Category Archives: Picks

Hugin

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There are two ways to make really high resoution photos.  The first is to have a camera with a bazillion MP.  The other is to take a whole bunch of pictures from the same spot and stitch them together into a panorama or really big picture.  If you want to go the second route, I recommend Hugin, a free, open source application that makes it easy to do. In the last two months, Hugin had another update to 0.7 which added a number of new features. In the area of panoramas, you could pay for a lot worse programs than this free one.

Songbird

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If you are not an iTunes fan or just want to try something new for music, I would recommend checking out Songbird.  Made by Mozilla, those folks who do Firefox, Songbird is an open source music player that has many of the features of iTunes, but also the flexibility to add plugins, just like Firefox.  It also has a browser built into it, so if you like scowering the web for new music, Songbird lets you do that easily and then also download songs directly into Songbird.

Another nice feature, especially to figure out if you want to use it or not is that you can have Songbird use your existing iTunes library without changing it at all.  This way you can check it out without messing up iTunes.  I am not sold on it personally for me, but it is the first program that has made me look at anything besides iTunes in a long time.

24 Ways

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Another late pick works in my favor as I get to recommend a site that has been going for 3 years now in doing a web development advent calendar.  Each day of December 24ways.org will give you a new article about web design and development. In addition to the new articles, their back catalog has some great material as well. With this year they have a new design as well which is pretty darn impressive as well.

Things

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This week I am picking the combo of Things for the Mac and iPhone. If you are looking for a simple but versitile task management tool, Things is fantastic. Both of the versions have the same features so once you get used to one, you are well versed in the other. When you combine that with the wi-fi sync, you can easily keep track of tasks at both spots. They can be used indepentantly as well but both together is fantastic.the iPhone app is $10 and the desktop version is $40.

Galactic Comics

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This is going to seem like a weird choice, but this week I am picking the current state of galactic comics from both Marvel and DC.

Starting with the Annihilation story in 2006, Marvel galactic comics have been some of the best that the company has to offer.  From an emmense story using all of the biggest and best scifi characters to the wonderful art throughout, Annihilation jumpstarted things for Marvel.  Spinning out of that came an ongoing series for Nova which quickly led into a sequel to Annihilation, Conquest.  While using some lesser known characters for Conquest, it was still good.  So good, that it had it's own spinoff, Guardians of the Galaxy. With two ongoing series and the forecast of another event, War of the Kings, space stories are and will continue to do well for Marvel.

DC has also been doing well through it's Green Lantern series. While it started getting better with the Rebirth miniseries, it really picked up with the Sinestro Corp Wars. That well down crossover event garnered a lot of attention for how well it was brought together. When you put that together with the evolving mythos being built around the lanterns, you get some great stuff.

If you are into comics and/or scifi, you owe it to yourself to check out one or both of the universes. You can find many of these in trade inexpensively making it a great way to get acclimated and introduced to either.