Wireless Camera Hunter makes spying fun. “Sporting two antennae and a 2.5-inch TFT LCD for maximum peeping enjoyment, the WCH DD9000 is a video Walkman-sized device that scans the airwaves for wireless video transmissions in the 900MHz to 2.52GHz range, and locks in on any usable signals within 500 feet.”
Engadget
Samsung Hybrid Touch Screen LCD. “This design has eliminated a separate printed circuit board containing the sensor that must be attached to the top of an LCD. Now, all the sensor circuitry is contained within the LCD itself.”
Gizmodo
My World Cup: How to take part. “The World Cup has kicked off in Germany – and the BBC are looking for football fans with webcams to appear live on BBC World TV during the tournament.To take part, you’ll need to have a passionate opinion about football and the impact of the World Cup in your country.”
BBC NEWS
GNU Radio: the universal, software-defined radio. “With the right GNU Radio hardware, the same machine can act as a digital TV receiver (try forcing the Broadcast Flag down a GNU Radio owner’s throat!), a satellite radio receiver, an AM/FM tuner, an analog TV receiver, and a military radar installation. All at the same time.”
Boing Boing
Find Out When Your Friends Become Single. “Want to know when that cute friend of yours breaks up with her boyfriend? Check out David Weekly’s SingleStat.us, a service that let’s you type in anyone’s Myspace profile and be notified by email if their relationship status changes.”
TechCrunch
The Yelpie portable outdoor lightweight personal safe. “The Yelpie is a portable personal, lightweight, electronic safe about the size of a shoebox. Users place their valuables inside, and enter a PIN number to lock and arm it, then Motion sensors inside detect unauthorized movement and emit a continuous 90 decibel alarm if it is moved.”
gizmag
MIDAS: Homemade Dorm Room Home Automation System. “Since moving into my dorm this last fall, my roommate RJ Ryan and I have been working on creating the most elaborate automation system we could envision. Featuring everything from web control, voice activation, and a security system, to large continuously running information displays, electric blinds, and one-touch parties, the custom designed MIDAS Automation System has brought ease to our lives (if one doesn’t count all the time it took to actually build and program the system).”
MIT
Phoxelspace: tangible exploration of voxel data. “Our goal is to improve the means to intuitively navigate and understand complex 3-dimensional datasets. The system works by allowing the user to define a free form geometry that can be utilized as a cutting surface with which to intersect a voxel dataset. The intersected voxel values are projected back onto the surface of the physical material.”
pasta and vinegar
Playing in circles. “loopScape, by Ryota Kuwakubo, is a game for 2 players with wireless controllers. It is a very classic shooting game. But instead of battling on a flat screen, you have to run around the cylindrical LED screen to follow your spaceship.”
we make money not art
Pet Translating Cellphone Service. “Get the pet to bark, meow, squak or moo for 10 seconds and then the pet translating service will provide information about the current physical state of the pet.”
Gizmodo
The EEM-GTMS-300BK finger mouse. “The mouse straps onto your finger, and it should work on any surface thanks to the 800 dpi optical sensor, not unlike your run of the mill optical mouse. The device itself weighs 35 grams and, as you can see, isn’t wireless, although you can convientently (and we use the word loosely here, people) wrap up the cable with the finger strap”
Engadget
Something I Don’t Get About Swaptree. “First of all, any media can be swapped for any other kind of media. So I can trade the book I just finished for a DVD, or whatever. And Swaptree isn’t charging transaction fees. The site will support itself from page views. Users are responsible for their own shipping charges, however.”
TechCrunch
Assisted Living Communities Using RFID To Keep Track of Residents. “Trading privacy for security, seniors have been wearing badges embedded with an RFID tag. The tag constantly relays the location of the residents, which gives them more freedom to walk around since caregivers know exactly where they are at all times.”
Gizmodo
Second Life & Flickr mashups. “My home in SL now sports a simple picture frame. Touch it and it looks up your avatar name to see what your favourite Flickr tag is, picks a random picture with that tag from Flickr and displays it on its surface.”
