Wednesday, February 9, 2005

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Gigapxl project

Max Lyons made the news a year ago when he released his first gigapixel image. He took hundreds of separate images which he later stitched together to create a gigapixel image of Grand Canyon.


Physicist Graham Flint took a different approach with the Gigapxl project. He has designed and built a camera from parts of old spy planes and nuclear rectors. The result? A camera that takes a 4 gigapixel image and fills an entire DVD! No stitching required,but they still take several images which they later merge to create the clearest possible image. The gigapxl technology pages explains how they built the camera and the choices they faced while designing the camera.


Some lucky people my be able to get their hands on the camera themselves:



When he completes his photographic tour of America later this year, Flint would love to take high-resolution images of hundreds of endangered archaeological sites. He said he is in preliminary talks with organizations like Unesco, which wants a detailed record of threatened archaeological sites like Rome or Angkor Watt, which are steadily disappearing.


Flint said he's unlikely to undertake the project himself, but will probably help design cameras and train crews.


"I'd love to do that," he said. "That would be a worthwhile project for the conclusion of my career."


Via [The Wired news letter]

Tuesday, February 8, 2005

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Play mobile games using buildings as displays

Play Tetris on a big display. A very big display. A display as big as a house:




Project Blinklights allows mobile users to play games such as Tetris, Pong, Breakout and Pacman, displayed on buildings. Dial the specified number and use the touch tones to play.


Via [SmartMobs]

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Junk email filtering service

JunkMailFilter.com claims to have the most advanced Spam and Virus Filter on the planet. They use all the tricks in the book and then some. The cool part is that they give free junk mail filtering for nonprofit organizations:



Nonprofit orgs waste a lot of time and money every year deleting spam and viruses.Most solutions are expensive and just plain don't work. The way I see it - I'd rather nonprofit employees spend their time doing good work rather than spending hours every week deleting unwanted email. And - I have a system that solves the problem.


The way it works is that your email comes from the internet into my servers. I process it - and send the good email onto your existing email server. So - nothing on your end has to change. Once this is set up - everything is the same - except the spam and viruses are gone.


Via [craigblog]

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Going to the U2 Vertigo concert in Milan

A looooooooong and painful purchase experience on TicketOne.it this morning buying tickets for the U2 Vertigo 2005 tour


It's a long story. The presales for the concert in Milano started at 10:00 GMT. I connected at 10:00:01 and everyting went like a charm until I got to the page where you enter the credit card info. I entered it and clicked OK but I got a connection refused message from our proxy. Convinced that the problem was our proxy I connected via Bluetooth and UMTS, reloaded the page and had a minor heart attack when I got this message: Your shopping cart is empty. I saw my tickets vanishing in front of my eyes as the personal presale code is only valid for one purchase.


I don't give up easily and went through the complete purchase experience 1, 2, 3 many more times. Always without luck as I got an error when entered the secure part of the site. In the end I did the only thing I could think of; enter all the data and wait for the secure site to come back up again.


At 10:51 the secure site came up again and crossed my fingers and tried again. It took forever, so I almost canceled the request, but I knew things were going the right way when my credit card company sent me a SMS message alerting me that someone had charged my credit card.


Coolissimo!


See you at San Siro, Milano, 19th of July at 18:30!

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Google Maps Beta


The Google Maps beta is just great:



  • It is fast

  • The map enlarges to fill the whole browser window

  • Easy to use.

  • You can click 'n drag to move around the map as well as clicking the standard scroll buttons on the map

  • Lovely graphics

There is one major problem though: it only works for the United States :-( Maybe they are playing safe to avoid the MSN Mappoint problems in Europe...

Wednesday, February 2, 2005

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iTECH Bluetooth virtual keyboard

Dave's iPAQ  reviews the iTECH Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard



I am a sucker for Bluetooth gadgets and this thing is a must have if you find yourself taking a lot of notes in places where there is a desk. Meetings could take a lot longer though as fellow geeks will not let you go until you have explained what this dark beaming Sentinel is. The Virtual Bluetooth Keyboard  adds Bluetooth support to their infrared keyboard. This beauty beams a normal QWERTY keyboard on most surfaces. Type ahead on the desk and the VKB translates your movements to keyboard presses.


Cool Or What? - according to Dave: 



OK, so now I have loaded the drivers, paired the device, started the VKB program and enabled it to start. The question is --- does it really work?


And the answer is --- YOU BET IT DOES!!


My first test was with Pocket Word. After starting the keyboard, I opened Pocket Word and started to type. As I looked up at the screen, to my absolute amazement, it was entering text as my fingertips touched the projected template. WOW! --- is this cool or what! However, I did notice that I was entering a few extra characters as I was typing and I was not pressing those keys.



Thanks for the tip Mike!

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New members of the RoboSapiens familiy

WowWee will release three new members of the RoboSapien family this year:



  • Robosapien V2  contains the features that they had to drop from the first version; the vision is back so it can track and accept objects as well as track a laser path. This is boss as it can control the other new members of the family.

  • Roboraptor looks just mean and comes with several moods: hunter, cautious and playful.

  • Robopet can perform the usual dog tricks and comes with the same laser guided features as RoboSapien V2.


More details, prices and release dates on GadgetMadness