viajaacuba.com

It is worth noting there was a lack of “emo” makeup styles–which foiled my plans at emo-izing a picture of Toby Mcguire for the sake of making a Spiderman 3 joke in this post. You’ll have to settle for this “embarrassed” Hugh Jackman-ish one instead.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Taaz is a fun new service aimed at women who want to try out makeup or hairstyles without real-life experimentation. You simply need to upload a photo of your face and map the outlines of your eyes and mouth. It’s a fairly standard process that’s been used in some other services, including Budweiser’s Bud2Bud service that creates customized e-mails using text-to-speech and matching facial animations.

This clearly works better for women, but there are some hairstyles that work for both sexes (some more than others).

[via TechCrunch]

Once your face has been uploaded and analyzed you can adjust the skin, eyes, mouth, and hair using real skin makeup products that accurately match the real life counterparts. It’s completely experimental, and when you find a style you like there are options to print it or share it with others. Printing out your creation is especially helpful, as it gives you a detailed shopping list of what products you picked in case you want to bring it to a department store or shop for them online.

I had plenty of fun outfitting my virtual self with nearly ludicrous makeup styles, but clearly there’s some potential for someone who knows what they’re doing. The same thing could be applied to certain post-processing techniques in online photo editors such as Picnik and Fotoflexer, or online painting tools with paints and other supplies that you could buy in stores.

On paper, it sounds pretty good. You take the carbon dioxide pollution from paper production and transform it into a paper additive.

McLeish said that the main competitor to carbon recycling is carbon storage underground, an approach that has raised concerns over safety and costs.

Technologies to recycle carbon dioxide waste are being seriously pursued. Large polluters, such as factories or power plants, are anticipating regulations to restrict their greenhouse gas emissions.

The company has developed a process that treats carbon dioxide gas with heat and pressure, then mixes it with other chemicals to produce calcium carbonate. For a video of the equipment in a solar-panel equipped van, click here.

Carbon Sciences’ strategy is to start with the paper industry and then optimize its technology for power producers. It also envisions using its equipment at mining operations which can use calcium carbonate.

Carbon Sciences on Monday announced that it intends to target its carbon recycling technology toward paper manufacturers.

Several routes are being pursued, including growing algae at power plants and making baking soda. Government research in the U.S. is focused on pumping carbon dioxide underground at power plants.

“We believe that by focusing our efforts on the existing multibillion-dollar PCC industry, we will be well-positioned to be a major player in the even larger $400 billion CO2 mitigation market in the future. This strategy is in line with our corporate mission of enabling a carbon-neutral world by transforming CO2 into high value products, one industry at a time,” company CEO Derek McLeish said in a statement.

Calcium carbonate, or chaulk, is used in many many industrial processes. Precipitated Calcium Carbonate, or PCC, is used to add gloss or brighten paper.

By Twitterholic’s last count, Obama stands at 56,661 followers, compared with Rose’s 56,442. Obama also has the second highest number of friends on Twitter–59,338–according to Twitterholic, which calculates individual statistics for each Twitter user a couple of times a day. The candidate’s Twitter page offers up such rousing tidbits of news as “Holding a town hall on economic security in St. Petersburg, FL.”

But for all those followers, there just may be a few who don’t feel sufficiently networked with the candidate. For those who want to be in-the-know about all things Obama–like his VP choice–a millisecond before millions of others, the candidate reminds us to sign up for his text message alerts.

Sen. Barack Obama has already proven himself to be the most popular presidential candidate on the Internet, what with his more than 1.3 million Facebook supporters and lofty aims of 2 million online donors. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee is not only outshining other politicians on the Internet, but also the very stars of social networking–Obama has just overtaken Kevin Rose’s spot as the most followed person on Twitter, according to Twitterholic.

The MacBook redesign is just around the corner, and further proof has surfaced that it’s going to look a lot like its siblings.

New MacBooks have been expected for months now as the MacBook design gets a little long in the tooth. The last time new details surfaced on the notebooks, October 14 was targeted as the introduction date.

