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imeem - It's like napster 1.0 with a web interface - upload your music collection to their servers and listen to any piece of music from everyone else's collection - it has practically any piece of music you'd ever want to hear on there, and has even negotiated revenue sharing deals with a load of labels to pay them for people listening to their tunes.

These services are pretty useful for sneaking links past automated link censorship systems. The example I most commonly encounter is users who want to embed content on their myspace pages from sites like imeem.com, which is apparently such a threat to the myspace monopoly that you can't even mention the text 'imeem.com' on myspace. So people use it to make the imeem media players work on myspace (of course they have to use a service other than TinyURL because that's also banned by myspace for this reason). Now that's a pretty tame example, there are probably more important sites where the links get censored for information control reasons, so at least against one type of automated censorship the short URL services help strengthen the interner.

Has nobody noticed that they're sharing all their music for free (ad supported) on imeem.com - I mean I can't believe that nobody responding to this has mentioned that 6 months ago they were suing this company and now they're sharing all their music through them.

The fact that they were so big meant people still used them even though every other site offered better quality. And the people running other sites had to deal with the fact that the content partners that understood youtube would ship them youtube quality videos, regardless of the site in question. now if only youtube would let you upload mp3's directly like imeem.com they might get me insterested.

Seriously, people do like downloading files, but many more appear to be happy to browse sites like youtube and its clones for videos, and imeem and it's blossoming collection of immitators for their music needs - not to mention the various agregator sites. Why download a client, share your bandwidth and put yourself at risk from getting sued by the RIAA/MPAA or at risk from wierd viruses from the sofware you're downloading when you can just upload your media to a website and proclaim to the world that you love it? I mean the big record labels have signed on to allow free sharing of music via imeem and that in itself must take a huge number of potential file sharers out of the equation. Sure the videos aren't really dvd quality yet, and while the music may be cd quality it's still bound up in a browser, but you can't beat the price, convenience or the fact that it's instant and on demand.

Seriously, people do like downloading files, but many more appear to be happy to browse sites like youtube and its clones for videos, and imeem and it's blossoming collection of immitators for their music needs - not to mention the various agregator sites. Why download a client, share your bandwidth and put yourself at risk from getting sued by the RIAA/MPAA or at risk from wierd viruses from the sofware you're downloading when you can just upload your media to a website and proclaim to the world that you love it? I mean the big record labels have signed on to allow free sharing of music via imeem and that in itself must take a huge number of potential file sharers out of the equation. Sure the videos aren't really dvd quality yet, and while the music may be cd quality it's still bound up in a browser, but you can't beat the price, convenience or the fact that it's instant and on demand.

Seriously, people do like downloading files, but many more appear to be happy to browse sites like youtube and its clones for videos, and imeem and it's blossoming collection of immitators for their music needs - not to mention the various agregator sites. Why download a client, share your bandwidth and put yourself at risk from getting sued by the RIAA/MPAA or at risk from wierd viruses from the sofware you're downloading when you can just upload your media to a website and proclaim to the world that you love it? I mean the big record labels have signed on to allow free sharing of music via imeem and that in itself must take a huge number of potential file sharers out of the equation. Sure the videos aren't really dvd quality yet, and while the music may be cd quality it's still bound up in a browser, but you can't beat the price, convenience or the fact that it's instant and on demand.

Who brought the Popstation into this world
http://groups.imeem.com/PhwrOdIK/video/q92O96zd/popstation_review/

This comes the same week that imeem announced a deal with EMI - adding on to Sony, BMG, Warners and a ton of smaller indie labels. For online experience there's no way the official napster can compete against imeem - imeem is like youtube for mp3's, users upload their music collections to their profiles and then anyone can listen to them instantly. imeem uses snocap's audio id system to figure out who gets paid, and we all know that snocap was created by shawn fanning, so imeem is the new napster

imeem.com does all that, and it's also 100% legal. It's got any kind of music you care to name, available to listen to instantly.

imeem is a great example of how media filtering can work to everyone's advantage, after you upload your mp3's their media filtering figures out what the track is you've just uploaded and depending on the results the music will be shared in youtube style either as a full length track with the copyright holder getting a cut of the advertising, or if the copyright holder has said no it'll just be a 30 second sample with links to iTunes/amazon to buy. imeem is using snocap for their song fingerprinting - if you rememebr snocap was originally seen as a plugin to a p2p sharing network, but the folks at imeem seem to have done away with the p2p part and just let users upload the music straight to their website. So it's like napster, except that it provides instant gratification, no waiting to listen to the track, or find out that the link is merely a 'broken' sample.

