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

Creative USB flash drives

There are more here.

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.

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

How Twitter was born

If you're curious about the history of Twitter,you may wanna check this post by one of its creators. BTW, this post has exactly 140 chars :)

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

The perfect gaming environment

Like these gaming setups? Check more here.

What if software still shipped on 3.5'' disks?

Remember the days when installing a program on your computer required you to use several different floppy disks (usually between 3 and 5) in sequence? Now imagine that CD/DVDs hadn't been invented yet and Internet is still a mirage and you had to install all your programs using these floppy disks that could only store around 1,5 MB. Let's see what that means for current popular programs:

• The "lightweight" browser Firefox - 36 disks
• iTunes - 46 disks
  
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 - 358 disks
• Sims 3 - 1760 disks

Now imagine that you would pile up all these floppy disks. Just for the sake of curiosity, the Sims 3 packaging of 1760 disks would be as tall as 19 feet (more or less 5 and half meters).

Have some more interesting items to add to this list? Comments are welcome!

The Following/Followers dilemma on Twitter

I usually follow everyone that follows me on Twitter (except when it's clearly spam users), but there are a lot of people that use that nasty little trick to gain some followers: follow a lot of people and once those people follow them back, they stop following the people. This way, they can boost their ego (and maybe their dicks, I'm not sure) by showing off a huge difference between Following/Followers.

I don't really care about the number of followers that I have, but I do have to watch out for the amount of people that I follow, because an overcrowded timeline is useless since I don't have the time to read everything. And a good way to purge the Following list is to start by removing those "non-followers".

Since the Twitter web site doesn't allow having a cross-referenced view of the list of Following/Followers that would allow you to easily discover these "non-followers", I decided to make use of one of the available Java APIs for Twitter, Twitter4J, and create a small program that would give me that information.

So, if you're interested, download the JAR file here. You'll also need the Twitter4J JAR file: you can either download from the official website or you can download it from here.

To run the program, just type on a prompt terminal:

java -cp crossfollow.jar:twitter4j-1.1.4.jar dev.follow.twitter.CrossFollow username password

Just substitute username password with your data and you're ready to go. Also, you can run the program without providing the username and password, in which case, the program will prompt you for it.

Then, you'll get the list of the users that you follow that are not following you and for each user, the corresponding Twitter URL will be provided for you to then use as you pleased. The program does not change anything on your following or followers list. It simply provides the list as described above. It's up to you to perform the necessary changes directly on the Twitter website.

If this program gets successful, I might consider creating a real app for this, with a graphical user interface and all :-)

Any problems/questions/suggestions, please comment...

DISCLAIMER:
This software is distributed here freely and as open-source. It is done so as a means to ensure dissemination of technical work on a non-commercial basis. All rights therein are maintained by the author. It is understood that all persons downloading this software know that the software is provided AS IS and in no way the author is responsible for anything that may happen to your hardware and/or software on your computer or network. This software may not be re-distributed without the explicit permission of the author.

How to freak out your friends with a ligthbulb hack

Invisibility cloak is closer to reality

This time it's not another camera/projection technology applied to clothing just to try and camouflage a person. This is a step closer to pseudo-invisibility, you know, kind of like Invisible Woman has the ability to bend and manipulate light to render herself and others invisible.

Scientists from Duke University have come up with a new type of device that is able to cloak an object from visible light. The device is made from a light-bending composite material that can detour electromagnetic waves around an object and reconnect them on the other side. That creates an effect similar to a distant mirage you'd see hovering above a road on a hot day.

But don't get your hopes up just now as this research is still far away from producing a cloaking cape as Harry Potter's. The foreseeable applications for this kind of technology will focus on eliminating obstructions to improve wireless communications or acoustic cloaks that could serve as protective shields, preventing the penetration of vibrations, sound, or seismic waves.

Source: CNet

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 :-)

A robot for all-terrain

Check out this amazing robot and its capability to adapt to completely different terrains:


Description from the website:

"RHex is a man-portable robot with extraordinary rough terrain mobility. RHex climbs over rock fields, mud, sand, vegetation, railroad tracks, telephone poles and up steep slopes and stairways. RHex has a sealed body, making it fully operational in wet weather, in muddy and swampy conditions, and it can swim on the surface or dive underwater. RHex's remarkable terrain capabilities have been validated in independent testing at US Government Labs.

RHex is controlled remotely from an operator control unit at distances up to 600 meters. A video uplink provides front and rear views from RHex’s onboard cameras. RHex also uplinks navigational data from onboard compass and GPS and from payload sensors. A downlink allows the operator to control mobility and to operate mission payloads."

Do you want GMail stickers?

Do you like GMail so much that you just wanna shout it to the world? Then, this tip is for you.


Google created a set of GMail stickers that can be very handy and the good news is that you can get them almost for free. To get your own set of Gmail m-velope stickers, bookplate style stickers, and keyboard shortcut stickers, just send a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

Send me some Gmail stickers already
P.O. Box 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420
United States

Google will then send your envelope back filled with stickers inside. Great!

Who's right about the Google carboon footprint?

Some say that the environmental impact of performing 2 Google searches is equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide that is generated by boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

Google says those estimates are too large and in fact a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

Who's right?

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.

Nicholas Negroponte predictions in 1984

Just watch this talk by Nicholas Negroponte and be amazed as most of his predictions (regarding CD-ROMs, web interfaces, service kiosks and touchscreen interfaces) in 1984 were absolutely accurate:

Great Programming Quotes

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

- Martin Fowler

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

- Bill Gates

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”

- Abelson / Sussman

There are more here.