Club Deportivo Zapata

What better way to curb your Google Earth addiction and procrastinate even more: the open source program Celestia lets you get out of Earth’s orbit and into the far reaches of space. It supports high-quality hardware rendering, smooth flyovers, animated tours, and many other visual goodies.

Although it comes with a generous collection of stars, planets, and moons (oh my!), you’ll eventually get bored of all that. Fortunately, there’s a huge collection of freely downloadable extensions that can add more stars, planets, satellites, tours… even whole galaxies! (And Star Wars and Star Trek fans will be heartened to know that there’s plenty of fodder for them available, too.)

Celestia is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. A newer test version is available for Windows.

Also, let me take this paragraph to point out that there’s a new Dorm Favorites (Links) page. Once you have an account here, you can easily add to the list by clicking the Edit My Blogroll link in MT. Speaking of which, I’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain up the staircase pretty soon to get all of you accounts. It’s really easy: you just tell me your e-mail address, and I let you type your password into the system.

Entry №8, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 11:46 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Tech Tips

If you’ve been perusing the somewhat… strange… comments on this blog, you might have noticed that my comments have my (freshman year of high school) photo next to them. You might’ve called such a picture an avatar, buddy icon, buddy picture, buddy pic, display icon, or mugshot (I just made that up). For our purposes, let’s just call these handsome images “gravatars.” So you’re wondering how you can be cool like me and have your own gravatar, eh?

It’s simple. Get an account with Gravatar, upload an image, wait for them to give it a rating, and you’re good to go. Now when you leave a comment here, using the same e-mail address you used for your Gravatar account, your gravatar will show up next to the comment (only PG photos are accepted here, sorry). The same gravatar will work on thousands of blogs that support this feature, such as… my blog.

Now, because the gravatar that shows up depends on the e-mail address you fill in, you can’t use a fake e-mail address like David’s classic “123@IwantSpam.com.” But now everyone will recognize you as that weirdo who used a Dancing Elmo gravatar, without having to squint to see your name at the bottom.

Entry №7, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 03:30 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Tech Tips