From the ESA post;

This image of Mt. Fuji is the first data to be acquired by Japan’s recently launched Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) on 24 January 2006...

Mt. Fuji – Japan’s highest mountain (3776 metres) – is a volcano that has been dormant since its last eruption in 1707. It is located near the Pacific coast and straddles the prefectures of Yamanashi and Shizuoka about 100 kilometres west of Tokyo.

Detailed streets and rivers in the Kofu Basin are visible in the front of the image, and Motosu Lake, one of five lakes making up the Fuji Five Lake region, is in the centre right. The Fuji-Subaru road, which leads to the top of the mountain from Motosu Lake, can also be seen.

You need to see the high res version to fully appreciate this shot.

Found at everyone's favorite astronomy blog - UniverseToday.

There's a 20mins documentary video on the 'Amen Break'. The film has a good history of this particular and very popular break, while also giving a good overview of some copyright/ownership issues.

Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

You can view the documentary online or download it for later viewing.

While you're at it, check out some of Nate's other works at nkhstudio.com

It still amazes me when I explain to some people what breaks are and how they are used in modern music, as a large percentage of them are totally oblivious to the concept. It's always good to provide these people with a concrete example, so if you find yourself in this situation, head over to The-Breaks.com where you can match a break with a list of tracks that use the break.

Unipage...

...is a way to store a complete web page as just one file.

All of the page's images, formatting, and even functionality are kept together instead of as separate files.

To create a Unipage from any web page or page on your computer, you need the Unipage Unifier program.

The download is windows only at the moment, which is funny because when I tested it, my saved page only worked in Firefox and not IE [which was what popped open when the Unipage Unifier finished making the single html file].

You can download it here.

From The Compact Yahoo! Group...

We are a group of individuals committed to a 12-month flight from the consumer grid (calendar year 2006)

1. to go beyond recycling in trying to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of U.S. consumer culture, to resist global corporatism, and to support local businesses, farms, etc. -- a step, we hope, inherits the revolutionary impulse of the Mayflower Compact;
2. to reduce clutter and waste in our homes (as in trash Compact-er);
3. to simplify our lives (as in Calm-pact)

From a SFGate article on The Compact...

While many people will spend countless hours this year lining up at Wal-Mart and maxing out their credit cards at Nordstrom, a small Bay Area group has declared it will do just the opposite.

About 50 teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals in the Bay Area have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 -- except food, health and safety items and underwear.

I think this is a good statement being made by this group of people.

Persoanlly I've been a [bit of a mad] recycler for a long time now. When I use to live in Sydney I was always amazed at some of the items people would put out in the street for garbage collection. My freinds and I would come home from late night skating sessions with loads of goodies and for many years our apartments were furnished [almost] entirely from recycled goods.

Now I'm living in rural Japan it's a lot easier to ignore the hyper-consumer way of life, and the recycling of objects here is just as good as in Sydney [although you have to travel a little further to get at it].

I admire this group for making such a stand while living in a major western city, as the tempations to consume will be in their face 24/7. But I think we could all learn from such an idea.

What I think would also be good, and I believe will probably eventuate from a group such as The Compact, would be a more long term version. Being strict for one year is great, but I hope some ideas, guidelines and instructions can be compiled for how people can adhere to a little less strict, but longer lasting compact lifestyle.

"We're people for whom recycling is no longer enough," said one of the members of the fledgling movement..."We're trying to get off the first-market consumerism grid, because consumer culture is destroying the world."

Well said and good luck to the members of The Compact. I wonder if they allow non-San Franciscans from joining the group. I'll head over to Yahoo! and check it out.

Found via this Boing Boing post

Reports are coming in the Songbird is going to be a iTunes killer. I use iTunes on my PowerBook to manage my music files, but haven't found a good alternative for Linux. At present Songbird is only available for Windows, but both OSX and Linux support are promised in the near future.

Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions. Learn more.

After downloading at installing Songbird on a work notebook, I'm fairly impressed by the following;

• It's as usable as iTunes - the interface is similar and Songbird seems to have some nice additional features, although I've yet to work my way through the whole app.
• It supports many different online services including music stores, podcasting sites, radio and more.
• Similar to Firefox, Songbird will support extensions. If you use Firefox you know the benefits that extensions have bought to that application, so you can imagine some of the possibilities.
• It's Open Source.

...hold up, the Songbird site just came back online, go check out the features for yourself. Looks really promising.

Also check out the about page as some of the people involved in this project have been fairly influencial to computer-/internet-based audio for a quite a while.

Linux/BSD Gangsters has an informative article on setting up OpenOffice Base and MySQL.

After installing Fedora Core 4 a few months ago I went back to using the Powerbook for a while and forgot about all the cool goodies that come with FC4. Among these is version 2 of OpenOffice.

I had given up using OOo on OSX, because of the UI issues, and even bought a copy of Pages [which is really nice] for my simple word processing requirements. But lately I have found myself using FC4 a little more, so it was only a matter of time before I cracked open the Office submenu in the K menu.

Upon doing this, not only did I realize I had OOo2, but that it included Base, their database front end application. Years ago I used MS Access a lot to generate reports out of SQL Server databases, and have alway kindof longed for a Linux/MySQL alternative...and now I have it.

Saving the Base reviews and howtos for others, I'll just say that Base looks promising.

BioMega designs and manufacutres bicycles.

The Biomega Philosophy is a part of Biomega's stronghold of ideas. We believe a strong vision and belief is a necessity for any post-millennium company. Conceived by Jens Martin Skibsted in the midst of Gaudi buildings in Barcelona, child of aesthetics and ethics, Biomega's Philosophy is a bastard. A new breed set out to make towns and cities lovelier, beautiful and cleaner places to be. We want to spread the love we put into our bikes to the people who ride them. We believe that a kind osmosis from the bike to the rider takes place, spreading our feel for quality and originality.

Some of the more interesting looking bikes are;

The Chicago - "This mountain bikish bicycle is built for the streets – a fat alloy frame, 26” tyres, brakes and derailleur from Shimano and a front suspension fork."

The Brooklyn - "...is urban in the American sense of the word. It is designed with a free style BMX in mind with heavy duty steel pedals & frame. The wheels are smaller & the tires are extremely fat to give it a bouncing ability yet unseen."

The Puma - "The leading edge Semi-fold Puma bicycle is designed by Skibsted. It is a totally new type of bicycle: lending coolness & rugged factor from BMX/Down Hill bikes such as though tubing, DH handlebar, small wheels and disc brakes."

Both the Puma and Brooklyn look like lots of fun, although I think I'm probably a little big for them nowdays.