By Brian Barrett, Gizmodo – September 13, 2010 at 04:40PM
Slogging through your Netflix Watch Instantly options can be a nightmarish tour of the straight-to-DVD netherworld. Fortunately, our friends over at Splitsider have compiled a handy list of 55 comedies for your queue that aren’t just excellent—they’re essential. More »
By nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson), Ars Technica – September 10, 2010 at 02:35PM
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today ruled (PDF) on a long-standing case involving used software on eBay, and it came to an important decision: if a company says you don’t have the right to resell a program, you don’t have that right. Could this mean the end of the resale market for all digital content? Yup. But the court says it had no choice.
The case is Vernor v. Autodesk, in which Timothy Vernor made his living from selling items (including software) on eBay. Vernor had picked up some old copies of AutoCAD from an architect’s office sale, complete with their serial numbers, and he put them up on eBay noting that they were not currently installed on any computer. Sounds legal, right?
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By (author unknown), National Geographic News – September 10, 2010 at 01:29PM
While battling a blaze on the slopes of Mauna Kea in August, a Hawaii firefighter captured rare footage of a fire tornado, or fire whirl. Video.
Hawaii – Mauna Kea – United States – Earth Sciences – Tornadoes
By Becky Stern, MAKE – September 10, 2010 at 12:00PM
Instructables user AaronX621 writes:
This will show you how to replace the internal battery on your Sonicare Elite 7300. After having my 2nd one die on me within 3 yrs I figured out how to rip it apart and fix it.
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By Kat Hannaford, Gizmodo – September 10, 2010 at 06:00AM
They’ve got millions of people out of trouble since their invention in the 1880s (and opened a few bottles of wine along the way), but how much do you know about the humble Swiss army knife? [Outside] More »
By Eric Reagan, Photography Bay – September 10, 2010 at 01:44AM
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography has been quite controversial over the past few years. But, if you thought HDR photos had fans and foes, just wait until HDR video catches on.
The above clip from Soviet Montage is captured using 2 Canon 5D Mark II cameras shooting the same scene simultaneously with the aid of a beam splitter. One camera is recording at +2 EV and one camera is recording at -2 EV.
Regardless of how you feel about the HDR effect, you have to admit that these shots are interesting at least. You can also bet that a feature like this will be built-in to a camera within a couple of years or so.
[Thanks to Dean for the tip!]
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By Gareth Branwyn, MAKE – September 10, 2010 at 01:30AM
This awesome video shows furniture maker extraordinaire Mike Jarvi creating one of his signature steamed-wood benches from a single slab of wood. The video documents the several-month-long process, from chainsawing the log to finishing the bench. Great filmmaking and soundtrack, too. Rock n’ roll woodworking! [Thanks, Eric!]
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By (author unknown), Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine – September 09, 2010 at 10:09PM
We’ve told you before about CCTV programs that can identify criminal behavior, or that skip through footage where nothing’s happening. Now, a consortium of ten organizations from six European countries is working on another concept involving video monitoring of public spaces. It’s called the SUBITO project, for Surveillance of Unattended Baggage and the Identification and Tracking of the Owner, and it’s intended to do pretty much what the name suggests. Installed in existing security camera systems at places such as airports or train stations, the software will identify baggage that has been left unattended, and that could therefore possibly contain an explosive device. It will then search back to identify the person who deposited that baggage, then follow them forward through various cameras to establish their present location…
Continue Reading New CCTV tech could spot abandoned baggage and track its owner
Tags: Bombs,
Cctv,
Detection,
Identification,
Luggage,
Monitoring,
Recognition,
Security,
Surveillance,
Terrorism,
Tracking,
Video
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By James Johnson, ForeverGeek – September 09, 2010 at 12:16PM
I usually cringe at the thought of a fan made animated short for movies I love, typically they are poorly constructed, lack imagination and basically suck all around, however this telling of why Jabba took out a bounty on Han Solo is actually very well produced Star Wars flick.
The short animated flick tells the story of the cargo Han Solo ditched, which in turn caused Jabba The Hut to take out a bounty on his head.
Listen to the voice actor who portrayed Han Solo and you’ll swear you were listening to a young Harrison Ford, while the animation gives great homage to Ford and Chewbacca’s original characters from the trilogy, while lending itself well to the CG based Clone Wars series.
There is just one warning, the movie is in 3D, so while you can watch it normally, a pair of of high tech glasses will definitely hep your experience.
So what do you think? Not to bad for a fan attempt at digital animation in my opinion.
By Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch – September 09, 2010 at 12:13PM
At first glance, the stats from free text messaging startup GOGII and its textPlus application sound like they’re too big by an order of magnitude: 3.7 billion messages sent since June 2009. 8.5 million downloads. 23 million phone numbers in the network. But they’re real, and they’re a big business. Today the company is launching two new features that make the textPlus experience even richer, with support for sending images and a nifty new feature called ‘Face Text’.
The first feature is self-explanatory: you can attach images to your outbound text messages and send them for free. The second feature, called Face Text, is related, but it comes with a twist. Upon activating the feature, textPlus will take a photo using your phone’s front-facing camera whenever you hit the send button, allowing you to quickly attach facial expressions whenever you send a message (think of it as emoticons meeting the photo booth — see the screenshot above). You can turn it off and there’s a countdown timer so the feature should never surprise you, and I suspect that the teenage audience that absolutely loves these apps will eat this up.
GOGII is one of a new breed of startup building on the relatively ancient and ubiquitous technology of text messaging. They compete with Pinger’s TextFree, which we wrote about last week and has similarly massive stats, and both companies have grown by leaps and bounds in the last year (interestingly, both Pinger and GOGII are part of the Kleiner Perkins iFund).
GOGII’s textPlus shares at least one major feature in common with Pinger’s TextFree: it allows you to send unlimited free text messages to your friends. But textPlus has a few differences. For one, it doesn’t give you a new unique phone number like TextFree does — instead you’ll have to message your friend’s username to the GOGII shortcode (users will be able to get their own phone numbers in the near future).
Another key differences lies in the community nature of textPlus, which TextFree doesn’t offer yet. The service effectively brings chat rooms to the mobile phone — fire up the app and you can create or join a chat room about, say, skateboarding, which behaves a lot like the AOL chat rooms of yore (around 500,000 communities have been created so far). But you can also elect to receive push notifications whenever there’s a new message, which turns into a powerful tool when you combine the feature with a private community. GOGII says that many people create private communities for their families or sports teams, which can be powerful for staying in touch with a small group: when a member of these private communities sends a chat message, it gets immediately relayed to everyone else in the community.