Wonderland
Websites as graphs. “HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I’ve written a little app that visualizes such a graph, and here are some screenshots of websites that I often look at.”
Aharef
Sima’s Hitch allows USB devices to share files. “Transferring digital files between disparate hardware no longer has to be such a chore thanks to a new Mass Storage- and Picture Transfer Protocol-compliant offering from Sima Products called Hitch (model USB-101), which lets you connect nearly any digital camera, DAP, PMP, or flash drive with a USB connection and send single files or entire albums to a like device.”
Engadget
Companies Read Employee E-Mail. “According to a new study, about a third of big companies in the United States and Britain hire employees to read and analyze outbound e-mail as they seek to guard against legal, financial or regulatory risk. More than a third of U.S. companies surveyed also said their business was hurt by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the past 12 months, according to the annual study from a company specializing in protecting corporate e-mail at large businesses.”
Wired News
Web users to ‘patrol’ US border. “A US state is to enlist web users in its fight against illegal immigration by offering live surveillance footage of the Mexican border on the internet. The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas’ border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings.”
BBC NEWS
LG’s 1.48-mm TFT LCD. “Besides being able to balance on a razor’s edge for photo ops, this wee TFT panel will drop in both 2.0 and 2.2-inch formats able to handle QVGA (320 x 240) resolutions.”
Engadget
The Unstabalizer. “The Unstabalizer can turn a bar into a self-organizing system similar to a stock exchange. The price of a drink (a “stock”) is set based on demand. The more people buy a certain drink, the more its price will rise, causing the prices of other drinks in this alcoholic stock market to fall. The owners and organizers can also set minimum prices, to avoid loss due to “market dynamics”.”
we make money not art
Soios 55-Cam 360 Surround Webcam. “It gives you a choice of outputting full 360-degree surround video, 270 degrees or a single 4×3 frame. Since the lens is in the base of the camera pointing up at a 55mm hyperbolic mirror, it’s possible to pan the shot across all 360 degrees, picking which direction that 4×3 video frame will be shot without having to physically move the lens.”
Gizmodo
Don’t shout it, Tratt’ it. “TRATTIs generate noise and sound and music (depending on your ear) according to what the kid is looking at. Each TRATTI is different, yet all are similar. The prototype plays the visual world as the score for the sounds.”
we make money not art
del.icio.us discover graphs-. “an impressive set of data visualizations that explore the del.icio.us collaborative bookmarking network”
information aesthetics
MediStick – carrying your medical history in your pocket. “The software solution in memory stick format contains your blood group, allergies, current medication and any current health conditions) and administrative data such as your name, date of birth, next of kin contact information and family doctor contact numbers as well as health care insurance details. The software also contains a password protected area for storing your more sensitive data.”
gizmag
Outward Bound for Robots. “A computer navigation system based on a part of the brain called the hippocampus has been tested on an autonomous robotic car. By enabling the robot to take what its creators call “cognitive fingerprints” of its surroundings, the software allows the vehicle to explore and remember places in much the same way mammals do. Tests on the robotic vehicle — an adapted Daimler-Chrysler Smart Car equipped with a laser range finder and omnidirectional camera as sensors — have shown that it can successfully explore and navigate more than one and a half kilometers of urban terrain without getting lost.”
Technology Review
Vibrating Combat Attire. “This is some sort of vibrating haptic combat vest that will alert you to the state of your comrades in battle and might even be able to sense incoming enemies.”
Gizmodo
Police offered robot eye. “A firm that produces surveillance software used by numerous British police forces is looking for one of them to test its latest wheez, a programme that automatically scans CCTV footage for suspicious behaviour and matches it with other intelligence such as mugshots. The new software, by Nice Systems, can alert police when it detects loitering, crowd gathering, people running when they should be walking, tail-gating, parking in the wrong place, unauthorised entry, or any sort of behaviour the police want to track.”
