Dream Recorder 2 is a software program for Mac OS X that measures your sleep states by detecting your motions with enhanced night vision. And it does all this with your iSight or certain video cameras. You can set Dream Recorder to wake you up at precisely the right time, at the end of a sleep cycle, so that you feel full of energy in the morning.

You can also have Dream Recorder gently wake you up with a dream feedback sound, just after a dream. You can then speak your dream and Dream Recorder will detect your voice and record. You can later hear your dream again and annotate it. We’ll talk more about inspirado in a bit.

Easy To Use

I downloaded & installed Dream Recorder and had it up & running in minutes. It has a beautiful and logical GUI which quickly felt familiar. Dream Recorder is a feature rich program. Here are some of the exciting things it can do:

• Make a quicktime movie of your night with time stamping. What happens during the third of your life ?
• Control your nights with accurate statistics, including night time, recovery and dream periods. Ideal for sportsmen.
• Snoring detection system with integrated anti-snoring whistles.
  A must.

• Sounds while you dream… are sounds influencing dreams ? Well, try the waterfall ambiance
• Full iTunes integration for importing your own sounds for relaxation, waking-up or dream feedback.
• Voice controlled notepad for your dreams. Just speak and your voice is recorded. Annotate them next day.

Inspirado

Dream Recorder can be used by creative types to capture dreams. Salvador Dali used to take naps while sitting in an arm chair holding a spoon over a pan so that when his muscles relaxed he’d drop the spoon into the pan which would wake him up and he would have the vivid hypnogogic images fresh in his mind for him to paint. Einstein’s notion of relativity is said to have come to him early one morning as he got out of bed, after having researched the matter for ten years. Thomas Edison is known to have made use of the hypnagogic state to help him formulate ideas for his inventions.

Hypnagogic experiences occur as one is falling asleep, while hypnopompic experiences occur as one is waking up - both experiences occur within the time period between sleep and waking (or vice versa).

Dream Recorder uses the difference between successive reconstructed images for computing the quantity of motion (see image on the right). Quantity of motions are reflected by the colored bar graph. High peaks mean motions. Very low peaks are just in the detection noise base level.
Dream periods are lit up by spotlights. Normal sleeps are represented by the dark blue shades. Deep sleeps have no lights nor shading.
Night events are displayed under the time line, here a dream feedback followed by a voice recording. Sleep profiles are easy to read when you get used to the program.

I feel that too many people pay attention to their dreams or use them for creative and inventive purposes. Obviously dream had an impact on some of the great creative minds in history. They understood that we spend as much as a third of our lives sleeping, but our mind is still working and creating. Maybe even more creatively working, as we’re using less of our analytical, left-side of the brain. Dream Recorder 2 is an awesome tool and the best way to help us get as much out of those “wasted” hours as possible.

It’s pretty sad that people trust companies like Experian with their private data. Consumers naively assume that because they are a credit company that somehow they have ethics. Grow up people. The three major credit reporting agencies “sell” the data they collect. Experian has in the past even run their own spam-for-hire operation. And if a person or company has enough money, they can purchase huge databases of consumer names, addresses, and social security information - it is done all the time.

So a company like lifelock trys to protect consumers against this type of fraud and what happens?… they get sued by Experian.

Lifelock sells identify theft protect services for a very minimal cost, but these services save consumers a whole bunch of headaches. So why are they being sued by Experian?

Lifelock makes a customer’s private information more secure by putting a fraud alert in the data maintained by the credit companies such as Experian. These alerts cause the credit bureaus employee’s to take extra steps to verity credentials of consumers which of course costs Experian millions of extra dollars a year. Lifelock also opt-out their members of pre-approved junk mail which save millions of tons of paper each year. Good stuff, Lifelock.

Boo hoo Experian. It’s about time someone stuck up for consumers and Lifelock seems to be doing a great job at it. People need to realize that these credit bureaus are not on the consumers side and it’s just big business for them. I hope Lifelock survives this fight or Experian may have free reign to everyone’s credit reports and that would not be a good thing at all.

I don’t know about you, but I use my Mac as an alarm clock. I think it’s the best way to go. Regular alarm clocks are notorious for having the most horrible, screeching alarms around. I think I’d rather be awoken by a car alarm. I started using my computer to wake me up because usually the first thing I do in the morning is turn on my computer to check my email. So I figured I’d save an extra step in my day and have my computer turn on by itself and then wake me up. Besides I’d rather wake up to a song I select rather than a cheap, ear-piercing clock alarms.

I recently tried out Alarm Clock Pro and I’m loving it so far. With Alarm Clock Pro I can wake up to my favorite internet radio station, MP3, CD, or video, I can even set a daily task list to be read aloud to me. If you don’t have a computer in your room Alarm Clock Pro can be configured to send text messages to your cell phone as well!

