While Google Picasa Web Albums has had facial recognition in-built for a while now, I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before the Picasa desktop software was also updated with that feature.

Google finally released the long awaited, facial recognition update for Picasa (Google’s version of photo editing software), to version 3.5.

Along with this update comes the aforementioned facial recognition capabilities; the ability to have faces automatically recognized and identified in the photos you take. This lets you sort photos by who is in them as opposed to tags or file names. Don’t be alarmed; the results arn’t sent to some central facial recognition database! It’s kept purely on your computer for your benefit of photo classification.

Now to how TF2 comes into the picture (pun intended ). So, being an avid gamer, and having an online Game Photo Album, I tend to take a lot of in-game screenshots, which I organize through Picasa. So, Picasa begins scanning for ‘faces’ … and low and behold, the characters in the games are being identified! I found this quite amusing

And so, while the scanning is only at 10%, I have played Medic class at least 46 times… The engineer with the two different poses (on the right) wasn’t picked up as the engineer; but I soon added both the photos under his name.

Interestingly, the 46 Medic photos were all of the same face pose. This was because they were from all the final scoreboard screenshots; an option in TF2 to always take a screenshot of the final match scores.

And the time it has taken me so far to write this post has allowed Picasa to reach 16% of the way through scanning my photo collection. The engineer category now provides substantially more entertaining results

You can download Picasa 3.5 here.

Released mid-Feburary of last year (2008), Audiosurf is still one of the most popular games which utilizes the music as the ‘track’, using the song as the soul of the game.

For only $10 this game is  great way to enjoy your music collection; pushing the boundaries of a new musical experience — immersed within a rich 3d (almost psychedelic) environment. You will find some of yours song produce much more relaxed ‘tracks’ to play on, while some louder rock tracks will provide you quite a challenge…

It is on that aspect that I propose to music stores to add a new criteria to online song purchases… an Audiosurf rating, ASR for short. While some websites list some of the ‘best’, none actually let you purchase the track and find try it out yourself. A dedicated website should be set up to associate these ratings with songs. Online music stores can use an API to obtain the latest ranking (possible a star based system) for a song in particular — an average of tracks could provide a album ranking. For example, the “Windows XP Setup Sound” (played during the initial setting up of your computer) is actually not a bad Audiosurf track compared to some others I have tried… Although I doubt a music store would be able to sell such a song; it would at least give people the opportunity to try out great Audiosurf rides.

Anyway… I’m heading back to my song now that I’ve posted my thoughts of the day. You can read more about Audiosurf here or on the game’s website, www.audio-surf.com.

Happy surfing

CSI: New York has had be baffled with a hidden feature of solitaire on Windows Mobile 5…

As per the CSI: NY story, the team were checking out whether any rats within an infestation had eaten a bullet from their dead body… So, they pull out a contraption and enter the roof space… however, freeze frame shows Mac Taylor holding this device armed with a game of solitaire.

… after using the secret analysis function of Solitaire, the PDA reported a high reading of Lead… bullet found

Now before someone comments on this post, thinking I’m flaming CSI: NY for their lack of real-ism; I’m not. I know its only fictional; the PDA app they used  just intrigued me, after looking oddly like a good-old game of solitaire .

My laptop (as most do these days), has a webcam integrated into the screen… On installation of the webcam’s drivers, prompted me with the following message:

Bewildered by this message (which wouldn’t go away until it was ‘unplugged’), prompted me to disable the device in Device Manager… that seemed to fix it…