The Register
A Social Screensaver or a Game?. “The Endless Forest is a social screensaver, a virtual place where you can play with your friends. When your computer goes to sleep you appear as a deer in this magical place. There are no goals to achieve or rules to follow. You just steer your deer through the forest and see what happens.”
pasta and vinegar
HP Coliseum does web conferencing in 3D. “A recently released research paper demonstrates a rig consisting of five FireWire equipped-webcams strategically mounted to an LCD monitor. Software combines the cams’ images into a real-time 3D model that looks like a character out of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and mimics your every move, shrugs included.”
Engadget
Jack PC: The Wall Socket PC. “The UK company Jade Integration is about to release a PC that is small enough to fit inside a standard wall power socket. Not only that, it can be powered solely over ethernet. Called the Jack PC, the guts of it consists of two layered circuit boards and is powered by only 5 Watts. The face contains a VGA port, 4 USB ports, an audio and a microphone port. The CPU is an AMD RISC processor which is the equivalent of a 1.2GHz x86 processor”
Gizmodo
Mob rule on China’s Internet: The keyboard as weapon. “It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China’s most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. “Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons,” as one person wrote, “to chop out the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband.” Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams to hunt down the student’s identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home.”
International Herald Tribune
Invisible maze. “The promised maze is there but it only materialises as we move around in it. Visitors are equipped with digital headphones operated by infrared rays that cause them to vibrate every time they bump into one of the maze’s virtual walls. Thus, the exhibition is perceived as a both minimalist and a spectacular playground.”
we make money not art
Korean citizen journalists get shot at Herald Tribune. “The International Herald Tribune, the global newspaper owned by the New York Times, is to carry stories written by members of the public. A deal with a South Korean news website, OhmyNews International, could see so-called “citizen journalists” appearing alongside established writers. The agreement is believed to be an attempt to boost the Herald Tribune’s coverage of Asia.”
Guardian
Orange branches out from mobiles. “Orange is launching Europe’s first “quadruple play” mobile phone service. The move means consumers will get just one bill from the company for mobile, landline, internet and TV services. Orange also said it would be launching a trial for customers to use one handset to cover mobile, fixed-line and voice over internet (Voip) services.”
BBC NEWS
User creates virtual ecosystem in Second Life. “If I was to turn off the clouds the whole system would die in about six hours,” Laukosargas Svarog tells me. “Turn off the bees and [the plants stop] growing, because nothing gets pollinated. And it’s the transfer of pollen that signals the plants to drop seeds.”
Boing Boing
Scientists Create Robotic Hand Controlled By Human Thought. “sing the incredibly expensive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, the researchers recorded brain activity of test subjects when asked to make rock, paper, and scissor symbols with their hand. They then mapped the data to the robotic hand. Researchers were then able to control the hand, to replicate the rock, paper, scissors movements, simply by thinking about the appropriate symbol.”
I4U News
Robot Mimics Tongues, Trunks, Tentacles. “A robot with a flexible, trunk-like arm could one day work like an elephant to grasp unwieldy loads, navigate like a snake through the rubble of a disaster zone, or feel around inside the dark crevasses of other planets.”
Discovery Channel
US court backs online reporters. “Online journalists have the same rights as traditional reporters, a Californian court has ruled. The decision was made in a case brought by Apple against a number of reporters who published information online about a future Apple product launch.”
BBC NEWS
Hospital staff in Truro who are always in touch. “The hands-free device operates on a wireless local area network, weighs less than two ounces and enables users to speak to each other by saying a person’s name or department. They are automatically connected with the appropriate person and can speak to them just as on a normal telephone.”
Times Online
Clothes make a statement electronically. “Imagine subscribing to a daily – hourly! – feed of T-shirt designs. Or admiring a friend’s plaid slacks and then turning your own trousers into instant tartan twins. Perhaps clothiers will sell designs without their customers ever having to step inside a store. Maybe advertisers will pay you to wear their brand on your sleeve. These are the sorts of ideas bandied about in Donath’s group.”
csmonitor.com
Flexible Electronic Curtain. “Liquid crystal molecules are dispersed between two panels of plastic. The curtain is opaque when turned off and becomes translucent when the power is turned on.