You know youtube posts all its; stuff in even tinier than hell 320x240 resolution at a partly 300kbit encoding bandwidth.

Even though almost every other site uses better video quality people are still stuck on youtube. Hell I see people attaching music to a single image so they can upload it to youtube and share their favourite tracks - all that effort when there's sites like imeem.com that let you post and share the mp3's, and do it legally.

So, viacom has added one more media site to the mix.

You might have missed out on imeem.com or at least ignored them ever since they changed from being a client/IM based p2p network to being a social media site about 2 years ago. But for the last 6 months they've been using automated content filtering for the music that people are posting to the site. Some of the people who register their content are have deals with imeem which allows the free sharing of their music - labels like Warners, Sony, BMG, Nettwerk, Beggars etc etc, and of course there are a few labels who have their tracks reduced to 30 second samples.

It should be noted that imeem announced all its big deals after turning its system on so presumably the content identification system helped make those media deals possible.

Spiralfrog already offers 'DRM' tied downloads supported by advertising for some major labels, the downloads can be copied to 'plays for sure' media players but not burned to CD. Of course because it uses windows DRM its Windows + Internet Explorer only Meanwhile imeem AKA 'youtube for music' lets you stream music uploaded by its users, providing the music is licensed from Sony, BMG, Warners or one of their other partners, it's a cooler approach in some ways because the user generated side of things gives you access to stuff that would never be heard on a catalog driven site. It works in any browser with a flash plugin so it's totally multiplatform, providing you just want to listen rather than download(and rate, comment, tag and all those other social things).

Most casual users downloading music and video from p2p networks aren't looking for permanent copies they just want to listen to a track or watch a tv show so more and more people I know are now using websites for their music and video. youtube.com has a ton of deals in place for legal content sharing and for music imeem.com has advertising sharing deals with music industry titans like Sony, Warners and BMG. Why download when you can just go to a website, type in a band's name and instantly listen to their music for free?

Sony/BMG just signed a deal with imeem.com which gives them a share of imeem's advertising in exchange for streaming rights to sony's records. No I'll bet that none of you have used imeem so I'll explain why this no-rip statement conflicts with the deal. Imeem is basicly 'youtube for music' users upload music from thei favourite artists and anyone on imeem can listen to them - providing the music is something that imeem has the rights to stream. But wait, where would users get mp3s (or oggs) from Sony to make this work? Maybe they'd prefer users download from p2p networks instead of ripping?

Might be interesting to compare itunes vs amazon vs imeem vs spiralfrog - imeem.com and spirafrog are both free music services supported by advertising. imeem is a little like youtube but it has become more music orientated and allows users to listen to CD quality music on demand via a flash based player, they've signed sony,bmg and warner brothers on top of the usual mess of indie labels and whatever the users have uploaded. Spiralfrog allows downloads and has universal as their biggest label, but the downloads are DRM encapsulated windows media files which can be copied to mp3 players but not burned to CD, spiralfrog requires a special Active-X plugin so its windows + IE only. I wonder whether the average user will tolerate the restrictions in exchange for being free, or if they'll just stick with p2p downloads instead?

The idea for anywhereCD was great, maybe a decade ago, I remember a few digital music companies tried similar things but nothing ever on the scale of this. However now the labels are starting to change from their 'sue everyone' attitude which has helped contribute to the digital music monoculture where you play with Apple or you don't play at all. Perhaps most radical is Warner brothers who have basicly made their whole catalog available for free, online at imeem.com - a couple of months ago they were suing imeem over its 'youtube for music' model, but then they surprised everyone by signing a deal.

Apple seem to be the only people who've managed a paid digital music store with any success. eMusic has been going forever without any real traction, Napster continues to lose money, meanwhile you can get free, legal major label music from places like imeem.com which is all ad supported.

I pretty much started out with exactly the same goals as yourself, I wanted half decent aperture and the possibility of astrophotography. the $1000 budget isn't so ridiculous if you already own a ddigital SLR, hen instead of paying $$$ for a ccd you can just mount your SLR at prime focus.