Say goodbye to the black plastic MacBook: a new aluminum one is said to be on the way.

(Credit:
Apple)

One interesting part of the report also suggests that Apple plans to drop the Firewire 400 port and the DVI-I ports currently found on the MacBook Pro in favor of a Firewire 800 port and a mini-DVI port.

AppleInsider reports that new MacBooks and new MacBook Pros have been spotted by people-in-the-know, and that as expected the new systems will get aluminum-based exteriors similar to the ones found on the MacBook Air and iMac. This will give Apple some consistency across the
Mac notebook lineup entering the holiday shopping season; for years, the MacBook has had a distinct look separate from the MacBook Pro.

I can’t really track RSS readers since CNET has chosen not to use Feedburner or other technology to track it. I really, really wish that I could.

Over the year, it has also become increasingly clear from which sources most people learn about posts here. While an increasing number are repeat offenders who subscribe to the blog (including a significant number of people who hate the blog but can’t seem to leave , 76 percent are net new visitors. The big traffic generators? In order of traffic:

Traffic on the Open Road blog

Because of such references, the traffic for this blog has increased significantly. How significantly? Put it this way: Traffic has gone up 1000 percent since July 2007. We’ve had millions of visitors and page views in The Open Road’s inaugural year.

My commitment for the coming year is to focus on improved fairness and accuracy if ever I’m going to write something negative about a company. I also hope to avoid ever writing something negative about a person. I’m a highly imperfect person, so help me keep my word.

CNET, Google (Search and the Google Reader application), News.com (CNET), Digg, LinuxToday, News.Google.com, Slashdot, Reddit, Stumble Upon, and My.Yahoo.com (RSS reader).

In the meantime, thank you for reading and be sure to let me know areas in which you think the blog can be improved.

I just realized that a little over a year and 2,064 posts ago, this blog was born. I’ve had a lot of fun with the blog. While I’m not always right (a nice way of saying “often wrong”), I appreciate the patience and insight that many readers share in the comments section, and in other blogs that reference The Open Road.

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Say Where, an iPhone app from Dial Directions, aims to give iPhone users the ability to employ speech recognition to get information from services like Yelp and MapQuest.

If you’ve spent any time using iPhone apps, you probably have gotten a hint of the fact that they may well be the hottest thing going and, in some ways, the future of software.

(Credit:
Dial Directions)

The point is to allow users to get the information they want without having to use their hands–much–to get it. So, by using Say Where, iPhone owners should be able to get information they’re looking for while driving, for example, without having to focus on the iPhone’s screen in order to type in the name of the business or the address they’re looking for.

That’s largely due to the fact that, especially with
iPhone 3G, the device combines GPS, an elegant interface,
Mac OS X, an accelerometer and high-speed Internet connectivity.

Say Where is an open application that Dial Directions hopes will lure in many other service providers. And that has a lot to do with its business model for the application, which is to get revenue by partnering with those companies and, ideally, incorporating the application into their services.

And on Monday, the company announced at DemoFall its Say Where iPhone app, a tool that allows owners of the device to use their voice to get information from several online service providers specializing in geographical information.

The idea is simple: you launch the Say Where app, which is expected to be free from Apple’s App Store–when it is approved, which Dial Directions hopes will be soon–and then, when prompted, say an address or business name that you’re looking for.

Dial Directions will continue to add partners, but it is starting out by giving iPhone users the ability to employ speech recognition with services like MapQuest, Yellow Pages, Ask.com, Yelp, and Traffic.com.

Now, Dial Directions, a company that has focused on providing speech recognition tools to cell phone users, is getting in the iPhone game.

Or, by speaking an address and using MapQuest, directions would appear, aided by the fact that the iPhone’s GPS chip tells the service where you are starting from.

It’s too early to tell if the application will be a success. But it has a lot of potential, especially given that there could be many more service providers linked to the app down the line.

Then, you choose which service you want to use–Yelp, say, for reviews of the restaurant that you named–and finally, the results should appear a moment later.