PlanningWiz Maps Your Floor Plan

Lifehacker:

“Plan out your next redecoration or plot the layout of your next
furniture rearrangement with online room mapping tool PlanningWiz. You
can either load pre-made plans and modify them to suit your space or
create your own plan from scratch. There are templates for furniture
covering everything from couches to tables to beds and cribs. Save the
plans you create, share them via email, or print them out. You can even
customize the background of your floor plan, if you just can’t
visualize your new living room layout knowing the default flooring just
doesn’t match your swanky green shag carpeting. PlanningWiz is similar
to previously mentioned Furnish or even Google SketchUp, but there’s no download—all the magic happens in your web browser.”

PlanningWiz [via Download Squad]

Find and Embed Album Art in Your MP3 Collection

Lifehacker:

“Your
digital music doesn’t stay in one place, and it should look the same no
matter where it’s playing. But somehow, in all the transfers from
system to system, onto and off of MP3 players, and to and from the net,
the album art illustrations that should add visual cues and familiarity
seem to always get lost. If you’re looking to match up all your music
with their album covers, read on for a quick guide to the best tools
and sources for finding and locking down album art, no matter what
computer you’re using.”

READ FULL ARTICLE

Real-life Mario question boxes don’t dispense coins, unfortunately

DVICE:

“Do you ever wish that making money for you was as easy as it is for Mario?
I mean, when that guy needs coins he just finds a block marked with a
question mark and gives it a punch. Voilà: instant coins. Nobody knows
what he spends all these stupid coins on, but he sure does like
collecting them.

Well, street artist Posterchild wants to give you the same feeling
of coin collecting, which is why he’s been putting up question-mark
blocks all over public places. And if you want to join the fun, he has
instructions on his site for how you can build your own. Of course, the
materials cost real money, and when you build it no coins will actually
come out. But hey, it looks pretty sweet, no?”

Posterboy, via Urban Prankster

Gates’ Last Day At Microsoft

Slashdot: “Today is Bill Gates’ last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft.
After 33 years at the company, the one-time richest man in the world
will be retiring at 52 to spend more time guiding the charitable Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation. What would you buy him as a retirement
gift?”

Bookmark Previews Creates Thumbnails of All Your Bookmarks

Lifehacker:

“Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Bookmark Previews
creates thumbnail previews for all of your Firefox bookmarks. Once
installed, you can browse your bookmarks in a straight thumbnail view
or in an iTunes Cover Flow-esque album view. Apart from the impressive
eye candy, Bookmark Previews could be an especially handy tool for
organizing and cleaning out your bookmarks, since rather than
inspecting each link to determine what it’s pointing to, you can just
check the thumbnail to determine whether or not you need it. Bookmark
Previews creates previews each time you visit a bookmark, but since
your previews will be empty when you first install it, it can also
create previews for all of your bookmarks automatically in the
background. Bookmark Previews is free, works wherever Firefox does.”

Bookmark Previews [Firefox Add-ons]

Gigeresque Aliens car mod

OK, this is just nuts!

Boing Boing:

“This silver-toothed xenomorph mod job done by a group of energetic
sci-fi roughs from Krasnoyarsk, Russia is ready to hit the road at
90mph and chestburst right through the passenger cage of that dinky
little hybrid you bought to impress your girlfriend. Why are all the
coolest modders from Russia? A hereto unknown physical law of the
universe. or a powerful argument for the benefits of low-level
background radiation on the creative cortex of the human brain? One
suggestion: GPS unit that says “Stay on target! Stay on target!”

Behold, the (alien) queen of the road [DVICE]

Stanza – The Best eBook Reader on the Mac

There’s also an iPhone version in development!

Lexcycle:

Stanza: A Revolution in Reading

Introducing Stanza — the digital eBook reader for the Mac that reads like the real thing. Stanza combines the easy-to-read format of the printed word with the convenience of the digital world.

Featuring a clean, well-organized interface, Stanza is expressly designed for reading digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general web content. Stanza is built from the ground up to make reading on your Macintosh laptop or desktop an
enjoyable and hassle-free experience. It gives \ special attention to details that are usually overlooked in other software readers such as
hyphenation, text columnation, automatic text scrolling, and user-friendly page and chapter navigation. Lengthy content that can be tedious to read using a web browser or PDF viewer is easy and natural with Stanza.

Stanza features built-in support for HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and Rich Text Format reading, as well as all the major eBook standards: unprotected Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, Palm doc, and the International Digital Publishing Forum’s new epub Open eBook standard. In addition to supporting a plethora of formats, Stanza features an open API that allows developers to implement support for their own document formats. Stanza is more than just a reader: it is a reading platform!”

LINK

iPhone roundup: iTunes remote, Apple ready for real software in the App Store

Engadget:

“Who would’ve thought that rumored iControl app
would not only turn out to be real, but survive the inevitable internal
politics, delays, and feature cutbacks to make it all the way through
to a summer release? Sure enough, iTunes 7.7 has been pushed out to
developers in the past several hours, and the installer encourages
iPhone and iPod touch owners to “use the new Remote application for
iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your
home — a free download from the App Store.” No further details are
given — and it’s not clear whether the “iControl” name seen earlier
has been scrapped altogether — but we can guess that it’ll use WiFi to
hook up with your mainframe, which really makes the idea of an AirPort Express appealing all over again.

On
another note, Apple has released Beta 8 of the iPhone SDK and is using
the occasion to kick off acceptances of applications to the real, live App Store
in preparation for its July 11 launch. It appears that Beta 8 is
actually required to complete the process, so don’t go jumping the gun
now — goodness knows the rest of the iPhone-toting world doesn’t want
your half-baked apps in a couple weeks, you shady developer, you.”

Apocalyptic Photos from the Decline of the Recording Industry

Thanks, Eric, for the tip on this one….

Dinosaurs and Robots:

“Greetings music fans, and welcome to Metaphor City!

I love these photographs of abandoned Tower Record stores that were taken by Calvin Kaneda. It’s no secret that sales of recorded music are in a deep nosedive, and the 2006 bankruptcy and liquidation of Tower Records is an apt symbol of the industry’s woes.”

MORE PICTURES

Easily Manage Firefox 3 Keyword Quick Searches

Lifehacker:

“You already know how to set up Firefox quick searches
by right-clicking in a web page’s search box—like on the Google home
page—and choosing “Add a keyword for this search.” Now in Firefox 3,
you can manage search engine keywords in Firefox’s built-in search box.
Hit the down arrow next to the currently selected engine and choose
“Manage Search Engines.” There you can view, add, and edit
keywords—like w for Wikipedia. Once you’ve got a quick search set up, just type it and your query into the location bar. For example, typing w Lifehacker will run a search on Wikipedia for Lifehacker. Here’s more on using bookmark keywords to do more than just run searches. Update: You can’t edit or manage bookmark keywords here, just keywords associated with the engines in the search box.”

[via Cybernet]