Two oysters were hanging out during boys night out and one of them made a loud noise. One oyster said to the other, “excuse me boys, but that loud noise, annoys me”, said Roy the oyster. “I’m a delicacy and am a low calorie protein so you can be sure that I won’t annoy your diet.” Oysters are also a good source of zinc, Vitamin B-12. On the flipside you have to be very careful when you eat oysters. BeOysterAware exists to inform people about the risks of eating oysters or Gulf oysters. They offer a wealth of information on their website and even an educational video that talk about the reasons some people can’t eat raw oysters. If you think you may be one of them, please visit BeOysterAware.com and become oyster aware yourself!

So have you ever loaded up your iPod with all your favorite media and then deleted your mp3s from iTunes to clear up some space on your computer. Even worse, I know someone who had 5000 songs on their iPod and had their computer crash. Then they connected their iPod to iTunes thinking the songs would transfer to their iTunes… but what happened is iTunes synched with her iPod and erased everything on the iPod… because iTunes was empty. Let’s just say she cried for days.

Music Rescue 3.1.5 can help. This great piece of software allows you to recover your music, video and playlists from your iPod back to your computer in the event of accidental deletion from or complete failure of your iTunes library. It can also be used to keep your music library in sync between two or more computers.

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We all love our pets and love telling stories about them. Pets offer endles moments of fun, laughter, frustration, and maybe anger even anger sometimes. ThoughtsFurPaws.com is a great new Pet Blog to brings pet lovers together to share their crazy pet stories. Their some really great posts on their blog and some are very touching like the blog post Sasha and the Cancer Patient. When you visit their website you’ll find categories such as animal shelters, cats, cute pets stories, pet charity, pet health, pet poems and much more. If you’re an animal lover and want to share your love with other like minded pet lovers ThoughtsFurPaws.com has something for you.

It is possible that Apple will use a future software update to give the iPhone Spotlight Search capabilities.

Bloggers over at iphoneology found two iPhone interface images named spotlight-full and spotlight-keyboard. This suggests the iPhone will see this feature in the near future.

For those of you who don’t own a mac, Spotlight is an invaluable OS X search feature that finds anything on your computer as quickly as you type. Spotlight Search makes it easy to search your entire system from one place: Files, emails, contacts, images, calendars and applications appear instantly.

This will be a handy feature and will make the iPhone feel even more like a mini Mac. Can the iPhone get any better? Actually, yes… more hard drive space… oh, and the price should be $200 less for the 8GB model.

It’s already the perfect phone in my opinion.

WebbyPlanet.com should be called HandyPlanet or SaveMoneyPlanet. It’s a website that contains thousands of coupon codes that you as a consumer can in your online purchases to save tons of money. Anytime I shop online I make sure I visit WebbyPlanet.com because they have coupons for all the big retail stores. I’m a computer geek and I love to save money on new gear any chance I can. Here’s a dell coupon that’ll give you $225 off all Inspiron laptop purchases over $999. WebbyPlanet has endless deals like this. I literally saved hundreds of dollars this past holiday season by using WebbyPlanet. Their website is easy to browse with categories such as Automotive, Baby, Books & Magazines, Clothing, Computer, Dating, Education, Electronics, and many more. Makes sure to visit WebbyPlanet frequently because they update their website daily.

SketchBox is the best sticky type application for Mac OS X. With SketchBox you can creat storyboards, jot down notes, draw pictures and store your thoughts… all searchable too!

Every SketchBox sticky consists of three layers. A drawing layer, a text layer and and an alarm layer. Layers are transparent so that you can see you sketches will you editing your text.

The drawing layer on SketchBox is really handy and can event support drawing tablets. A little trick is to use a PDA Stylus pen lightly on your laptop mouse pad and you have an instant drawing tablet.

I find SketchBox really handy when I have logo ideas or website layout ideas that I need to express via a quick sketch. This simply isn’t easily possible in any other software of it’s kind that I’ve used. After you create a few SketchBox stickies and save them to the same folder you can see how much fun this software is to use. SketchBox is one of those FREE applications that makes being a Mac user so much fun.

DOWNLOAD SketchBox for FREE

Because Valentines day comes every year I think it is important to keep it original. Especially is you are spending it with someone you’ve been with for a long time. 1800flowers.com is my favorite website when I want to send flowers because they have such a huge selection of gifts, i can be original every year. Trust me guys, when I say this; a woman knows if you went to your local supermarket on your way home from work to pick her up the “left over” bundle of flowers.

1800flowers.com is the perfect place to find a valentines day flowers or that unique gift that shows your love how important she is to you. On their website you’ll find a Valentine’s Day category that offer all kinds of flower choices and gift ideas including: roses, tulips, chocolates & sweets, teddy bears, luxury flowers, gift baskets and much more.

Let’s face it, many men stress out around Valentine’s day because they think they have to do so much for their women and then they procrastinate and end up buying a bad gift at the last minute. The funny thing is, all women want is a bit of originality… they don’t even need expensive… just something from you Even if Valentine’s day is not important to you, act like it is… this day is for your lover. Using a website like 1800flowers.com takes the stress out of Valentine’s day. Just visit their site, pick out a gift and have it delivered. Done!