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Take Your DailyMugshot

I found this website today after Kyle Lacy had an update of his own photo posted with a link on his Facebook profile. The DailyMugshot makes use of your webcam to take a picture of your face on a daily basis and share them with the world.

daily-mugshot

I’ve been shopping for a nice webcam for myself and sites like this just seem to give me one more reason to need one. The good news is that you can start using it immediately without a webcam though as they will accept photos from digital cameras or your cell phone.

The Daily Mug shot began when I came across a dude who took a picture of himself every day and turned it into a video. He had taken pictures of himself every day for years, and the video was amazing. I thought: I want to do that too! Then I began thinking about what sort of system would make the entire process as easy as possible, and furthermore, what would be the most fun and easy way to show these videos to friends on the net.

Have you already heard of Daily Mugshot and been using it? Let us know in the comments and we’ll take a little look-see on who’s reading the site. Would love to meet more readers and get to see you at the same time.

Image: DailyMugshot website screen shot

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Using System Resources to Play Music

One of the things I almost always need when I’m working is music. Not sure what it is but there’s just something about silence when I need to be moving and doing or thinking and processing. It’s been that way since I was a little kid and was told to clean my room.

media-system-resources

Normally when I’m working on my computer I’m listening to either my own music I’ve ripped to my hard drive or downloaded legally; or I’m streaming some great music from Pandora into my headphones.

The only challenge is that when I’m working I’ve also usually got a number of applications open and running to be productive. Right now I have 8+ applications going.

I started wondering which method of listening to my music required more system resources. I was surprised by what I found.

  • Pandora Desktop App: 103,868K Memory Usage
  • Windows Media Player: 18,685K Memory Usage

I’d always heard and thought that Windows Media Player was really a system hog and I expected the Pandora streaming app to be a little lighter on the requirements. Pandora is using 4x+ more system memory to function though.

The one thing I didn’t think about checking to see was how much memory was being used for playing an audio CD via Windows Media Player instead of ripped MP3’s. May have to check on that later, but then I’d have to go dig out a CD from somewhere.

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Gmail Fixed and Xobni Out Again

I’ve had some recent changes to my computer system that I had shared about recently in posts and thought I’d provide a little update on the matter. One of the issues was with Gmail not displaying images in messages, even though I’d told it to, and Xobni having a new release version available.

gmail-xobni

I wrote awhile back about Gmail not displaying images in my email messages, even though I’d told it to specifically always do so from specific senders. I had written this back in November of 2008 and up until now had continued to have issues. Recently I noticed that I was once again seeing graphics and now I don’t believe I’ve been having anymore issues. There was talk in the comments on the original post that it could be due to some Google Labs issues, but I never was able to confirm or fix anything there. Is everyone else noticing images again? Any ideas of what it was?

Also I’ve been a huge fan of Xobni since I first found out about it. I think it adds some great tools and features to Outlook that don’t exist. They continue to develop and improve the tool and expand the features. My problem though is it still brings my machine to a sluggish pace that’s just not acceptable. Honestly, part of the problem is probably with my machine. Pushing 4 years old and I put it through the wringer in my daily use. I uninstalled Xobni from my laptop, but when I get a new machine, Xobni will be one of the apps I’ll immediately reinstall and give it a try again.