This curtain can actually be made to appear white, red, yellow or blue. “
I4U News
EtchASound. “You talk, and EtchASound makes your words into 3D sketches – “EtchASound is an installation inspired by the world famous toy Etch-A-Sketch. By interacting with EtchASound audiences can have the unique experience of drawing with their own voice.”
networked_performance
Compress files online with Krunch. “With Krunch, you can upload and compress your files, upload and uncompress already compressed files, uncompress and view/download compressed web files, and finally, grab files from the internet, compress them, and then download them.”
Lifehacker
iPod and the SpeckTone. “If the Hi-Fi was a little late-century minimalist for you, peep Speck’s new SpeckTone, the only iPod dock with real-simulated 1950s design stylings to get your be-bop on, dig?”
Engadget
Technology and Easy Credit Give Identity Thieves an Edge. “Browsing a government Web site, he pulled up a local divorce document listing the parties’ names, addresses and bank account numbers, along with scans of their signatures. With a common software program and some check stationery, the document provided all he needed to print checks in his victims’ names — and it was all made available, with some fanfare, by the county recorder’s office. The site had thousands of them.”
New York Times
CNET’s AllYouCanUpload Is Disruptive. “AllYouCanUpload is a site that makes uploading photos as easy as it can possibly get. They’ve removed all of the friction. You do not need to register for an account. You just use the uploading tool and you are shown the image along with codes to post the photo on sites like Myspace, ebay and others (I’d also like an option to have the image links emailed to me).”
TechCrunch
When location information undermines navigation. “We found that after training with a navigation aid, there was no reduction in performance when the aid was removed. Even with training interfaces that made the task significantly easier, people learned the locations as well as those who had no aid at all in training. These results suggest that designers can use navigation aids to assist inexperienced users, without compromising the eventual acquisition of a spatial map.”
pasta and vinegar
Japanese Magic Candle by HONO. “Fancylogic started to sell the HONO Magic electrical candle. The stylish LED candle is lit with the bundled magic match. You can actually blow out this candle like any normal one. “
I4U News
Software to Look for Experts Among Your Friends. “The service allows the user to mine the data on the computers of friends, business associates and others with shared interests on any subjects. However, Illumio is not a search engine, like Google or Yahoo. The system works by transparently distributing a request for information on questions like “Who knows John Smith?” and “Are Nikon digital cameras better than Olympus?” to the computers in a network of users. The questions can then be answered locally based on a novel reverse auction system that Illumio uses to determine who the experts are.”
New York Times
Sensors: Living off scraps of energy. “Professor Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology has devised a sensor that can harvest mechanical energy and convert it into electricity. Embedded in the boot of a soldier, for instance, the sensor could conceivably gather energy when its wearer walks and use that energy to charge batteries for a radio or flashlight, for example. Similarly, blood flow from the heart could generate energy for an implanted medical device.”
CNET News.com
Airbus turns to robots for in-flight emergencies. “Currently, pilots are trained to turn off the autopilot when they encounter an emergency and maneuver the plane to safety themselves. But Airbus thinks that pilots sometimes overreact in such situations, unneccessarily shaking up the passengers (at best).”
Engadget
The Shorter, Faster, Cruder, Tinier TV Show. “A boyish-looking 41-year-old man wearing jeans and a green-and-purple-striped sweater, Sirulnick was in the room that morning because just a few months earlier MTV redrew its organizational chart and gave him a new job it considers extremely important, one with the unwieldy title of executive vice president for multiplatform production, news and music. Translated, it means that he is the guy responsible for figuring out how his network — one of the most recognizable in the world, with annual ad revenue of more than a billion dollars — will continue to thrive creatively, and thus financially, in a world where television’s center of gravity seems to be rapidly shifting, away from immobile TV sets and toward roving screens: laptops, P.D.A.’s, iPods, game players and, most important, cellphones.”