If it wasn't for the 'interested in photography' part then I'd just recommend an 8" (or larger) dobsonian, a large newtonian reflector on a simple mount, for under $1000 you can get up to 12" of aperture which is more than enough to let you see galaxies and nebula under dark skies
Anttlers Optics has a great in house brand, but you can also look at Celestron and Orion

BUt, for photography you need a steady, equatorial mount with a drive on the RA axis, which means you need to shrink the size of the scope to make it stable enough. I'd recommend Orion's 80mm Refractor on their Skyview Pro Mount, that'll sneak you in under your $1000 mark. The 80ED is an apochromatic scope which means they use special glass to eliminate Chromatic aberration, and because it's a refractor it produces nice high contrast images. The focal length is 600mm which is about as high magnification you can go before the limitations of the mount start to show up. For the mount you need to get singe axis drive ($50) to make it track, and preferably a polar alignment scope so you can get the thing aligned enough to take images of greater than 30 seconds (which is the longest exposure time on many digital SLRs).

The great thing about the mount is that you can upgrade it with computerised object location or even GOTO capabilities later when you want. It's also sturdy enough to hold larger scopes if you don't need to take photos. You can drop an 8" reflector on there, or a 9.5" Cassegrain.

Now, this setup will not let you photograph planets, they're too small, if you want to image planets you need to spend some more money on a barlow lens, and a camera which is smaller and faster than the SLR - I use a converted phillips webcam, but you can save time and just buy a $100 camera that'll just work.

I should stress that this is an antry level photography system, the optics are pretty damn good, but the tracking is barely adequate, but it'll give you enough experiece to let you have fun. People will tell you it's a waste of time to even think about astrophotography on that budget, but I'm having loads of fun - even from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland.

Here's some of my images with my setup - same mount, same focal length, but it's a 100mm non-ED refractor which means more Chromatic aberration.
Orion Nebula
Andromeda
M51
The Moon
Jupiter
M13

I pretty much started out with exactly the same goals as yourself, I wanted half decent aperture and the possibility of astrophotography. the $1000 budget isn't so ridiculous if you already own a ddigital SLR, hen instead of paying $$$ for a ccd you can just mount your SLR at prime focus.

If it wasn't for the 'interested in photography' part then I'd just recommend an 8" (or larger) dobsonian, a large newtonian reflector on a simple mount, for under $1000 you can get up to 12" of aperture which is more than enough to let you see galaxies and nebula under dark skies
Anttlers Optics has a great in house brand, but you can also look at Celestron and Orion

BUt, for photography you need a steady, equatorial mount with a drive on the RA axis, which means you need to shrink the size of the scope to make it stable enough. I'd recommend Orion's 80mm Refractor on their Skyview Pro Mount, that'll sneak you in under your $1000 mark. The 80ED is an apochromatic scope which means they use special glass to eliminate Chromatic aberration, and because it's a refractor it produces nice high contrast images. The focal length is 600mm which is about as high magnification you can go before the limitations of the mount start to show up. For the mount you need to get singe axis drive ($50) to make it track, and preferably a polar alignment scope so you can get the thing aligned enough to take images of greater than 30 seconds (which is the longest exposure time on many digital SLRs).

The great thing about the mount is that you can upgrade it with computerised object location or even GOTO capabilities later when you want. It's also sturdy enough to hold larger scopes if you don't need to take photos. You can drop an 8" reflector on there, or a 9.5" Cassegrain.

Now, this setup will not let you photograph planets, they're too small, if you want to image planets you need to spend some more money on a barlow lens, and a camera which is smaller and faster than the SLR - I use a converted phillips webcam, but you can save time and just buy a $100 camera that'll just work.

I should stress that this is an antry level photography system, the optics are pretty damn good, but the tracking is barely adequate, but it'll give you enough experiece to let you have fun. People will tell you it's a waste of time to even think about astrophotography on that budget, but I'm having loads of fun - even from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland.

Here's some of my images with my setup - same mount, same focal length, but it's a 100mm non-ED refractor which means more Chromatic aberration.
Orion Nebula
Andromeda
M51
The Moon
Jupiter
M13

I pretty much started out with exactly the same goals as yourself, I wanted half decent aperture and the possibility of astrophotography. the $1000 budget isn't so ridiculous if you already own a ddigital SLR, hen instead of paying $$$ for a ccd you can just mount your SLR at prime focus.

