Cleaning up the house

This particular blogger weblog is, as you may have noticed, defunct. I decided to aggregate all my content in my own personal weblog. Although my personal weblog has bits of non-tech related news, the "Tech in Me" RSS feed remains the same and will only be filled with tech-related news, so there's no need to change feeds.

Nevertheless, if you're interested in other subjects like funny stuff, movies, tv shows, books, games, etc..., you can always subscribe to my full RSS feed.

Cheers

Google Wave Invitations

I've been using Google Wave for a while now and they were kind enough to send some invitations for me to distribute around. So, I have 3 left. If you want one, just leave a comment here or send a reply/DM on Twitter with your e-mail address.

Geek alert: I'll be using FIFO as the sorting protocol in case there are more candidates the number of invitations. Good luck :-)

How the use of technology can be so natural for us these days

My brother has recently had an experience that perfectly describes how technology can be so helpful and natural to use for most of us. It's quite amazing. Read it here.

How to solve a wifi issue between Nokia 5530 and a Thomson TG787 router

So, my wife bought a Nokia 5530 Xpress Music phone and was very eager to try it, especially the Wifi since she could now connect to Facebook and e-mail at home without having to use my Mac or iPod Touch :-)

However, the experience was not that thrilling since the phone was unable to connect to our our home router (a Thomson TG787 provided by our ADSL provider).

After trying several different configurations (with WEP, WPA, WPA2, without encryption, etc...) and with other gadgets (iPod Touch and Nokia N80 could connect successfully to every configuration) I was very frustrated that I couldn't find a working solution.

At that point I went out and while at a shopping mall I was able to try some public wireless networks and it worked immediately. This increased my frustration to an even more absurd level. Back home, the problem remained.

It was only when, while using some Google-fu, I was able to find this forum post (in Portuguese) that I could finally solve the problem. Even though this post refers to the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music, the solution appears to be suitable for the 5530 model as well.

So, basically all you need to do is some Terminal action:

• Open Terminal (on a Mac) or a command window (in Windows)
• Run the following command: telnet 192.168.1.254
• This will give you access to the router, but you have to insert the username (Administrator) and password (the password you defined)
• Once an administration console appears, write: wireless qos config mode=disabled
• Then hit Enter
• After that (it takes a few seconds to compute) write: saveall
• Then hit Enter
• Just exit and you're done

The Nokia 5530 phone was able to connect to the home wireless network... success, finally!

Final note: I don't know exactly if this affects only this type of phones, but my Nokia N80 worked fine without the need to do this hack. Also, I don't know exactly what this hack does to your router so beware. So far, I haven't noticed anything different on all other devices, so I won't reverse it. By the way, if you need to restart your router, this configuration is lost, so you'll need to do it again.

An amazing moment in time

Did you notice that an amazing moment in time has just passed? And what moment would that be, you ask?

Well, have a look at today's date and time. The day is September, 9 of the year 2009, that is:

09/09/09, 09h:09m:09s

Cool, isn't it? The next moment in time like this one will only occur next year, on October, 10th of 2010.

Retro-blogging: best tech posts of August 2008

Previously, on "The Tech In Me":

• Geek's license plates
• I want to believe in UFOs, but Photoshop is making it hard
• Interesting Google searches: 2 girls, 1 cup
• Tiger Woods walking on water is not a glitch
• Interesting Google Ads
• It probably means that something's wrong
• Suspicious swimming records
• I'm a father

A year ago...

Ahhh, a year ago I bumped into this lady in the most famous Ice Cream place in Cascais, Portugal. And as kindly as she is beautiful, she said to me: "Paaaarrrrdon!"

Ahh, beautiful 2008 Summer nights!

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.

Retro-blogging: Best posts of July 2008

Previously, on "The Tech In Me":

• Close Encounter with a Star
• This is so true
• How to really cool down your laptop
• Two girls, one cup - Thank God for the Internet
  
• Putting those retro-3D-glasses to work
• Another way to generate power while dancing
• Testing your website in different browsers
• Just don't click it
• Using Quicksilver to tweet
• R2-D2 and C3PO make a special appearance
• 3D tetris... kind of!
• Internet ramblings
• The other side of the world
• PacMan is everywhere
• A different kind of alarm clocks
• Rotate screen display in Windows Vista

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!

A few gadgets that I would love to see on my kitchen

Sauce Dispensing Chopsticks


People who love sushi like I do, know it's not easy to get all those food sculptures from a plate to the sauce dish and then to the mouth. Using these special chopsticks you can avoid some embarrassing accidents with the sauce and simply enjoy your sashimi.

D-Cell Battery Salt & Pepper Shakers


The D-Cell Battery Salt & Pepper Shakers are simply great. Not only you'll surprise your friends with such a neat gadget, you'll also be able to see how much “power” (or pepper) you have left through the power indicator panels so you know when to “recharge.”

Spinning Spaghetti Fork


It's not that easy to do all that spinning in a full-of-sauce spaghetti plate, so why not use this electrical fork and make things a lot simpler?

Sharky Tea Infuser


How cool is that? To have a shark swimming around in your cup of hot water, while the tea is getting ready. Pure awesomeness!

Portable Toasters


Here's a gadget that I totally dream off. I hate my toaster because I can never tell when the bread is done. Sometimes it burns the bread, other times it simply is not enough. How to know for sure? Well, do it manually with this portable toaster.

There are more here.

Using the cars' weight to generate energy

Kinetic energy is not a new subject on this blog. I've already shown you how this kind of technology can be used to generate enough energy to power some parts of a nightclub or more simply, your MP3 player.

This time I bring you a great idea developed at a Sainsbury's supermarket in Gloucester, United Kingdom. This supermarket has installed kinetic plates in the parking lot that use the weight of shopper's cars to pump a series of hydraulic pipes, which in turn drive a generator. The figure below is quite self-explanatory:


Apparently, the kinetic system can generate enough energy to power the store's checkouts. While it may not seem as much, it sure is a great step towards a more green attitude.

Here's another picture at location:



Source: Engadget, Guardian

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.

Funny stuff: musical charts

Try guessing which musics these charts refer to:








Source

Retro-blogging: best posts of April 2008

Previously, on the "Tech In Me":

• Optical illusion
• Oh shiiiiiiiit
• Programming Joke
• Standards a la Microsoft
• Crossing the bridge problem
• What if programming languages were...
• Using QuickTime to create stop-motion videos
• Technology to break Olympic records...but only for swimming
• How to setup Apache, PHP and MySQL on your Mac
• Yahoo and the Semantic Web
• The portable gaming consoles

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.