WirelessDoc

Internet Archive: Free Downloads: LibriVox

Internet Archive: Free Downloads: LibriVox.

Here's a listing of free audio books recorded by volunteers reading books in the public domain, which are mostly classics.

Now, with the so-so reviews of The Lost Symbol, I think I might check these out.

LibriVox.org They mention how you can volunteer.

And we upgrade...

iTunes 9.0.1 & QuickTime: I'm only interested in Webcasts, formerly known as Podcasts. The Genius function doesn't do it for me, I'd rather do this with Pandora.com. Rent movies? Nah. I'll do Unbox Video with Amazon.com, as well as the music MP3s.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3: I'm still trying to figure out a way to manage opt-in cookies. Just for the heck of it, I've enabled notification each time a cookie is to be placed. The NoScript add-on also provides an interesting perspective, alerting you for each and every script that will run on the Web page. Still evaluating Zotero for scholarly research and citation management.

Google Chrome 3.0.195.21: Fast and stable, but it does choke on Web sites that auto-update, but this is not a major problem. My most-used browser, now.

Microsoft Security Essentials: Yes, I enable automatic updates for the second Tuesday security upgrades, and since I'm not running an MRI scanner I'm not encumbered by the FDA. Running XP SP3.

Med Students on Twitter, Facebook: No Patient Privacy? - TIME

Med Students on Twitter, Facebook: No Patient Privacy? - TIME.

A new survey of medical-school deans finds that unprofessional conduct on blogs and social-networking sites is increasing among medical students. Although med students fully understand patient-confidentiality laws and are indoctrinated in the high ethical standards to which their white-coated profession is held, many of them still use Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and other sites to depict and discuss lewd behavior and sexual misconduct, make discriminatory statements and discuss patient cases in violation of confidentiality laws, according to the survey, which was published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Of the 80 medical-school deans questioned, 60% reported incidents involving unprofessional postings and 13% admitted to incidents that violated patient privacy.

I could think of beneficial uses of images and media that could be kept on a connected handheld or smartphone for medical students, such as how to do certain procedures. But, of course, all this would have to provide anonymity and require the patient's consent.

But what's going on here is just downright snarky, and easily traceable.

Shirt of Ultimate Disambiguation

ThinkGeek :: Shirt of Ultimate Disambiguation .

"Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard"

"I'll buy almost anything if it's shiny and made by Apple."

Passphotoprint.com: quick way to DIY passport photos

Guess which photo costs $14 and which 31 cents?

I had the polaroid picture in the lower right taken at a Kinko's in Manhattan for $14. (The retake was even worse.)

Then, I found out about Passphotoprint.com. This Web site takes your 2x2 inch digital photo and gangs it up on a 4x6 inch print. I took a 15-minute walk to the nearest RiteAid drugstore, inserted the SD card into their Kodak printing machine, and they produced an excellent 4x6 print in minutes for 31 cents.

To take the photo I set my Nikon point & shoot S10 on a pile of books. I was facing the window in my bedroom and used the self timer and fill flash. I had a piece of white foamcore laying around that I propped up behind me for the background. I kept taking photos till I felt I got an acceptable shot.

They guy at Kinko's was discussing when he should take his break with his supervisor when he did my photo. That polaroid doesn't even meet the specs for a passport photo.

A most excellent optical illusion

Yes, I woke up early this morning, 6am-ish, and did my Web research on medical informatics. So now I'm taking a break, waiting for Fedex to deliver my Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical software.

Here's a most excellent optical illusion created by a MIT professor, and served up on BoingBoing.net. Squares A and B are the same gray tone, despite what you're perceiving. I brought the image into Macromedia Fireworks (now Adobe), and sliced out a portion of the A square to bring it along side square B. Voila!:

Digital lifestyle: Amazon.com to Acquire Audible.com

From the Amazon PR Release:

"Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection and the broadest device compatibility in the industry," said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's senior vice president for worldwide digital media. "Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience."

They also plug the out of stock Kindle in the press release.

I've been using audiobooks to listen to John M. Barry's The Great Influenza (unabridged, just over 19 hours), Ian McEwan's Atonement, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. It was a little difficult with Gibson's work because he's invents new cyberwords and sometimes writes in sentence fragments which makes comprehension difficult. I chose to download the ebook of Cormac McCarthy's The Road for this reason.

The good thing about audiobooks is that you can listen while during your entire commute without interruption, and it's great for a long walk in the city. The really bad thing is that you can't bookmark or navigate to a specific chapter. This works for fiction, but for a science book that you want to use for future reference, it's a real pain.

Mobipocket is great for reading ebooks on your smartphone. You can annotate, bookmark, even draw pictures with their free reader. I've even put chapters of Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment 2008 on my Treo 700p using the desktop Mobipocket software. You lose the illustrations, charts and graphs, but having the text on hand that you can bookmark works for me. It also loads the texts onto the SD card, so can carry many books without clogging up the phone's internal memory.

Multitouch is spreading to more devices

Uncle Walt says so.

This is the interface introduced with the Apple iPhone, then carried over to the iPod Touch. If you're not a gadget person, you might not realize that this is not the traditional touch screen used on what we called PDAs in the olden times, but it's that feature where you can flick, swipe and squeeze your finger tips on screen to navigate or resize an image.

It's now appearing on the the touchpad of the MacBookAir, and according to Mossberg, another company, Synaptics will use something similar for the touchpads it produces for laptop manufacturers.

And, you have the companies such as HTC who are making cell phones with a Multitouch-like capability to  ride on the coattails of the iPhones popularity.

Western Digital My Passport Essential portable hard drive gets a makeover

There's a new announcement about a design change, but I don't see much difference from the one I now have. I'm happy with the one I have as far as size and convenience is concerned. It comes with software that automates the back up process, and I would consider something like this is truly an essential item.

Anyway the PR says that  the newly designed models have capacities of 160, 250 and 320GB, with the last one priced at a reasonable $200.