If it wasn't for the 'interested in photography' part then I'd just recommend an 8" (or larger) dobsonian, a large newtonian reflector on a simple mount, for under $1000 you can get up to 12" of aperture which is more than enough to let you see galaxies and nebula under dark skies
Anttlers Optics has a great in house brand, but you can also look at Celestron and Orion

BUt, for photography you need a steady, equatorial mount with a drive on the RA axis, which means you need to shrink the size of the scope to make it stable enough. I'd recommend Orion's 80mm Refractor on their Skyview Pro Mount, that'll sneak you in under your $1000 mark. The 80ED is an apochromatic scope which means they use special glass to eliminate Chromatic aberration, and because it's a refractor it produces nice high contrast images. The focal length is 600mm which is about as high magnification you can go before the limitations of the mount start to show up. For the mount you need to get singe axis drive ($50) to make it track, and preferably a polar alignment scope so you can get the thing aligned enough to take images of greater than 30 seconds (which is the longest exposure time on many digital SLRs).

The great thing about the mount is that you can upgrade it with computerised object location or even GOTO capabilities later when you want. It's also sturdy enough to hold larger scopes if you don't need to take photos. You can drop an 8" reflector on there, or a 9.5" Cassegrain.

Now, this setup will not let you photograph planets, they're too small, if you want to image planets you need to spend some more money on a barlow lens, and a camera which is smaller and faster than the SLR - I use a converted phillips webcam, but you can save time and just buy a $100 camera that'll just work.

I should stress that this is an antry level photography system, the optics are pretty damn good, but the tracking is barely adequate, but it'll give you enough experiece to let you have fun. People will tell you it's a waste of time to even think about astrophotography on that budget, but I'm having loads of fun - even from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland.

Here's some of my images with my setup - same mount, same focal length, but it's a 100mm non-ED refractor which means more Chromatic aberration.
Orion Nebula
Andromeda
M51
The Moon
Jupiter
M13

I pretty much started out with exactly the same goals as yourself, I wanted half decent aperture and the possibility of astrophotography. the $1000 budget isn't so ridiculous if you already own a ddigital SLR, hen instead of paying $$$ for a ccd you can just mount your SLR at prime focus.

If it wasn't for the 'interested in photography' part then I'd just recommend an 8" (or larger) dobsonian, a large newtonian reflector on a simple mount, for under $1000 you can get up to 12" of aperture which is more than enough to let you see galaxies and nebula under dark skies
Anttlers Optics has a great in house brand, but you can also look at Celestron and Orion

BUt, for photography you need a steady, equatorial mount with a drive on the RA axis, which means you need to shrink the size of the scope to make it stable enough. I'd recommend Orion's 80mm Refractor on their Skyview Pro Mount, that'll sneak you in under your $1000 mark. The 80ED is an apochromatic scope which means they use special glass to eliminate Chromatic aberration, and because it's a refractor it produces nice high contrast images. The focal length is 600mm which is about as high magnification you can go before the limitations of the mount start to show up. For the mount you need to get singe axis drive ($50) to make it track, and preferably a polar alignment scope so you can get the thing aligned enough to take images of greater than 30 seconds (which is the longest exposure time on many digital SLRs).

The great thing about the mount is that you can upgrade it with computerised object location or even GOTO capabilities later when you want. It's also sturdy enough to hold larger scopes if you don't need to take photos. You can drop an 8" reflector on there, or a 9.5" Cassegrain.

Now, this setup will not let you photograph planets, they're too small, if you want to image planets you need to spend some more money on a barlow lens, and a camera which is smaller and faster than the SLR - I use a converted phillips webcam, but you can save time and just buy a $100 camera that'll just work.

I should stress that this is an antry level photography system, the optics are pretty damn good, but the tracking is barely adequate, but it'll give you enough experiece to let you have fun. People will tell you it's a waste of time to even think about astrophotography on that budget, but I'm having loads of fun - even from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland.

Here's some of my images with my setup - same mount, same focal length, but it's a 100mm non-ED refractor which means more Chromatic aberration.
Orion Nebula
Andromeda
M51
The Moon
Jupiter
M13

I pretty much started out with exactly the same goals as yourself, I wanted half decent aperture and the possibility of astrophotography. the $1000 budget isn't so ridiculous if you already own a ddigital SLR, hen instead of paying $$$ for a ccd you can just mount your SLR at prime focus.

