The invisible flash

Using the flash while taking some photos may be, in some situations, the only choice you have in order to produce decent lighting in a picture. However, most flash pictures are ruined because of the excessive light in the foreground and not enough light on the background.

In the ideal world of photography, a camera would be able to capture just enough light to make the picture perfect but not suffer from the disadvantages of using flash. Basically, what we need is an "invisible flash". But how can one produce such a paradox: a blast of light but that is not visible?



The answer is given by a student of the New York University, Dilip Krishnan and his advisor Rob Fergus. They have developed a dark or invisible flash which uses infrared and UV light to take photos in dark places without the nasty glare of a standard flash.

Basically, what they did was modify a light bulb to emit light over a wider range of frequencies (not visible at the human eye). They also changed their camera to adapt to these new conditions by using a set of filters to prevent the silicon image sensor from detecting infrared and ultraviolet rays.

This is not exactly new as this is more or less like night vision works. The difference is that, instead of having those photos where we all look like vampires, they managed to find a way to produce the correct colour balance by taking a quick colour image right after the dark flash image.

Even though the image produced in this second image is of low quality (grainy and unclear), the colours are correct. This allows them to produce a correct final image by using special software that combines the information from the photos (you can see the process on the 3 images above).

The technology is not yet perfect but it definitely looks pretty promising. To know more about it, you can check the website here.

Source: Engadget

Anti-paparazzi gadgets

Adam Harvey, a student of of Interactive Telecommunication at New York University has created a new gadget that will probably be the next sensation of all those paparazzi-harassed celebrities: a purse with a flash sensor and flash.

So what does it do? It's simple. The purse contains a sensor that is triggered by any flash going off, and it instantaneously fires its own flash, completely ruining paparazzi shots.

Source: core77

Creative USB flash drives

There are more here.

Turn your pictures into a miniature model

By now you've probably seen around the Web some of those pictures that look like miniature models but are in fact pictures of real places that were just modified to look like it. Here are a couple of examples of photos that I tilt-shifted to make it look like a miniature street filled with small cars:



Looks nice, right? And you don't even have to be a Photoshop genius to pull something like this. All you have to do is use TiltShiftMaker.com. This website is quite simple and allows you to create this kind of photos quite easily and without having to have that much of photography knowledge.

Enjoy!

Retro-blogging: best posts of June 2008

Previously, on "The Tech In Me":

• DVRs, TVs and infrared sensors
• So, you thought your Bluetooth headset was secure?
• The key to my heart
• Cool webdesigner shirts
• Quantum superposition, or how can video games be creative
• How to make solar power more appealing
• YouTube just got more interesting
• Dance to charge your cellphone
• How to download musics from MySpace using Safari and "wget" (on Mac OS X)
• Eco-friendly gadgets
• How old is the Internet?
  

Interesting ideas/products that we may never end up using

The USB Fan Tie

The K-wine plate

The Strawberry plate

The Solar-powered tie

There's more here.

The truth about cellphones

Rechargeable batteries with solar cells

Now here's a great idea: integrate a solar cell directly into a rechargeable battery so that it can recharge just by facing the sun.


The SunCat batteries were born when its creator wondered as to why "hasn't anyone made a battery with integrated solar cells" and answered: "The batteries should just bask in the sun like a cat and left for a while, in a sunny window, they would slowly recharge."

I think it's a great idea and the good part is that you can do it yourself... that is, if you can get around the necessary parts and have the skill to build them :-)

Just check the SunCat blog post for details, here.

Twitter Charts

Ever wondered when do you Twitter the most? Twitter Charts allows you to have a nice graphically view of your most frequent tweets distributed by hours and days of the week. For example, have a look at my Twitter Chart:

You can easily see that I'm most inclined to Twitter during the weekdays in the morning and specially between 10 and 11 AM. By the way, those little dots between 1 and 6 AM are sponsored by my baby son's crying :-)

How using Microsoft Outlook can ruin your birthday cake

There are some bakeries that allow you to send personalized messages, to be placed in your birthday cake, by e-mail. A lady in NY found this idea very appealing and ordered a birthday cake over email. But as it turned out, the result was not the expected:


The problem seems to be have been caused by the fact that she used Microsoft Outlook to send her email but Wegman’s email system failed to recognize the proprietary HTML tags of Outlook and caused this oddly-looking cake.

