Techie Stuff, Lovecraft, and Howler

A little something different today. I'm including some music and reading, but also some nerd knowledge I've recently acquired. On with the show.

Ear candy. If you need a little acoustic inspiration in your day, you can stream the band Howler's premier album America Give Up before its official release at NPR's First Listen. I'm already excited to follow this band in the future.

Hooray for compacts! I got a camera for Christmas, and I must say it's not too shabby. It's a sleek-little-retro Panasonic DMC-LX5. I wasn't born a photographer, but this machine lets me capture some nice images in a user-accessible way.
If you get giddy looking at this kind of thing too, you can check out my model at the Panasonic Site. Look forward to more pictures taken with this camera in subsequent posts.

Mac Apps
Smartr. Free for Lite, $2.99 for full. This is a neat little flashcard application available in the Mac's App Store. Simple design--it's as Swedish as IKEA--but it meets its purpose quite well. You can import files directly into flashcard format or export and share them. It cycles through different portions of the stack each time you initiate a study session, so it's not fantastic for major cram sessions, but it's good for retention over time. Updates are in the pipeline, so I'm looking forward to expanded features and functions in the near future.

Stanza. Free. Open a wide variety of formats from PDFs to reader docs, and read them on your computer screen, or convert them to another format for iPhone. *NOTE: You've probably already heard of Stanza app for iPhone, but there have recently been a lot of problems with crashes.
This software has actually been out for years; I just hadn't found it until recently. You can download it for Mac at CNET.
Practical example: I've been on a Lovecraft kick the past couple of months. All of his works are now in the public domain, so they're available in their entirety online, for free, and I can save them to my computer as PDFs. However, I can't seem to find them for free in an ePub format in the iTunes store. Solved with this freebie. I just convert and transfer them to my phone. Now I can give myself the willies on the go.

And in case you're also in the mood for creepy Poe-inspired sci-fi, you can find a long list of complete Electronic Texts of H.P. Lovecraft’s Works. "The Colour out of Space" is a fun short story to start with, though "The Call of Cthulhu" is probably his most famous work.