Riya

Riya's face recognition technology allows automatic tagging of your photos. According to their website, Riya can recognize & tag faces, signs and events.

The software looks damn cool. It is rumored that Google has expressed an interest in acquiring the company.

Beyond home users, this kind of automatic face recognition software would be a big help to organizations like Interpol, CIA, FBI etc. Or maybe they probably already have such software available.

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IMDB Top 250

Twofifty.org is an interesting application that lets you keep track of the IMDB Top 250 movies that you have seen. [via Anand]

The set of IMDB Top 250 that I have viewed is available here.

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Using Gmail for Note Taking

Often I need to draft quick notes to myself. These could be a set of interesting links that I plan to explore later, a list of actionable items or maybe simply a set of important dates I need to remember. Sometimes these notes need to be edited at a later point in time.

These days I have started using Gmail for this purpose. I compose a mail and save it as a draft. The Subject line is usually a short description of the material in the notes. The advantage of saving it as a draft as compared to mailing it to myself is that I can edit the drafts later to add / delete / modify the information contained therein.

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Books!

GRR Martin's eagerly awaited A Feast for Crows is out. Currently in the process of finishing that. The last few weeks have been good. Got time to finish:

Neil Gaiman's American Gods
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere
Jonathan Stroud's The Amulet of Samarkand
Jonathan Stroud's The Golem's Eye
Malcolm Gladwell's Blink
Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man
Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats (not too impressed with this one)

In the pipeline:

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations
Betrand Russel's Unpopular Essays

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