But the funniest part is the explanation of the bakery's employee: "we just cut and paste from the email to the program we use for printing the edible images, we are usually in such a hurry that we really don’t have time to check. and if we do the customers yell at us for bothering them."

Source: Digital Inspiration

Original Air Fresheners

What if leaving a nice fragrance in your room only required you to blow on a balloon and then let it loose? Intrigued? Check the details here.

The perfect gaming environment

Like these gaming setups? Check more here.

Retro-blogging: best posts of February 2008

Previously, on "The Tech In Me":

• An hilarious prank video
• Portal: I'm still alive (live)
• How to obfuscate an Hello World program
• Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD: the war is over
• How to create that perfect landmark picture with photoshop
• iCrap: the worst accessories for your iPod
• 3 degrees of Porn
• iPod's Russian Roulette
  
• 10 DIY for the weekend...if you only had the time
• The "working" logo
• iMovie and iDVD: the apps that could be excelent, but aren't
• Avoid Apple Remote's evil twins
• How to burn MP3s to a CD with folders in iTunes
  

Things I've learned from my students

One thing I've learned this year whilst teaching at the University is that, apparently, the probability of having a hard disk failure on your computer is tightly linked to work assignments deadlines.

Let me explain how I reached this conclusion. I teach "Introduction to Programming" and at the end of the semester, the students have to deliver a work assignment. Usually, they have to develop a game in Java and this semester the decision was to implement a simple text-based Minesweeper.

Interestingly, as the deadline was becoming closer, the number of students that come up to me with an excuse to try and get an extension was massively increasing. But the amazing part is the fact that most students used the same excuse: hard disk failure that led to loss of work.

Since all students are honest and could never lie to a professor just to try to get an advantage over their colleagues (let's be naive about it) I can empirically conclude that the following applies:


Needless to say, this didn't change my position and no extensions were given.
It's Murphy's law :-)

The alarm clock suitable for couples

This concept alarm clock by Johan Brengesjo (which is interesting enough to add to my collection of different alarm clocks) is an excellent idea for couples that have to get up at different hours and don't want to bother each other with different buzzing alarm clocks.

How? Well, a wireless rubber ring with an integrated vibration device is worn on the finger (the alarm clock has two-user settings and there's one ring for each person). When the alarm "rings" only the corresponding ring vibrates and the person can wake up by sensing the vibration. The light function and the snooze function are engaged by shaking your hand. Move your hand and the snooze gets activated.

Source: Hometone

One Night Stand: the bed anatomy

There are more here.

Longcat is looooong

One of the funniest memes I've seen on the Internet to this day, is LongCat. It all started when the owner of a strangely enormous cat has decided to post a photo on the Internet with his cat hanging in such a way that it'd seems as if it was in fact very long. See with your own eyes:

Like any other meme, this one (Longcat is long) spreaded through the net quicker than a virus. And the most amazing part is that, with it, we were able to witness some of the most creative anonymous contributions of the whole world.

For me, this image is one of the most spectacular things to represent the true spirit of the Internet Memes. Have a look.

There are more here.

USA's new visa waiver program: fuck privacy

Pardon my french, but this is exactly how it feels. Apparently the amount of control that US borders apply to foreign travellers were not enough and so all citizens of those countries for which no Visa was required (in which Portugal is included) are now required to request a pre-authorization to travel do the USA...starting today...

The pre-authorization is requested at this website, but the funny part is the privacy warning that you get once you enter it:


Besides not having any cancel button (as a possibility for you to "not agree" with these conditions) the warning clearly states that your privacy is not guaranteed and that any information that you enter there can be used by any US official in any means necessary.

For iPhone aficionados and chocolate addicts

Found here

What if Mona Lisa was created by other artists?

Manga-Anime

Southpark

Simpsons

Andy Warhol

Picasso

There are more here.