The essence of travel (and life) in simple lines

by Jamie Rhein on

Here is a most charming, animated video from LInebuster that reminds me of what travel can feel like when you’re heading out into the unknown. There is the excitement, the thrill, and the unexpected dips and turns.

The song seems perfect, particularly since my travels through life this week has involved the hurricane caliber winds on Sunday that left much of Columbus, Ohio (and a wide-sweeping range of elsewhere) without electricity. Most fantastic are the enormous trees toppled like twigs. In the past few days, people have gone sight-seeing looking for them, just like they do when they search out Christmas light displays in December. If I would use one word to describe my mood, “startled” comes to mind.

Enjoy whatever ride you are on, even if it’s a doozy.

Daily deal – Creative Zen 8GB portable media player for $99

by Scott Carmichael on

In honor of the Apple event being held today, I’ve picked a daily deal that is not an iPod. The Creative Zen 8GB portable media player is a pretty sleek little device with a very impressive lineup of media features.It has been covered in the past by fellow Gadling blogger Tynan.

Naturally, it plays music in MP3 and WMA format, as well as music downloaded from subscription services. The player also supports video, in one of the widest range of formats available; MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, XviD, MJPEG and WMV9. If none of those abbreviations mean much, don’t worry; it essentially means that the player will display almost any kind of video file you throw at it including protected files from video rental services like Amazon Unbox.

The Zen 8GB also displays your photos, it has an FM radio, a clock/alarm function, an organizer with Microsoft Outlook synchronization and you can use it as a portable 8GB hard drive for storing your important files.

At $99 it is one of the cheapest multipurpose media players on the market, and the price at Amazon.com is about $30 cheaper than most other vendors. Amazon will even ship it for free.

Included in the package is the player, a USB cable, headphones and an installation CD. The 8GB of internal storage is enough for about 2000 songs, but you can expand this with a cheap SD card.

Our world in a single moment: 100 pictures, 100 words

by Abha Malpani on

I discovered Ten by Ten about 4 years ago in Benetton’s “Colors” magazine and ever since I’ve logged onto it countless times.

The website gives you an hourly update on what’s happening in the world through 100 pictures and 100 words, all scouted by a program that scans through RSS feeds from BBC, Reuters and NY Times.

The pictures you see appear in order of importance (left to right, top to bottom). The word corresponding to the image tells you something about the photo; click on the image and you can see the top headlines this hour alongside the picture.

So in a nutshell: the website automatically captures an hourly updated image of the world. Benetton’s Fabrica artist — Jonathan Harris — who came up with the idea, calls it Internet Art.

What’s also cool is that from November 2004 till date, you can get the “image of the world” for any year, any day, and any hour.

It beats all the “day in photos”/ “best of week photo” sections on any news-site. Simple, creative, brilliant.