LIVEdigitally

One aspect of the Internet I’ve always found attractive is the chance for hobbyists to virtually leave their dens and garages and take their tinkering to the world.

For would-be writers, there’re blogs, fanfics and on-line ‘zines just like this one into which I’m typing.

Now a commercial venture, TotallyPhotos.com, offers pros, semi-pros and hobbyist photographers a potential new market for getting their pics seen and used.

As a “place for truly creative royalty-free photography,” the site will likely help the graphic hungry web provide more eye candy and be a resource for (as they say on the site) 100% royalty free, fresh new material from around the world.

(In the interest of full-disclosure, the thumbnail above is from my photo of the Grand Canyon. I truly think it’s a great Internet-based idea.)

On his .Mac homepage, Ian Meyer demonstrates an ingeniously simple way to use your iPod photo (and fourth generation ‘Pods) as a portable direction finder. Simply take screenshots of Google maps and download them to your iPod, and presto! Directions that doesn’t involve carrying a bulky atlas, crude drawings of the route (that’s me) or a long list of directions:

L on Downing
Go .75 miles, take the third left on Anderson
Go straight through the second major intersection after the Dairy Queen, but be sure to stay right…

What an elegant, simple, and new way to use the ever-so-ubiquitous iPod. Good job, Ian!

Props to The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Make: Blog for showing me the light.

Just saw this on BoingBoing:

A 28-year-old South Korean man died of heart failure after finishing a 50-hour first-person-shooter gaming session, according to Reuters. He was in an internet cafe, having apparently just completed his more than two day session (punctuated by breaks to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed). Upon failing to return home one day, his mother had asked the man’s former colleagues (he recently quit his job to devote more time to games) to find him. When they did, he told them he would finish the game and go home.

The cause of death was reported as heart failure.

A few VOIP tidbits this morning:

Quite a bit of speculation is floating around about Skype being snapped up. The Register lists potential suitors as Yahoo!, Google or News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch, while The Independent claims that $3 billion might be Murdoch’s magic number. Meanwhile, Skype says it isn’t for sale. Ultimately, it’s impossible to predict the service’s long-term growth; venture capitalist Tim Draper compares Skype’s purchase to Microsoft’s of Hotmail in 1998 for $450 million – the service now has nearly 200 million users. I suppose Skpe could ultimately go belly-up if people lose all interest in VOIP, but that seems unlikely. The tech big boys wouldn’t be so interested if they believed this to be the case.

Meanwhile, the guys at Engadget posted this morning about VoipBuster, who, appropriately, is busting Skype when it comes to calling rates. According to Skype Journal, the service allows users to make free calls to most of the SkypeOut countries after opening account and paying a single Euro (~$1.27) worth of credit. That’s it! Free calls to most of the world for just over a dollar. VoipBuster shows its limitations, however, in a complete lack of a feature set – no chat, no conference calls, no online presence information, and no PC-to-PC calling. But for PC-to-phone, for now it doesn’t get any cheaper.

pssst: make a Mac version!