New York Times
Music from the pools. “Waves is a sound installation that uses buoys to connect wading pools in two different locations and create sound compositions generated by the energy of waves in a wading pool.”
we make money not art
First Amendment Applies to Internet, Appeals Court Rules. “A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.”
New York Times
Startup Designs MEMS Gyroscope For Cameraphones. “The tiny micromachines react to and counteract vibrations in a user’s hand, steadying the cameraphone’s lens. While bulkier gyroscopes are becoming increasingly common in standalone digital still image and video cameras, InvenSense’s “Gyroscop” was created to fit within the tiny confines of a cellular phone, which is taking on the functions, and feature sets, of low-end dedicated cameras.”
ExtremeTech
WikiMapia – The geographical wikipedia. “Web site WikiMapia is a Google Maps mashup that lets users add call-out sections to any area on Google Maps. The site is intended to be a Wikipedia-like reference for the planet.”
Lifehacker
Use Farecast To Find Flight Deals (or just fly Southwest). “Seattle-based Farecast, now in private beta, is an airfare pricing comparision tool that also uses a predictive algorithm to recommend when you buy your ticket. So the idea is to show the user not just who has the cheapest ticket, but whether or not waiting might make sense as well. “
TechCrunch
Open travel-time maps of the UK. “They’re laying an open geodata-bank for use in correlating house prices to travel times, cost-to-time, and generating realtime web-services.”
Boing Boing
Watching online video. “the number of online video watchers in the U.S. increased 18 percent in six months,from October 2005 and March 2006,according to comScore’s first-ever study of video viewing habits,writes ClickZ.In March,viewers initiated 3.7 billion online video content streams and on average watched nearly 100 minutes of video content,compared with 85 minutes in October,according to comScore’s new Video Metrix service.”
Smart Mobs
Babble: The Office Conversation Masker. “Babble connects to your desk phone and reproduces your voice tone and quality through its speakers and broadcasts them to mask your own voice. The result: others hear a low volume group conversation while the person you talk to can understand you loud and clear.”
Gizmodo
Logitec intros USB touchscreen “faceplates”. “Coming in 15-inch or 17-inch varieties, respectively, the LTP-15UBK and LTP-17UBK (or LTP-17U, in white) simply attach to your existing LCD with velcro strips, and let you manipulate your pointer with either a finger, a la an ATM machine, or the included pen, as with a graphics tablet.”
Engadget
Physicists draw up plans for real ‘cloaking device’. “Light normally bounces off an object’s surface making it visible to the human eye. But John Pendry and colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, have calculated that materials engineered to have abnormal optical properties, known as metamaterials, could make light pass around an object as so it appears as if it were not there at all. Metamaterials are exotic composites made of electronic components such as wires and inductors that can be engineered to precisely control the way light travels through them.”
New Scientist
Amazon introduces new Online Reader. “It looks like the Online Reader is available already for most books that had previews (see Getting Things Done in the link below), but what’s more interesting is that after purchasing an Amazon Upgrade on eligible books, you can read, highlight, bookmark, tag, and print the book from any computer as soon as you purchase it. Upgrades look like they cost around $5, which doesn’t seem too bad.”
Lifehacker
“Smackbook Pro” switch desktops by touch. “Mac user and developer Erling Ellingsen is putting the new Macbook’s motion sensor to work with his virtual desktop manager: he’s programmed it to switch desktops when he hits the side of his “Smackbook Pro.” Check out the video to see it in action”
Lifehacker
Interactive TV to capture MySpace generation. “MyTVNetwork will now be built around heavy interaction with the internet. It will feature two 65 episode, five days a week, 13 week TV series entitled “Desire” and “Secrets”, with clips freely shareable over the internet and via mobile phones among members of the MyNetworkTV.com website, built around MySpace principles. The idea is to create a shared experience across neighbourhoods and groups of friends, who will be able to join web groups that contribute to blogs and debates over which direction each series should go in. Viewers will also be able to vote on which actors should be cast in which roles, based on auditions which are viewable from the website.”
