Darren Straight's Blog

Snow surrounded the Aral Sea in early January 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image on January 8, 2010. A band of snow extends from southwest to northeast, crossing over the Aral Sea. The band of snow thins along its southeastern edge, so snow barely covers the southeastern shore of the water body.

January 2010 also brought the heaviest snowfall in decades to the Beijing region and Seoul, and unusually heavy snow to Western Europe, including Great Britain. Unusually cold temperatures throughout the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in December 2009 likely resulted from a negative plunge of the Arctic Oscillation. Land surface temperature anomalies in the region of the Aral Sea, however, were mixed, both above and below the 2000–2008 average.

By the time MODIS acquired this image of the Aral Sea, the water body was a small remnant of its former self. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the sea was dramatically reduced by irrigation projects.

Snow around the Aral Sea

iH8sn0w.com, the creator of iREB, the utility that allows you to bypass certain errors returned from iTunes during/before restoring to a custom firmware version for your iPhone and iPod Touch, has now released Sn0wbreeze into a public beta download.

Just in case you don’t know, sn0wbreeze is a tool for Windows that will jailbreak your iPods and iPhones, setup custom boot logos, activate your iPhone, root partition size, build custom IPSW, and more!

Sn0wbreeze’s requires Windows XP, Vista or 7 to run but can operate on the following devices.

• iPhone 2G
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3G[S] (old bootrom)
• iPod Touch 1G
• iPod Touch 2G – non MC

For more info and the download check out: http://ih8sn0w.com/index.php/welcome.snow

I must say though I’m in no way responsible for what happens to your device, and can not  guarantee it’s safe, but hey those that don’t experiment shall not learn or know what they are missing out on – click and install at your own risk! :p

Snow this January is pretty bad everywhere around the UK, and I’m sure you’ve seen enough snow to last you a while but here’s some Photos I’ve took of Snow at Darland Banks countryside walk in Chatham, Medway, Kent.

BETT 2010 (The world’s largest educational technology event) is on next week:

• Wed 13th January 10.00-18.00
• Thurs 14th January 10.00-18.00
• Fri 15th January 10.00-18.00
• Sat 16th January 10.00-16.00

But have you registerd yet? If so what day are you going? And what stands are you hoping to visit?

Theres a lot going on from what I hear, here’s a list of exhibitors as of the 9th November 2009, it’s certainly a long list at that….

Snow blanketed Great Britain on January 7, 2010, as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite passed overhead and captured this image. Snow covers most of England, from the east to the west coast. (The large image shows snow cover over the entire island of Great Britain.) The cities of Manchester, Birmingham, and London form ghostly gray shapes against the white land surface. Immediately east of London, clouds swirl over the island, casting blue-gray shadows toward the north.

Frigid temperatures followed snowfall, leaving roads and sidewalks treacherously icy, according to news reports. As of January 7, overnight temperatures had plunged to -18 degrees Celsius (-0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in isolated spots, with more widespread temperatures of -10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit). The heavy snowfall downed power lines, leaving several thousand homes in southern England without electricity.

According to the Federation of Small Businesses, transportation difficulties kept an estimated 10 percent of the workforce home on January 5 and 6, and thousands of schools were closed. Forecasters warned that frigid temperatures could linger for up to a week. Eurostar was operating at a reduced capacity and airports remained open although passengers could expect delays.

A contributor to the persistent cold and snow across much of the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes in December 2009 and January 2010 could be the fact that the atmosphere was in an extreme negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The AO is a seesawing strengthening and weakening of semi-permanent areas of low and high atmospheric pressure in the Arctic and the mid-latitudes. One consequence of the oscillation’s negative phase is cold, snowy weather in Eurasia and North America during the winter months. The extreme negative dip of the Arctic Oscillation Index in December 2009 was the lowest monthly value observed for the past six decades.

Snow across Great Britain

A behind-the-scenes look at the research and technology that brought Project Natal to life.

Skyfire 1.5 has been released for Windows Mobile. For those of you with high resolution (VGA) screens on your mobile phones, you will appreciate the crisp text and stunning graphics of this new browser. The Windows Mobile version has launched, and the company designing Skfire expect to have news for Nokia Symbian touch screen and high resolution phones very shortly.

Skyfire Labs has recorded a video discussing and demonstrating the new improvements, which you can check out here. I’ve been using it myself for a while now and definitely like it.

Skyfire Mobile Browser 1.5 – Windows Mobile from Skyfirelabs on Vimeo.

Many human-computer interaction technologies are currently mediated by physical transducers such as mice, keyboards, pens, dials, and touch-sensitive surfaces. While these transducers have enabled powerful interaction paradigms and leverage our human expertise in interacting with physical objects, they tether computation to a physical artifact that has to be within reach of the user.

As computing and displays begin to integrate more seamlessly into our environment and are used in situations where the user is not always focused on the computing task, it is important to consider mechanisms for acquiring human input that may not necessarily require direct manipulation of a physical implement. For that reason Microsoft are exploring the feasibility of muscle-computer input: an interaction methodology that directly senses and decodes human muscular activity rather than relying on physical device actuation or user actions that are externally visible or audible.

11694 different keyphrases were used to find my site in the Year 2009, here are the top 10 with the amount of times they were used plus their overall usage percentage.

680 different keyphrases were used to find my site in December 2009, here are the top 10 with the amount of times they were used plus their overall usage percentage.