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Pandora: the Music Matching Service

Pandora is a great service if you know which music you like and want to discover something similar.

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It's powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we'll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.

We take your input (artists, songs) and feedback ("I like this", "I don't like this") and use the Music Genome Project to create stations that play songs that are musically similar to what you've told us. That's it; only the music counts. We don't care how popular the artist is, who's backing them, and we don't care which genre bin they usually belong in. Only the music matters.

Pandora is available in a free ad supported version as well as a subscription based versions. The library is huge; ~400.000 songs from more than 20.000 artists. You can buy the songs you discover, if you wish, thanks to the partnership with Amazon and iTunes.

I threw some famous as well as unknown artists at it and I have spent the evening listening to lots of great music.

Thanks for the tip Paolo!

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There is plenty of oxygen on the moon

The lunar dust is a major problem for austronauts going to the moon. The dust is very small and with jagged edges that attaches to everything and is very abrashive. It partially wore its way through the outer gloves of the space suits of the first astronauts. The more they tried to brush it away, the more it worked its way into the fabric of the space suits.

The good news is that lunar dust is full of oxygen just laying around:

An early, persistent problem noted by Apollo astronauts on the Moon was dust. It got everywhere, including into their lungs. Oddly enough, that may be where future Moon explorers get their next breath of air: The moon's dusty layer of soil is nearly half oxygen.

The trick is extracting it.

Several teams are working on the challenge and they are already able to extract half of the oxygen from the lunar dust.

NASA and the Florida Space Research Institute, through NASA's Centennial Challenge, are sponsoring MoonROx, the Moon Regolith Oxygen competition. A $250,000 prize goes to the team that can extract 5 kg of breathable oxygen from JSC-1 lunar simulant in just 8 hours.

The competition closes June 1, 2008, but the challenge of living on other planets will last for generations.

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3D Papercraft

Bored of making just paper airplanes? The 3D Papercraft site has a lot of 3D-Papercraft projects in many different categories; animals, town, lucky items, famous buildings, science, toys, origami, seasons & holidays, and of course, kids. Some of the animals, like the Golden Retriever is particularly easy to make. Just print the instructions, cut and bend:

The paper version of the Himeji Castle in Japan is a “bit” more complex but the result is impressive:
 

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The 2 second tent from Decathlon

Decathlons Quechua brand has a cool 2 second tent:

No problems with hard ground, missing plugs and poles. Just release the tent and it unfolds itself in 2 seconds. The larger version is slower at 3 seconds but it has more space.

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Pink Panther 6 DVD box set

I recently got 6 DVD The Pink Panther Film Collection as a gift.

Peter Sellers is just fantastic in the role of Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The DVD set contains some cartoons, special features and the five first Pink Panther movies:

• The Pink Panther (1964)


• A Shot in the Dark (1964)


• The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)


• Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978)


• Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)

Great fun even though it does not include the latest movies like Return of the Pink Panther and Son of the Pink Panther with Roberto Benigni.

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PHLAT: an improved user interface for Windows Desktop Search

PHLAT is a new interface for Windows Desktop Search by the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Team at Microsoft Research. PHLAT lets you easily specify queries and filters, integrating search and browse in one intuitive interface. In addition, Phlat supports a unified tagging (labeling) scheme for organizing personal content across storage systems like files, email, etc.

Read the Getting started guide to learn more about the new interface.

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An extensible MP3 player for $8.50

It does not have the sexy looks of an iPod but it is cool anyway:

Evergreen's DN-2000 MP3 player only costs $8.50 and plays music from standard SD cards. It has everything you need: volume control, previous/next, start/stop/pause etc. No battery wasting menus. Just a simple, yet functional, MP3 player.

It should not take long before MP3 players are branded and given away like USB keys are today.

Via SciFi Tech