As an amateur photographer, I like to have a nice image as my desktop wallpaper to provide me with some inspiration throughout the day. Thanks to a post on freewaregenius, I just discovered that National Graphic magazine makes a huge selection of inspiring images available for desktop wallpaper use for free.

You can get National Geographic wallpapers from two locations. The first is in the main photography section of the site. Wallpapers here are handily categorized (Adventure & Exploration,  Nature & Weather, Underwater, etc). Unfortunately, the images available in this section are only a maximum of 1280 pixels wide, which isn’t big enough for many of today’s monitors, although they should be fine on most laptops.

Fortunately, you can also use images submitted to National Geographic’s International Photography Competition, and these are available in larger sizes (up to 1600 pixels wide). These photos aren’t categorized — you need to browse by month, but flicking through the range of beautiful images isn’t much of a chore. I currently have this image of melting ice set as my desktop background.

If you’re still looking for more images, another great location to try is Flickr’s Explore page, which always has a huge selection of interesting and inspiring pictures.

Where do you get wallpaper images from?

For some actors, just sitting down and reading off a teleprompter is hard work. So Ginger Marie Rogers, host of Fear News, might have one of the toughest on-camera jobs in web video history. For each week, the 25-year-old actress not only has to spew out the latest developments in horror, but she has to do it while being chased by a machete-wielding psycho or fending off a menacing ghost.

Fear News, produced by filmmakers Jack Conway and Matthew Mercer for FearNET.com, offers a fresh approach to the talking-head show, eschewing green screens for real sets and narrative-driven scenarios. And the series in its first two episodes has created a half-narrative/half-informative style that mixes chills with news on a fairly equal basis — it’s as if Conway and Mercer know how bored we’ve gotten of the Rocketboom approach, and are, perhaps, just as bored themselves.

Each episode of Fear News essentially functions as both a standalone horror short and a nonfiction news update, and there’s a clear sense of the producers’ imaginations at work — which is good, because the best thing about Fear News is probably going to be the hardest part to sustain; continually finding new ways to mix news and terror on a weekly basis is a pretty Herculean task.

Rogers manages her double-duty role as horror movie heroine (specifically, the well-established “Last Girl” trope) and news presenter with a great deal of confidence and flair, and the production values so far are definitely of a pro quality.

But the series isn’t flawless — like every great horror villain, it has a few key weaknesses. There’s only enough time per episode to relay about four news bites, for one thing, and oftentimes the action onscreen is so compellingly done that it ironically distracts from the few stories they do have time for. However, on the flip side, the fact that each episode is so creatively staged means that the series might have longevity beyond the standard weekly news series.

The variation and experimentation happening here is fun to see — like when a demonic Teddy Ruxpin is the one to finish an update about Buffy producer Marti Noxon’s next project, or Rogers, discussing an upcoming 3-D screening of Nosferatu finds a Nosferatu T-shirt in the closet she’s hiding in. But the most important thing for Fear News to do is pay close attention to the balance implied by its name. As long as both aspects remain present in each episode, it should be a winner.

Heroku, the San Francisco-based startup that offers a Ruby-focused cloud platform as a service, last week saw the number of apps deployed on its platform top 40,000, according to CEO Byron Sebastian. He joined the company after stints at BEA, EMC and most recently, SourceLabs, where he replaced co-founder James Lindenbaum as CEO. Heroku, which offered its services for free during its beta, started charging for its platform back in April. Sebastian stopped by our offices to give us a quick update on the state of Heroku.

Heroku is adding about 1,000 apps to its platform every week and sales are growing at a rapid clip, Sebastian told me. But he declined to share any revenue specifics, despite my repeated requests, which tells me that they’re still a ways off from being meaningful. Indeed, the company’s low-cost platform first needs to scale. Sebastian, however, remains confident: “We see a lot of new apps go live with small app development and testing…but in couple of months people shift to premium models.” The 2-year-old company was incubated inside YCombinator and raised about $3 million in funding from RedPoint Ventures and certain individuals in May 2008.

According to some developers who are currently using Heroku, the service hits a sweet spot of “managed application hosting at a reasonable price point (and with free small-scale deployment).” Add to that its ease of use, and the gushing of such developers over the service makes complete sense. It helps that Heroku has been listening so intently to the developer community and has subsequently been rolling out some of their most-requested features. For smaller developers, the low entry price is definitely a differentiator. But while the company has targeted its service to the developers of Facebook and iPhone apps, it’s slowly seen interest emerge from larger enterprises. “We are seeing a transition from being a prototype platform to being a platform for serious business apps,” said Sebastian.

Heroku’s platform is based entirely on Amazon Web Services such as EC2 and S3, which allows the company to lower its initial capital outlay while at the same time enabling it to scale as needed, depending on its end customers. As Derrick Harris previously noted, Heroku’s platform-as-a-service offering makes deploying web applications “a trivial process, where developers can forgo the busy work of configuring app servers and databases, and of allocating resources to each component.”

Heroku’s recent growth spurt mirrors that of cloud computing services, especially those in the U.S., many of which Derrick wrote about in a recent note for GigaOM Pro (subscription required). I’ve been hearing similar stories as to the robust demand taking place across the cloud ecosystem. In the meantime, AT&T last week started offering a cloud compute service and Microsoft is getting ready to launch its much-awaited Azure cloud offering early next year.

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I quit smoking four years ago, but before that, I was a dedicated smoker for a solid decade. Luckily, I never had any Mac trouble that would necessitate a warranty replacement during those 10 years, or I might’ve been out of luck. Apple has denied Applecare warranty service in at least two separate instances due to the effects of secondhand smoke, according to Consumerist.

In both cases, smoke was to blame for repairs not performed, but not because the malfunctions the computers suffered were due to damage related to cigarette smoke. Instead, the fact that the Macs had existed in houses where people smoked had resulted in the machines being labeled health risks, which was grounds for repair personnel to refuse to work on them.

It’s unclear whether or not smoking is specifically covered in the terms of Applecare, but it appears that the grounds upon which service refusals have been made is the classification of nicotine as a hazardous substance on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) list. At least, that’s what one of the people affected heard from Steve Jobs’ office, though she clearly disputes the logic used in that justification:

Dena [from Jobs' office] did advise me that nicotine is on OSHA’s list of hazardous substances and Apple would not require an employee to repair anything deemed hazardous to their health. However, OSHA also lists calcium carbonate (found in calcium tablets), isopropyl alcohol (used to clean wounds), chlorine (used in swimming pools), hydrogen peroxide (also used to clean wounds), sucrose (a sugar), talc (as in powder), etc…as hazardous substances.

Consumerist couldn’t get an Apple representative to make an official statement regarding the company’s policy on Macs used in a smoking environment, but considering the similarity of both responses to the inquiries of the two people affected, Apple repair personnel at least reserve the right to refuse service, even if they don’t always choose to exercise that right.

As a longtime smoker (who never smoked indoors anywhere I lived, mind you), and as someone who’s had to get the cigarette smell out of at least one car before selling it, I can see people objecting to working on a computer that’s been saturated with smoke for an extended period. The smell isn’t pretty, and it might feel like the machine might be hazardous to your health — feel being the key word.

I’m no scientist, but I’m assuming it isn’t like the Apple techs cracked the case and a puff of smoke shot out. Is there really a significant danger associated with the inert remnants of what smoke leaves behind? I remain highly skeptical. Anyone else ever run into this excuse for refusing an otherwise valid Applecare repair?