The Register
The mobile-phone-controlled interactive mannequin. “The technology enables consumers to use their mobile phone like a remote control to surf or communicate with large screens in storefront windows, cafes, bars or city streets and converts passive out-of-home networks into interactive marketing networks, creating a closed loop between the web, mobile phones and retail spaces.”
gizmag Article
Charging up the stairs. “Your body at rest is emitting about 100 watts into the environment. Now the 34,000 commuters who pass through Victoria underground station in London at rush hour could theoretically generate enough energy to power 6,500 LED light fittings. Elsewhere in the world, researchers are also looking into how energy harvesting devices can be embedded within roads or how they can be used to create a self-powering heart pacemaker or even an artificial limb.”
we make money not art
Listen Up, Navigation System. I Know a Shortcut.. “Navigation devices may suggest routes that do not match your tried-and-true paths. But the Pioneer AVIC-Z1, an in-dash entertainment and navigation system, will learn and follow your favorite routes, storing the information on the hard drive that holds its map data.”
New York Times
SuperOyster: Monetizing the Waiting List. “The service, which was profiled earlier this month on O’Reilly Radar, has an innovative and controversial business model: allowing people to buy and sell their places in line on a waiting list. The prime market for this is professional sports, where waiting lists to buy season tickets are sometimes decades long. If a team integrates the SuperOyster solution, fans on the waiting list will be able to buy and sell those positions to each other at prices determined by the overall market.”
TechCrunch
More People Living in Digital Cocoons. “A new lifestyle trend is springing up in South Korea, one of the world’s most advanced digital hotbeds _ more and more folks are retreating to their homes instead of socializing with others. Experts call the phenomenon “digital cocooning” because such a fad is enabled and accelerated by the digital revolution, which is occurring here in a full-fledged manner.”
The Korea Times
New Samsung Notebook Replaces Hard Drive With Flash. “Samsung Electronics said Tuesday that it will launch two mobile computers in early June that will do away with hard drives altogether, replacing them with 32 gigabytes of NAND flash memory. The notebooks will be the first to use flash memory as the main storage device.”
ExtremeTech
The Attention Trust. “They’ve developed their own software (or you can use an approved online service called Root) that allows you to track your own internet usage. It’s a bit like spying on yourself, except it’s all above board. Later on, you can review on your habits, which may provide some insights, and you can share your information with whoever you wish (and only with those you wish). Privacy is key. Our attention is ours and we have a right to this proprietary information.”
Cool Hunting
Honda’s Asimo gets mind control interface. “In a demonstration, a person in the MRI machine made a fist, then made a V-sign, which Asimo imitated a few seconds later. The same system could potentially be used to control a keyboard or phone, researchers say, or even help people with spinal cord injuries move their limbs. From there, we assume, it’s only a matter of time before the bots learn to reverse the process, initiating a mind control link over their would-be masters.”
Engadget
Virtual Sightseeing. “Those creepy, potentially-diseased heavy metal binoculars that you find at tourist spots might be going the way of the Do Do. The Virtual Sightseeing system uses a similar concept but can overlay graphics and text on any scene.”
Gizmodo
Sweet Success For Pioneering Hydrogen Energy Project (Fuel Cells). “This was a highly successful laboratory demonstration of bacterial hydrogen production using confectionery waste as a feedstock. The waste was supplied by Birmingham-based international confectionery and beverage company Cadbury Schweppes plc, a partner in the initiative. An economic assessment undertaken by another partner, C-Tech Innovation Ltd, showed that it should be practical to repeat the process on a larger scale. As well as energy and environmental benefits, the technique could provide the confectionery industry (and potentially other foodstuff manufacturers) with a useful outlet for waste generated by their manufacturing processes.”
Lockergnome
MIT poet develops ‘seeing machine’. “While still allowing the projection of images, video and more onto a person’s retina, the new desktop device costs much less than its predecessor in part because it doesn’t include the diagnostic feedback of the SLO. The new seeing machine also replaces the laser of the SLO with light-emitting diodes, another source of high-intensity light that is much cheaper. Like its inspiration, the seeing machine is designed to be used by one eye.”