If it wasn't for the 'interested in photography' part then I'd just recommend an 8" (or larger) dobsonian, a large newtonian reflector on a simple mount, for under $1000 you can get up to 12" of aperture which is more than enough to let you see galaxies and nebula under dark skies
Anttlers Optics has a great in house brand, but you can also look at Celestron and Orion

BUt, for photography you need a steady, equatorial mount with a drive on the RA axis, which means you need to shrink the size of the scope to make it stable enough. I'd recommend Orion's 80mm Refractor on their Skyview Pro Mount, that'll sneak you in under your $1000 mark. The 80ED is an apochromatic scope which means they use special glass to eliminate Chromatic aberration, and because it's a refractor it produces nice high contrast images. The focal length is 600mm which is about as high magnification you can go before the limitations of the mount start to show up. For the mount you need to get singe axis drive ($50) to make it track, and preferably a polar alignment scope so you can get the thing aligned enough to take images of greater than 30 seconds (which is the longest exposure time on many digital SLRs).

The great thing about the mount is that you can upgrade it with computerised object location or even GOTO capabilities later when you want. It's also sturdy enough to hold larger scopes if you don't need to take photos. You can drop an 8" reflector on there, or a 9.5" Cassegrain.

Now, this setup will not let you photograph planets, they're too small, if you want to image planets you need to spend some more money on a barlow lens, and a camera which is smaller and faster than the SLR - I use a converted phillips webcam, but you can save time and just buy a $100 camera that'll just work.

I should stress that this is an antry level photography system, the optics are pretty damn good, but the tracking is barely adequate, but it'll give you enough experiece to let you have fun. People will tell you it's a waste of time to even think about astrophotography on that budget, but I'm having loads of fun - even from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland.

Here's some of my images with my setup - same mount, same focal length, but it's a 100mm non-ED refractor which means more Chromatic aberration.
Orion Nebula
Andromeda
M51
The Moon
Jupiter
M13

I pretty much started out with exactly the same goals as yourself, I wanted half decent aperture and the possibility of astrophotography. the $1000 budget isn't so ridiculous if you already own a ddigital SLR, hen instead of paying $$$ for a ccd you can just mount your SLR at prime focus.

If it wasn't for the 'interested in photography' part then I'd just recommend an 8" (or larger) dobsonian, a large newtonian reflector on a simple mount, for under $1000 you can get up to 12" of aperture which is more than enough to let you see galaxies and nebula under dark skies
Anttlers Optics has a great in house brand, but you can also look at Celestron and Orion

BUt, for photography you need a steady, equatorial mount with a drive on the RA axis, which means you need to shrink the size of the scope to make it stable enough. I'd recommend Orion's 80mm Refractor on their Skyview Pro Mount, that'll sneak you in under your $1000 mark. The 80ED is an apochromatic scope which means they use special glass to eliminate Chromatic aberration, and because it's a refractor it produces nice high contrast images. The focal length is 600mm which is about as high magnification you can go before the limitations of the mount start to show up. For the mount you need to get singe axis drive ($50) to make it track, and preferably a polar alignment scope so you can get the thing aligned enough to take images of greater than 30 seconds (which is the longest exposure time on many digital SLRs).

The great thing about the mount is that you can upgrade it with computerised object location or even GOTO capabilities later when you want. It's also sturdy enough to hold larger scopes if you don't need to take photos. You can drop an 8" reflector on there, or a 9.5" Cassegrain.

Now, this setup will not let you photograph planets, they're too small, if you want to image planets you need to spend some more money on a barlow lens, and a camera which is smaller and faster than the SLR - I use a converted phillips webcam, but you can save time and just buy a $100 camera that'll just work.

I should stress that this is an antry level photography system, the optics are pretty damn good, but the tracking is barely adequate, but it'll give you enough experiece to let you have fun. People will tell you it's a waste of time to even think about astrophotography on that budget, but I'm having loads of fun - even from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland.

