Send Your Name to the Moon in a NASA Spacecraft

Lunar Reconnaissance is an unmanned spacecraft that will launch for the moon in late 2008. The objective is to find safe landing sites on the moon and other planets like Mars.

Now NASA is collecting names of people who support this mission and this list will then be placed onboard the spacecraft when it is headed for the moon.

If you want to send your own name to the moon, just go to this Johns Hopkinssite and submit. The deadline is June 27. You may also print a "certificate of participation" in PDF. Thanks Gerard Vlemmings.

Navigate The Street View in Google Maps with Keyboard Shortcuts

The Street View feature of Google Maps lets you move around the streets ofthese cities using the mouse but for a more smooth walking experience, try the following keyboard shortcuts (some are undocumented):

*you may practice these key combination here itself on the Street view map embedded above. Just make sure you click the map once before using these keys.

a (or left arrow key) – rotate 45 degrees in counter-clockwise direction.

d (or right arrow key) – rotate 45 degrees in clockwise direction.

w (or PageUp key) – look up towards the sky.

s (or PageDown key) – look down towards the road.

+ (plus key) – zoom in for a close-up view.

– (minus key) – zoom out one level.

The up and down arrow keys help you navigate the streets in forward and backward directions but make sure that the zoom level is set to none else these arrow keys will make you look up or down.

Another update: The Google Maps picture that recorded a police arrest has now been deleted from Street View. That was quick.

Fonts for Creating LOLCAT Pictures

If you ever wanted to create your own Lolcat pictures, use the IMPACT font with a white foreground and transparent background.
You can keep the font size as 20 pixels for maximum "impact".

Microsoft To Release New APIs for Office 2007 Programs

Microsoft will make some significant announcement at 8:30 AM PST which is not related to the Yahoo! deal. The press call will be attended by CEO Steve Ballmer, CSA Ray Ozzie and other top executives.

Any guesses what Steve and his team will announce in the call ?

Update: OK, the details are up here. Microsoft is making it easy for open source developers to build products that work with Office and other Windows software.

Microsoft will also release new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.

Find People Who Are Yet To Accept Your Request to Become Facebook Friends

When you send a friend request to someone on Facebook, they can either approve your friendship request, decline it or leave the request untouched.

Now Facebook will inform you when friends approve your request but there’s no easy way to figure out the names of people who are yet to approve your friendship requests.

So here’s a simple Facebook hack to help you retrieve this information:

1. Open your Facebook Privacy page by clicking the "privacy" link at the top right corner.

2. Click the link that says "Poke, Message, and Friend Request"

3. The next screen will show you a list of Facebook members who are not your friends but can see some parts of your Facebook profile. They are in the list because you have contacted them in the past through a poke or friend request though you are not mutual friends.

And this is the list that has all the names who have not confirmed your friendship request yet. Unfortunately, there is no way to cancel a friend request once it has been made so you cannot delete names from the list on your own.

Related: Know When Facebook Friends Secretly Remove You

Know When Facebook Friends Delete You As a Contact

X and  Y are now friends on Facebook” – That’s the message displayed in your Facebook profile each time you add a new friend on Facebook or someone else confirms your pending request.

But the reverse is not true – you will never know when existing friends remove you from their Facebook friends list. The count of your friends will decrease but Facebook won’t reveal the name of the person who just unfriended you.

You can however play detective using a Facebook app called Unfriender – this will let you know when friends quietly remove as a connection on Facebook. They are extending the alerts to email and SMS as well.

The only downside is that Unfriender works only with friends that you have added after installing the Facebook application. Thanks Josh.

Update: The Unfriend app is now offline but see this new app to know when friends unfriend you on Facebook.

Facebook Adds a Clear Invites Option, But You Still Need Ignore All

Finally, Facebook has a added a "clear all" option that will immediately remove all pending invites from the Facebook requests page.

The only caveat is that you must have at least 25 pending invites in Facebook before the "clear all" option is visible. Everyone else can use the "unofficial"IgnoreAll discussed here. 

Facebook Invite Spam Gets Worse, An ‘Ignore All’ Button May Help

“Invitation Spam” has become a major problem for Facebook members ever since they introduced the f8 platform. And unfortunately, Facebook still offers no solution to deal with this growing menace.

For instance, there are around 400 pending messages in my Facebook account each inviting me to “some” Facebook application. To clear this queue alone, I will have to hit the Ignore button on Facebook minimum 400 times.

The worst part is that each time I approve a new friend request on Facebook, this “very long” web page (it measures 16 meters or 53 sheets of A4 paper) loads itself in the browser. So it also makes Facebook slow.

Can Facebook engineers please provide a simple “Ignore All” button that will clear the pending invites queue in one click ? And once I decide to ignore a application, Facebook should automatically block all future invites from that app.

That simple enhancement alone will make life a bit simple for Facebook fans.

Generate A Human Calendar with Pictures of Real People

Craig Giffen is working on an interesting project called Human Calendar where the calendar grid is actually made up from photographs of real people looking at each other. They are all friends of Craig.

You can either generate a monthly calendar (like the one above) or a dynamic short calendar that automatically shows the current day and date – perfect for sidebars in websites.

Google Maps 360°Camera for Shooting Street View Pictures

  This is the 360 °digital camera head that captures still images for Google Maps – street view photographs that now available for San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver.

  This Google Maps camera can be carried by hand or mounted over cars or airplanes. The camera shoot images at 11 different angles at a 100 megapixel resolution.

Google says the imagery is “gathered by vehicles driving public property streets equipped with imaging technology”.

  So the next time you see some car or van around your house with this 11 lens camera mounted on the top, shut the door and the windows of your house if you are really worried about your privacy.

  Thankfully, they are shooting images for Google Street Maps only from the roads and not inside the building premises.

Windows Media Encoder Problem

  Tom Cantu who works for Christian Radio Station “Radio Vida KRGE 1290 AM” is having some issues with Windows Media Encoder. He writes:
    I stumbled across your Website Digital Inspiration when I was looking for some information concerning dropping packets or as our Provider for re-broadcasting our radio signal to satellite tells us that when streaming some content using Windows Media Encoder 9.0 some of the content may cause rebuffering.

  I would like to know if you would be kind enough to share some information regarding this process. I’ll give you some details about how and what we are doing and you can tell me how I should be performing this operation.

  In our engineer room, we have a Dell Dimension 1100 computer with 1gig of memory. This computer is dedicated for streaming audio and only performs this process. Via the line-in input of the built-in audio portion of the Dell, our broadcasted program is fed into the computer.

  The OS is Win XP Home Ed and we are using Win Media Encoder 9.0. Our Internet Service Provider provides us with about 1.5mbps wireless bandwidth. To my knowledge the service has been consistent and trustworthy that I don’t think the bandwidth could be more than just considered. We stream our programming via internet to an Audio/Video re-broadcaster who in turn sends the signal to Hispasat which allows our programming to be received in different parts of the world.

  We need to setup a bullet proof way to monitor our feeds integrity to the re-broadcaster. We placed a satellite dish on our rooftop to monitor our signal from the Hispasat Satellite but have yet to lock-in on the exact location. Our geographical location needs to be considered as well as the size of dish to install.

  What other way can I monitor our signal after the streamed signal leaves the dedicated computer? How can I resolve a re-buffering issue if in fact that is what is happening? Is there a hotfix to help encode consistently. Which is better, push to server or pull from encoder? We have another stream feed which is received in California that is provided for our website and rarely experience any service interruptions.