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After shooting with toy cameras, researcher Greg Dash became hooked on the random results and reveal that came with developing film. However, he couldn’t share all his film photos digitally and on top of that, was unable to find a decent-priced fisheye lens for his SLR. He decided to make his own.
Dash’s camera body is about as thick as an iPhone 5, takes HD video and has a 170 degree fisheye lens. Photos are stored on a microSD card and the battery charges via USB. Check out the video, above, for more.
Aside from its size, the camera’s biggest feature is the surprise. There’s no screen to look back on your photos, so users get the experience of film.
With the mini camera, you won’t have to miss an opportunity by going to an app. You can also snap pictures in tight spaces to achieve extreme angles — Dash put the camera in between the gaps of a monkey cage to get up close.
You can buy the tiny camera for $84 with estimated shipping in June, provided the fundraising goal is met.
READ MORE
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/04/02/digital-fisheye/
The opposition will congregate in dark corners.
They will whisper with their mouths, while their eyes will scan the room for spies wearing strange spectacles.
The spies will likely be men. How many women would really like to waft down the street wearing Google Glass?
It won’t be easy. Once you’ve been cybernated, there’s no turning back. Which is why the refuseniks are already meeting in shaded corners of the Web.
One site is called “Stop The Cyborgs.” It claims to be “fighting the algorithmic future one bit at a time.”
It’s going to take a lot of bitty fighting, but the people behind this site — they’re naturally anonymous, in an attempt to stop Google spying on them — say they’re fighting Google Glass in particular.
They say that it will herald a world in which “privacy is impossible and corporate control total.”
Some would say that, thanks to Googlies and other bright, deluded sparks, we’re there already. The Lord and Master Zuckerberg explained to us a long time ago that he knows us better than we do and that we don’t actually want privacy at all. Really?
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57574607-93/google-glass-the-opposition-grows/
There are so many ways to burn bridges. And Valentine’s Day could be the PERFECT time for you to dump that annoying soon-to-be ex from your life. Your Facebook life, that is. New mobile app KillSwitch makes it easy to eliminate your ex’s entire presence on your Facebook timeline — in one fell swoop. The app is set to launch Thursday, February 14, you know, the Hallmark holiday of hearts, flowers, and candy.
The caveat is you still have to be friends with your ex to use the app. (So, don’t make any brash decisions, post-breakup.) Simply identify the target ex from your list of friends. The app then crawls your profile for content (photos, videos, wall posts and status updates) linked or tagged with that person’s specific Facebook ID. In the next step, you have the option to delete all the content or manually select and vanquish certain interactions.
The app will cost $0.99 in the App Store and Google Play, and each sale will benefit the American Heart Association of New York.
Don’t have an ex in mind? Use KillSwitch to abort all kinds of Facebook relationships: friends, co-workers, ex-in-laws, etc.
“People might think that Facebook won’t like a service like this,” says Erica Mannherz, co-founder of ClearHart, KillSwitch’s agency, “but in essence, what KillSwitch does is allows users to feel even more comfortable about sharing because it allows them to control and cut down some of the unnecessary negative consequences of doing so.”
If you think breakups don’t happen on VD, they do. Just ask Punkmetalmamma…sniff sniff. You get over it. Eventually.
http://mashable.com/2013/02/13/killswitch/
When users report a problem with Google Maps — a missing roundabout, a road closure, a one-way street that’s marked incorrectly — it’s Nick Volmar who hears them.
Volmar is a program director on Google’s Ground Truth team, which has been an essential part of Google’s efforts to create a comprehensive, detailed and accurate map of the world. To build Google Maps, Google relies not only on satellite imagery, data from third-party sources and information captured by its Street View fleet, but also on the thousands of corrections it receives daily from its users, which are manually consulted and addressed by Googlers like Volmar, who reviews up to hundreds of reports a day and updates Maps by hand.
Huff Post spoke with Volmar, here are bits of the interview:
What are you responsible for? I’m primarily responsible for working with a lot of the reported map issues that come in from external users — analyzing the things they’re requesting, verifying their claims and trying to improve our maps using the different resources that are available to us internally.
Do you ever have to send someone out to physically investigate an area to answer a question? If someone reports that there’s been a new housing community built in a town and we don’t have that data available to us to confirm it, we can ask the Street View team to go out and drive the road, so we can get the street names for the roads, draw in the roads and other things that we wouldn’t be able to see unless we had an on-the-ground picture and understanding.
How many user reports do you get a day? We get around 10,000 a day. During the holidays, if there are a lot of people traveling, we tend to get a lot more because people are using our product to navigate areas they’re unfamiliar with.
What’s the strangest report you ever received from a user?
There are some fun “Easter Eggs” in Google Maps, like when you search for directions from San Francisco to Tokyo, one of the steps is “Sail across the Pacific Ocean.” One user submitted a report that said sailing wasn’t a very feasible suggestion as opposed to hopping on a plane.