Here's some of my images with my setup - same mount, same focal length, but it's a 100mm non-ED refractor which means more Chromatic aberration.
Orion Nebula
Andromeda
M51
The Moon
Jupiter
M13

THere's several pieces of software which do som parts of this - Registax is what I use, but amateurs usually only have enough aperture to make this work for bright objects like planets. You can take a good quality webcam (the top of the line Phillips webcams are the best bang for yout buck), record some video of a planet through a telescope and then pick out the least distorted images before adding them together to create the final image. Now, the trick is getting the best measurement of which images are undistorted, and getting enough light in each frame while keeping the esposure time short enough to beat the atmosphere.

Look at the planetary images here for my attempts at this technique.

The only internet radio I listen to these days is BBC radio, you can't beat it for quality programming and no ad's, that's unlikely to get affected by any internet radio royalty ruling because (a) it's main listener base uses old fashioned radio wave technology and (b) it's in the UK where licensing clearly controlled by some more enlightened individuals. There is another place to go if you want more control over your listening - imeem.com is kinda like youtube for music - people upload music and then you can listen to music. Imeem does some mojo to figure out who the artists are and pays them a cut of the ad revenue, but if the artist has said no then all you can hear is a 30 second clip of the tune. The most astonishing thing is that somehow they've managed to convince one of the major labels - Warners - to sign on, this means that artists like Metallica and Madonna who used to sue site like napster are now supporting 'free' sharing of music. Sure there are a lot of artists still blocking their music, but there's so much in the way of fully licensed music that it's hard to run out of things to listen to. In a way it's like napster was, but with instant gratification and with the warm fuzzy feeling that the artists are getting compensated every time you listen. Forget most internet radio, much of it remains at the same production values as a winamp playlist in shuffle mode, I left that behind as soon as imeem turned up.

You might have missed this imeem.com has been doing this for a while, as well as the usual selection of indie labels the massive news was that Warner Brothers music has basicly given them streaming rights to their catalog which includes hundreds of mainstream artists. All advertising supported and free (well I guess you have to sign up for an account)

After suing file sharers for many years, the music business is starting to come around to the internet, In case you missed it the big news was that Warner Brothers signed a deal with media sharing site imeem.com, a couple of months after suiing them for being 'the youtube of music'. 5 years ago I'd never have imagined this happening, but now things are changing.

Another popular media site imeem has been using audio fingerprinting on user content for a while now, they have deals with the usual clutch of indie labels and more interestingly they have a deal with Warner Brothers (who up until a month ago were suing imeem for copyright violations). The main draw of the site is 'youtube for music', and I guess imeem has some process to detect what is licensed and what isn't because some uploads are turned into 30 second previews if they're not covered by one of imeem's deals.

If you're the kind of person who finds themselves wasting all their time surfing youtube you had better stay away from imeem because it will suck you in forever.

I've always been a Queen fan, the most educated rock band in the world, Brian a bit of a hero for me.

I started my astronomy PhD in 1995 at Armagh Observatory, but I also wasted a lot of time hacking on multimedia software for linux building mp3 dj'ing and streaming software.... so I found myself with some job offers in California at internet music companies including Napster, myplay.com and right now imeem.com (which has evolved into youtube for music and video).

I still hope that one day I might find the time between work and family to resume some original research, at the end of next month I'm helping collect data on a meteor shower so there are still tenuous links to the world of research.

Maybe they're just using the web browser on the wii to watch tv from youtube and other places -
imeem is probably the most complete of the wiiptimised sites I've seen, since imeem does music and video it covers the basic stuff you'd want to see from a media center. You can't access the blogs, photos, chat or social features from teh wii but you can pretty much get all the music, and I guess they've just signed a deal with warner brothers so there should be more than indie stuff up there.

User uploads music to share with friends, imeem checks to see what label it's on and then pays the label every time it's listened to. Doesn't matter if you download it or rip it, imeem users Snocap to figure out what the music sounds like.
They just signed a deal with Warner brothers too, who were suing them until a couple of days ago.

Also if you're a fan of imeem.com and their social media platform then you can peruse most of the content from your wii using a specially designed interface targeted at nintendos console. Imeem is the best place I've found online for music and the wii integration is good enough to make it my main media player.

Also if you're a fan of imeem.com and their social media platform then you can peruse most of the content from your wii using a specially designed interface targeted at nintendos console. Imeem is the best place I've found online for music and the wii integration is good enough to make it my main media player.

