Archive for May, 2007
Pure class: the new Nokia 6500 twins
Nokia have announced two new handsets, based on their proven s40v3 software: the 6500 Classic and its fancier brother, the Slide.
There’s been a Nokia 6500 before, but they seem to have run out of numbers and are re-using them for new models (usually with the ‘Classic’ suffix added).
One of them is a slim (9,5mm) but feature-packed device, while the other is a slider, a bit thicker, but with even more goodies. They both sport a sleek and stylish metal finish, that just shouts ‘Business!’.
Continue reading » Pure class: the new Nokia 6500 twins
Google’s new street map uses multi-angle camera
There’s a scene in Star Wars Clone Wars where a clone trooper tosses up a floating remote camera and uses it to survey the entire city from the safety of building’s rubble. The camera has multiple lenses to provide complete 360 degree coverage of the entire area. In real life, this was largely the kind of idea used by the Walt Disney company for many of their 360 degree movies they showed at Disneyland and Epcot – only they used multiple cameras, not one camera with multiple lenses.
Now Google is using life to imitate art with their latest “street view” features of Google maps. Immersive Media is the company which uses a drive by technique, and a multi-lensed camera – called the Dodeca Telemmersion® System.
Continue reading » Google’s new street map uses multi-angle camera
Laser-Sighted Billiard Cues
I dreamed of inventing something like this but never actually followed through with it, so I was delighted to see that somebody else also had the idea and actually did something about it. CueSight a laser aiming site for you billiard cue (or pool cue to us UK lot).
The CueSight serves two main purposes, the first is it will help you perfect your stroke:
Any dip or twist will be revealed by the crosshairs. With a perfect stroke, the crosshairs will remain fixed in the “strike spot”, narrowing in on that point as the cue approaches the cue ball. Obviously, the idea is to keep the crosshairs motionless throughout your stroke to eliminate the possibility of mis-cueing or striking at an unplanned angle.
Once you’ve perfected your cueing action you can use the CueSight to line up your shot:
The CueSight cue can help tremendously when it comes to lining up your shot. Simply use the laser to draw a line fronm the center of the cue ball to the point where the center of the cue ball will be when it impacts the object ball.
By lowering the butt of the cue from your normal shooting position, and perhaps raising the shaft slightly, depending on your technique, the vertical line of the crosshairs will illuminate not only the cue ball, but positions “down table” as well. For a straight-in shot, you want to have the top portion of the vertical line illuminate a position in the center, left-to-right, of the object ball…
I’d love to give one of these a try to see how my cueing action changes as the evening progress down the local pub, I find my optimum playing ability coincides with pint three and it’s all down hill after that.
Further info and availability over at CueSight, found via our gadget forums, thanks.
Google Adds Facial Recognition to Image Search
It looks like Google’s 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a company specializing in facial recognition software, is finally starting to pay off. Google Blogoscoped, a blog dedicated to everything related to Google, got a tip from a Google engineer that Google had secretly added some facial recognition abilities to its image search this week.
The feature remains unofficial and unannounced, but you can add a small query string to the end of your Google Image search URL to see the facial recognition software in action.
For example, do a normal Google image search for “Starbuck Battlestar” and your image results should produce images from the American SciFi TV show Battlestar Galactica. Then try adding “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL. Your new search results will only contain photos of people and tight shots of their faces. Cool right?
Last August, Google Picasa product manager Adrian Graham had this to say about Google’s acquisition of Neven Vision in the official Google blog:
“Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects.”
BeSocial: flickr | digg story | methodshop
Apple TV Announcements
Apple didn’t just start offering DRM-free music today (which is awesome in itself), they also made a small announcement regarding the Apple TV. What exactly did they say? By mid-June, YouTube will be available on your Apple TV and by tomorrow, you’ll be able to buy an Apple TV with a 160 GB hard drive.
Continue reading » Apple TV Announcements
I live on the big one in the middle (Starship Earth)
Here’s a fun little product from the people at National Geographic.
Sure, you know which sphere you stand/sit/sleep on, on a daily basis, but you’ve also got to think,, hmm, where am I really?
This is cool for the kids.
Why, you ask?
Because think of all that explanations of astronomical units, distances, and spatial relations. Now you can show kids, (and friends too) just where we are, what we’re looking at, and a tiny glimpse, at what else is out there.
(I know it’s a tad spendy at $450, but come on,, we live here!) Continue reading » I live on the big one in the middle (Starship Earth)
Apple Launches iTunes Plus
On Wednesday, Apple released an update to iTunes (US) that added DRM-free AAC music files to the iTunes Store. Dubbed iTunes Plus, the new version of iTunes will allow you to either download DRM (Digital Rights Management) files for the standard $0.99 or spend $1.29 on DRM-free songs.
In addition to iTunes Plus, Apple added a new section to iTunes 7.2 called iTunes U, where you can download lectures from various universities around the US free of charge. In addition to lectures, many Universities are offering language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours. Participating schools currently include Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University and MIT.
It’s probably only a matter of time until someone claims that they graduated from “iTunes U.”
BeSocial: digg story | methodshop