READ MORE HERE
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/google-maps-editor-ground-truth-team_n_2516924.html?ir=Technology
Samsung is expected to unveil a smaller, 8-inch-screen tablet next month at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress, according to a report.
The rumored tablet is expected to be called the Galaxy Note 8.0 and rival the iPad mini, Nexus 7 and the 7-inch Amazon Kindle Fire HD.
Because the tablet will be a part of the Galaxy Note line, it’ll feature Samsung’s S-Pen stylus.
The SamMobile report doesn’t include information regarding the tablet’s processor, but it says the device will run on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, the latest version of the Google mobile operating system.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/la-fi-tn-samsung-galaxy-note-8-20130118,0,2985845.story
Sometimes inventions, even the important ones, aren’t pretty. Case in point: this vomiting robot. It could help us understand, and then battle, an illness that no one’s found a cure for in 40 years. Even if it’s not the cutest ‘bot out there.
The unfortunately but appropriately named Vomiting Larry is an anatomically correct model of a freshman at a frat party and, more importantly, an anatomically correct model of someone vomiting after contracting norovirus, a nasty bug that causes puking and diarrhea. It spreads fast–less than 20 virus particles can infect someone–and it’s been a higher-than-expected year for infections.
To see video of Larry in action, READ HERE. It’s disgusting, but hey, it’s all in the name of science.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/vomiting-robot-pukes-so-you-wont-have
Google’s rich, reliable Maps app is back on the iPhone, and that means iPhone users can stop relying on the flawed, fledgling Apple maps app that replaced it as a built-in feature in September.
Apple’s version is still bolted into the phone, and the new, free Google app must be downloaded from Apple’s app store. Google says the app was downloaded 10 million times in just its first two days of availability last week.
The reappearance of Google Maps on the iPhone closes a big advantage Google’s own Android phones had gained when Apple’s replacement turned out to lack some key features, such as labeling of buildings and businesses, street-view photos and public-transit routing. It also offered too much inaccurate location data.
Why would Google bail out iPhone users and give its rival’s phone a better version of its Maps app than its own Android customers enjoy, even temporarily? Because, while Apple makes its money from hardware, Google is a services and advertising company, and wants its products to be heavily used on a popular platform like Apple’s.
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324907204578187360502871352.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_RIGHTTopCarousel_1
Brain drain, I mean Android battery drain gotcha down?
Android smartphones run the gamut in terms of battery quality, from the incredible longevity of Motorola’s Droid RAZR MAXX to the quick-draining mediocrity of certain other handsets that will remain nameless. So if you’ve got an Android that could use some extra battery juice — or if you frequently find your smartphone in the red with no outlet in sight — Huffington Post has put together a bunch of tips, tricks, techniques and apps that can help you maximize battery life on your Android phone.
GET INFO HERE
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/05/galaxy-s3-battery-life-11-tips-tricks-android_n_2130787.html?ir=Technology#slide=1759508
Facebook has made it official: Its users will no longer get a vote in how the giant social network handles their personal information.
And the votes that they did cast over the past week rejecting Facebook’s proposed changes to privacy policies will not count. Facebook said Tuesday it has already adopted the policy changes.
An external auditor reviewed and confirmed the final results, Facebook said. Nearly 669,000 Facebook users voted, most of them opposed to the policy changes, including taking away their right to vote on policy changes. Yet that was less than 1% of the 1 billion Facebook users around the globe, and Facebook requires 30% of users to cast ballots for the vote to be binding. That means 300 million users would have had to vote.
In comments on Facebook, users didn’t take the news too well.
“Wow, just wow. Don’t ask people to vote, then completely ignore their voices,” wrote Daniel Horton.
Cindy Storm complained that the polls “were hard to locate and rarely worked.”
Others complained that Facebook did not do enough to get out the vote.
But Elliot Schrage, vice president of communications, public policy and marketing, said in a blog post that Facebook made “substantial efforts to inform our users and encourage them to vote, both through emails and their news feeds.”
My question on Facebook privacy? How were the comments (above) from Daniel and Cindy obtained? I’m on Facebook every day and was never clued in there was a vote. Scary…
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-vote-results-new-policies-are-in-voting-rights-are-out-20121211,0,7533207.story
Microsoft may boldly go where no one has gone before.
At a demonstration in China on Oct. 25, Microsoft’s chief research officer Rick Rashid revealed a new technology seemingly straight out of Star Trek. In the classic sci-fi television show, a gadget known as the “universal translator” (seen here) was used to decipher languages in the 22nd century. And now, Microsoft has created a program that takes spoken English and translates it to spoken Chinese in realtime.
Pretty futuristic, right? Here, let’s try it with what we have available today (this is not a big secret): Q101 suona la migliore musica in tutto il mondo!
If we all had a universal translator at the ready, you wouldn’t have to type the message into a computerized translator, trying to figure out which language was spoken!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/microsoft-voice-translator_n_2102158.html?ir=Technology
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