MIT News Office
Dermal Display Gets Under the Skin. “The display would consist of billions of light-emitting robots implanted under the skin and capable of rearranging themselves to spell out words and numbers and produce animations. They would display data received from other nanobots in the body designed to monitor a person’s vital signs. Instructions from the patient could be communicated by touch-screen-like finger taps on the skin.”
Discovery Channel
Scottish Rite real time solar power performance. “When I checked at 10:30am PT, the panels were producing 31 kW, and the building was consuming only 23.2 kW, which means the Scottish Rite building’s meter was running backwards.”
Boing Boing
The Sheep Market. “Thousands of workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk webservice were paid two cents to “draw a sheep facing to the left.” Their sheep drawings were collected and printed on collectable stamps.”
we make money not art
What’s Hot on the Linux Front? Xgl Compiz. “Think Apple’s OS X offers incredible user-interface eye candy? Wait until you see Xgl and Compiz in action! A little background first. Xgl is an X server architecture running on Linux that taps into high-powered, modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers to accelerate jaw-dropping 3D visual effects rendered by the Compiz compositing windows manager. Together this duo greatly enhances desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.”
eHomeUpgrade
Musical column. “SoniColumn (image on the left) is a high column-like cylinder that can be played by touch. Grids of LEDs installed inside the column light themselves on by the users’ touch and emit unique sounds. When a user cranks the handle, the column slowly rotates itself and plays the light patterns of the user’s touch.”
we make money not art
A Weinstein Will Invest in Exclusivity. “Invitations are difficult to come by: only some members have the right to invite friends to join. According to Erik Wachtmeister, the site’s founder and the son of a former Swedish ambassador to the United States, a panel considers 12 to 15 variables before permitting certain users to issue invitations. “You don’t want to let just anyone invite,” Mr. Wachtmeister said. Asked what those variables were, he replied that it’s a “secret sauce.”"
New York Times
Virtual Sumo. “The more emotionally neutral their state of mind is, the more their (virtual) energy grows. When they think the moment has come, by pressing a button with their right hand they launch the attack: The piece that represents them flings itself at the opponent’s piece tryng to throw it out of the circle. On the wall above the two contestants a large screen will dramatically reveal the alternation of the two fighters’ emotional responses.”
we make money not art
Never Mind the Clip-On Ties, Geek Squad Can Fix Your PC. “The conversation with Mr. Stephens, who is chief inspector of the Geek Squad for Best Buy, helps to explain the success and, indeed, the proliferation of services that do what most Americans are unwilling to do themselves. It is not confined to oil changes, maid service or hiring a gardener or handyman. Almost every time you buy electronics you are offered a service contract either by the manufacturer or the retailer. Beyond service contracts, though, consumers need some insight into how to be smarter about deciding when to call for help. It all boils down to the classic choice between time and money.”
New York Times
Human Locator. “Human Locator is an art & technology company created by the web designers who designed MoCo Loco; Freeset. They create stunning interactive installations like the never-before- seen-until-now ones you can see here. My faves are Water and Bubbles.”
MoCo Loco
CuteCircuit fashion show in Pisa. “To help New Yorkers stop a Yellow Cab on its tracks designer Terence Arjo embedded the Yo,Taxi! coat with a persistence of vision display, shown through a row of LEDs on the cuff of the coat. When the wearer waves his/her hand in the taxi-hailing gesture, the LEDs illuminate.”
we make money not art
Technology Innovation and Job Interviews. “What if you could use TiVo for a job interview? The candidate does the interview at the place and time of his/her choosing. The interviewer reviews responses from multiple candidates when and where convenient. HireVue is facilitating just that.”
deal architect
Robot surgeon performs world’s first unassisted operation. “Luckily for the pioneering patient, the 50-minute surgery went off without a hitch, most likely due to the fact that the prototype bot has software containing data about some 10,000 real-world operations, and has already performed assisted procedures on at least 40 people. Pappone, who initiated and monitored the latest surgery from a computer in Boston while it was occurring in Milan, plans to release a commercial version of the unnamed robosurgeon later this month.”
