Yes, yesterday was officially Pi day (3/14), but it's 2 AM on the 15th, so technically its not Pi day anymore. Yesterday a few notable things happened, Apple put their first full length movie on iTunes, Disney's High School Musical (for $2.99), then took it down, then put it back up (for $9.99). I suppose they haven't quite worked out all of the kinks in the movie system yet. I don't know about you, but 10 dollars for a 400 x 250 pixel movie? Yikes... don't think so. I came across a little project that was kind of interesting, a motorized, optically tracked turret appropriately named, TheSentryGun.

The idea of this project was to create a fully-automated sentry gun, capable of picking out a human target and accurately tracking and shooting him or her in the heart. Really, the idea was to find a cool robotics project for the summer while I was working at an advertising agency, and I'd only ever seen sentry guns in movies (like Congo) and video games (Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress Classic).

I guess the creator of the project searched for another similar project but didn't find one... On to more interesting things, Google released "Google Mars" which allows people to explore Mars in a similar fashion to Google Earth. Neat concept, but not really all that useful. I suppose it has novelty factor. Also a distro of Linux titled, Kororaa was released. This distro is in very early stage of development, but it uses the Xgl interface which is very fluid and has very flashy window effects. Not to mention 3D manilpulation of the desktops. Try the Live CD, it's pretty cool. Last but not least the feature of the post. FOTP: GIMP "The GNU Image Manipulation Program" The GNU Image Manipulation Program or just GIMP is an open source free software bitmap graphics editor, a program for creating and processing raster graphics. It also has some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License. This program has a lot of support and a lot of plugins, it also, IMO a GOOD Open Source alternative to Photoshop. For the latest tech news, visit digg.com. -Tom