vincenzo Carabillo' — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:24:18 +0000

The Freeware Genius website has posted a great list of freeware software that can be used to re-install a Windows machine. The list contains a lot of incredibly useful software as well as screenshots and reviews.

Link:
Reinstall Windows and outfit your system with all freeware programs

Human computation

Vincenzo Carabillo' — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 08:01:30 +0000

This is a very interesting video in which you will find many of the new aspects of Web2.0. The point is that a cooperative effort of humans can solve some of the greatest problems of Artificial Intelligence. Think about captcha: these are small problems created by computers, that the computer itself is not able to solve, but relatively easy for an average human.

Speaking to "think out of boxes", the video reported below can give some insights and interesting point of views about the new cooperative way to rewrite the web.

Speech synthesizer

Vincenzo Carabillo' — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 19:35:27 +0000

Since I was a child, I have been amazed by speech synthesizers. The first one which I could use was SAM, in the eighties, which was a program running on the Commodore 64. That kind of voices war very cold and robotic, but already understandable. The C64 audio chip (called SID) was very different form what you can find in toda’s hardware: it was an analog circuit with three "voices", or tracks.
Since then, hardware and speech synthesis algorithms have got better and better. The new "text-to-speech" programs use now big databases of professional speakers samples; the most used words and phrases are recorded, as well as all the phonemes which many languages use.

I have just found the following web site which hosts one of the most advanced and accurate speech synthesis so far:

http://www.ivosoftware.com/ivonaonline.php

You can let the voice speak in several languages. Excellent.

MapJack

Vincenzo Carabillo' — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 19:17:01 +0000

I have just found a web site which makes it much easier to use the new "Street View" feature of Google Maps. Even if Street View is a marvelous add-on to Google Maps, I found the interface and controls it a bit too unintuitive. MapJack makes the thing much easier. A nice add on is that it seems to pre-fetch the images, so you the experience to run around the city is much more enjoyable. The only supported city at the moment is San Francisco. Have fun!

http://www.mapjack.com/

Google Street View

Vincenzo Carabillo' — Thu, 31 May 2007 06:15:35 +0000

A few days ago Google launched a new feature for the already marvelous Google Maps : Street View.
Have a look to this YouTube presentation:

The "walkable" cities are at the moment San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami, but the list will be extended soon. Take a look at this page, and start walking in Vegas!