Engadget
How much is your domain worth?. “Here at LeapFish, we have created a rating system which is based on various factors and ratings you may find individually for a domain name. This system is called a CVS (Combined Value Score). The CVS is created by compiling a score derived from several different factors and running them through our formula to end up with a number. This is your score.”
Lifehacker
Accenture takes on the battle of bulge. “The prototype is based on a standard bathroom mirror which feeds in information gathered from webcams and sensing devices positioned around the home, monitoring visits to the refrigerator, use of the treadmill, or spending too much time on the couch. When users then look at their “reflection” in the mirror it will project an image of how their face and body will look in the future based on their current habits.”
smh.com.au
Iris Scan Camera Jiris JCP1000. “The Jiris JCP1000 from Jiristech recognizes your eyes signature in 1 second. The camera connects via USB to your PC. The bundled software encrypts and decrypts files and grants to the desktop and hard-drive access.”
I4U News
Chasing Exotic Cars Is Their Pursuit. “For most car watchers, the hobby is about snapping a few photos with their cellphone cameras. But Spyder and his friends shoot videos and post them on car-watching websites like http://www.exoticspotter.com and http://www.streetfire.net where enthusiasts offer their latest sighting of a $1.4-million Bugatti Veyron.”
Los Angeles Times
Pimp my heart. “Pimp my Heart is a performance/vehicle intervention that uses a HBBB (HeartBeat Bass Booster) system to amplify the heartbeat of a car driver in real time through an interface with a beefed up car audio aftermarket system.
The project turns the body/vehicle relationship inside-out, addressing the vulnerability of human body and emotion and aims to understand our obsession on automobiles and its modification.”
we make money not art
The Phone Tattoo. “the company is also releasing packs of blank tattoo stickers so you can design (using free software downloadable here) and print customized tattoos for Motorola RAZR and Motorola SLVR phones (L2, L6 and L7). The “tattoo” stickers are specifically designed to match the contours of these devices. Accordingly, you can now customise your mobile phone to match your clothes, reflect your surroundings, or portray your car, your football team, your partner, your children, your style, or lack thereof!”
gizmag
Volunteer Computer Grids: Beyond SETI@home. “But now there are dozens of other massively multiprocessor projects—known alternatively as distributed computing (DC), grid computing, or volunteer computing—that can take advantage of your otherwise unused CPU cycles in an effort to do things like predict global climate change, calibrate particle accelerators, or develop drugs to combat cancer and AIDS. We decided to look into whether these projects have actually accomplished anything or were just spinning CPU cycles unnecessarily and making their users feel virtuous.”
Extreme Tech
What Things Cost. “Apple 4GB iPod Nano: New York City: $249 Buenos Aires: $592 (1,799 Argentine pesos) Cape Town: $321.77 (1,956 rand) London: $286.802 (152.34 pounds) Moscow: $299 (8,074 rubles) Paris: $295.80 (231.61 euros) Shanghai: $299.74 (2,400 renminbi) Tel Aviv: $371.68 (1,649 shekels) Tokyo: $248.83 (27,800 yen)”
Business Week
3D Milling service for virtual worlds. “Second Life residents will soon be able to order up physical versions of their avatars, their builds or their favorite Second Life objects in full 3D, and in a variety of materials, thanks to a pair of students at the Art Institute of Chicago.”
MAKE
Create 3D images with Picture Cloud. “Web site Picture Cloud lets you stitch together a series of photographs to create a “picture cloud,” a 3D walkaround of your subject of choice.”
Lifehacker
New York park goers to get free Internet Wi-Fi. “”We expect Central Park to be launched in July, and the rest of the parks in the late summer,” the Department of Parks and Recreation said. Among those green spaces going on-line for public Wi-Fi access will be Washington Square, Union Square, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and Flushing Meadows.”
Yahoo! News
You are currently browsing the rb.trends weblog archives for the month June, 2006.