I crunched the mathematics a while back and wrote an article exploring the limits of cameras with compact optics such as those found in cellphones. It's all about the light

http://snm.imeem.com/blogs/2006/10/16/23WDH-33/lim its_on_digital_cameras

OGG, ACC, WTFE. Here's an MP3 a PIM0 posted.

I had no idea how young until I saw this video of a 2 year old girl playing old fashioned records - I'll wager this is probably the cutest reply to this topic, and the one most likely to give audiophiles a heart attack as they watch a toddler take the record from its sleeve and put it on the turntable.

Wow, where does one even start to combat the trolling.

If you look in the Mono.* namespace they've developed a LOT of Mono on its own, including Mono.Xml, Mono.Unix, Mono.Math and a wide vareity of other tools. Not to mention now there are various open source projects out there like DBus#, Dumbarton, and of course Tao.

Mono is a definite option now for cross-platform applications (Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, etc) and extends the compatibility to .NET 1.1 and is coming up on having a .NET 2.0 compatible class library.

Don't get yourself mixed up, Mono does allow developers to use .NET code on other platforms, but it is really a powerful framework unto itself nowadays.

I took a few photos from my house in Oakland -

http://meems.imeem.com/iQrVatKB/photo/blSLxv2H/1lA W_FAX99Dry/

I'd managed to grab a few shots at sunset, but I wanted a shot with both the sun and the comet in frame - so I held my sun filter out as far away from the camera as I could manage, it dimmed the solar disc but left it visible, a wee bit of adjustment to the luminance curves was needed to bring out the comet at the top left of the shot. Sorry it's kind of small, I just used the stock 55mm lens on my camera so I could be sure I'd get a wide enought field of view.

This one shows the whole event and then replays it zoomed in on the sunspot and on the filament destruction

http://meems.imeem.com/iQrVatKB/video/wPgDIh4_/sol ar_tsunami/

A couple of days ago if you googled 'Solar Tsunami' the top hit was from some nutter who had a whole website that was promoting the theory that underneath the photosphere there was a solid iron-silica surface, thankfully the scientists had enough imagination to call it a tsunami rather than a Moreton wave.

I can think of some other crackpot science that needs to be googlebombed into non-significance.

Imeem may not have screwed up the video, but I on the other hand managed to screw up the link.

cuz, you know, has so much more geek cred than youtube. And imeem's video uploader didn't try to squish the 1:1 aspect ratio into 4:3 so it looks a lot better.

He did a fantastic APU costume in previous years, that was my grand plan for this year, except that my 4 month old son Orion was going to be strapped into the pilot's seat. However procrastination got the better of me and with a few hours before the first halloween party I attached some constrols to his baby carrier and wired them into a cardboard hat that said 'Mind Control Unit' - it may not have been 10% as cool as the power loader outfit, but it did win a prize for originality.

There's some photos here, completely unimpressive compared to the original article
http://snm.imeem.com/photo/MJDZtjMt/McddntHQ57Yp0/

Of course, next year he'll probably be too big to be the pilot.

I already see a ton of myspace pages crossposting media content from imeem.com pages - they'd probably use use imeem.com, since it has more features than myspace now, except for the fact that imeem stops users from applying the blink tag to everything.

If you really want to see the mini episode you can check it out here, all 6 minutes of standing around in the TARDIS trying to explain the whole regeneration thing. http://meems.imeem.com/Xfr8x3GL/video/mNasvAfl/doc tor_who_mini_episode/

Ever wonder what the Doctor Who christmas get together must be like? http://meems.imeem.com/Xfr8x3GL/video/OKZE6cfu/doc tor_who_christmas_party/

There's a fantastic little video spot that assembles all the best bits of the metroid games in order of the story 'arc' that has developed on imeem - it's accompanied by some funny commentary about how she just can't hold onto her power ups and her relationship with the metroids.
Definitly worth a watch even if you've played all the games and know all the bits.

When I found Warren Ellis had an account on imeem.com that was the point I realised that it was a cool place to be after all ;-)

It's funny how certain people can lend credibility to communities.

Well you may be missing the channel, but you can still get many of x-plays finest moments online in bite sized video form at places like youtube, imeem etc - imeem even has a meem devoted to X-play so you can watch segments without having to sneak around Fastlane and Formula Drift.