First Skype HD webcams from In Store Solutions detailed

 

 

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First Skype HD webcams from In Store Solutions detailed

via Engadget by Tim Stevens on 1/5/10

Remember those 720p-capable webcams we mentioned yesterday, specifically positioned to work with Skype HD? We've got the details courtesy of In Store Solutions, which is launching a trio of models, two of which are HD and feature integrated video compression chips, so less than cutting-edge machines should be able to get their high-def on (though a 1.8GHz, dual-core processor is still recommended). They are the Freetalk Talk-7170 HD Pro and the Talk-7181 HD Pro Plus, both offering 720p sensors and H.264 video compression, the latter also packing quad cardioid microphones with a four meter range. The former gets by with just stereo. An 800Kbps connection (both upload and download) is needed for HD streaming, so if you're stuck on low-tier DSL you may be more interested in the Freetalk HQ Talk-7140. No specific details were given for this one, but most "high quality" Skype cameras are 2 megapixels, and at a price of just $40 this looks to be the cheapest. No MSRP mentioned for the two HD models, but you can read all about them after the break.

Continue reading First Skype HD webcams from In Store Solutions detailed

First Skype HD webcams from In Store Solutions detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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e-Readers: Kindle goes global, iRiver plays catchup, and Hearst is just damn...

 

 

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e-Readers: Kindle goes global, iRiver plays catchup, and Hearst is just damned crazy

via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza on 1/5/10

The Kindle is finally to get global wireless internet, spots Engadget. But a new challenger appears: iRiver, with a surprisingly unappetizing clone that'll have a hard time against Sony's Digital Edition and B&N's Nook. Myself, I'll take the Skiff, an 11.5" monstrosity with a 1600x1200 resolution display, just announced by Heart Publishing. It'll have 3G internet via Sprint, but no pricing details are out just yet. This Burj Dubai of e-readers also doubles as a baking tray and will be featured in a new remake of The Omen, sliding off a truck and decapitating David Warner.

 

 

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Tchaikovsky "The Nutcracker: Complete Ballet" MP3 downloads for $2

 

 

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Tchaikovsky "The Nutcracker: Complete Ballet" MP3 downloads for $2

via 9to5Mac Toys by 9to5toys on 12/14/09

Today only, Amazon MP3 Store offers downloads of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker: Complete Ballet, for $1.99. That's the lowest total price we could find for this 24-track, DRM-free album, released in July. (iTunes charges $12.99 for a similar bonus edition.) Amazon MP3 downloader is required.

 

 

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Bloglines - PHOTO: Camouflage Art by Liu Bolin: "Inspired by

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Signal vs. Noise Signal vs. Noise

PHOTO: Camouflage Art by Liu Bolin: "Inspired by By Matt Camouflage Art by Liu Bolin: "Inspired by how some animals can blend into their environment, Liu Bolin from China uses camouflage principles to create amazing contemporary art." Ya gotta see the rest of these too.

Santa Claus banned from visiting locked-up children in UK asylum

Santa Claus banned from visiting locked-up children in UK asylum detention centre

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 12/13/09

Santa Claus was prevented from giving presents to the imprisoned children of asylum seekers at the notorious Yarl's Wood detention centre by private security guards. Yarl's Wood is a privately run prison whose inmates are UK immigrants who arrived seeking asylum, but whose claims have been denied. They are dragged out of bed in the dead of night and stuck in mesh-windowed vans without their belongings and without the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, and then detained in terrible conditions that have been decried by human rights advocates, doctors, psychiatrists and other experts. Their "crime" is trying to escape torture, privation, and disaster.
The rent-a-cops at Yarl's Wood told the Anglican church's leading expert on Father Christmas (dressed in a Santa costume) that he couldn't enter the centre to give the children presents. They also blocked the canon theologian at Westminster Abbey. Then they cancelled a later scheduled visit with detained families at the centre.
And the whole mess is on video.

But when the Anglican church's leading expert on Father Christmas, dressed as St Nicholas himself, arrived with one of Britain's most distinguished clerics to distribute presents to children held at the Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire, things took a turn straight out of Dickens.
An unedifying standoff developed that saw the security personnel who guard the perimeter fence prevent St Nicholas, the patron saint of children and the imprisoned, from delivering £300 worth of presents donated by congregations of several London churches.
In a red robe and long white beard, clutching a bishop's mitre and crook, St Nick - in real life, the Rev Canon James Rosenthal, a world authority on St Nicholas of Myra, the inspiration for Father Christmas - gently protested that he was not a security threat, but to no avail.
Then as St Nicholas, accompanied by the Rev Professor Nicholas Sagovsky, canon theologian at Westminster Abbey, attempted to bless the gifts, the increasingly angry security guards called the police. The resulting ill-tempered and surreal impasse between church and state was videotaped by asylum seeker support groups and could become an internet viral hit.

Anglican 'Santa' barred from giving gifts to children at detainee centre

Previously:

• Britain's deportee detention system subjects small children to ...

A spectacular view of the entire Milky Way... using open source!

via Download Squad by Sebastian Anthony on 12/13/09

Filed under: Fun, Photo, Linux, Open Source

Do not adjust your computer screen: what you see here is a piece of genius. A labor of love spanning two years, two hemispheres, two countries and over 3000 images... I give to you, the All-Sky Milky Way Panorama -- version 2! And, you'll be glad to hear, it was stitched together with open-source software.

Well, not just open-source software: he needed a lot of processing power too, though nothing beyond a beefed-up home computer (it ran Linux, of course). And then there was the problem of actually stitching it together, and making sure every star and and entity in the visible cosmos looks correct, relative to everything else in the sky -- for that, he used catalogs of star data and sky background data from Pioneer 10 and 11. For the entire creative process, and a list of the programs he used, check out the creator's site.

The final image, which you can probably obtain if you're a student, and if ask the creator Axel Mellinger nicely, clocks in at an impressive 650 megapixels and 7.7 gigabytes.

But the best bit, which I dutifully saved until last, is that you can surf around the maximum-resolution image using another open-source application called IIPImage. Enjoy!

Deadly Truck Accident Spills Millions Of Nickels On Florida's I95 [Offbeat N...

 

 

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Deadly Truck Accident Spills Millions Of Nickels On Florida's I95 [Offbeat News]

via Jalopnik by Ben Wojdyla on 9/17/08

Last night on Florida's I95 freeway a US Treasury truck carrying four million nickels was southbound on its way from Philadelphia to Miami when it collided with another southbound truck, spilling $187,000 worth of coins all over the scene. The passenger in the Treasury truck died as a result of the accident and Florida police are currently investigating the scene. Also on hand are Treasury officials attempting to clean up the mess and eager citizens trying to grab some coins and not get slapped with a Federal robbery charge. [Local6]

 

 

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Searching Google and Yahoo! Concurrently

 

 

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Searching Google and Yahoo! Concurrently

via WebWorkerDaily by Samuel Dean on 9/3/08

I've written about alternative search engines here before, and because I spend so much time searching, I always keep my eye out for good new search ideas to try. Recently, I've been using SearchBoth, which has an interesting spin on the concept of searching multiple sites at once.

SearchBoth lets you search a few different types of sites concurrently, but the one web workers may find most useful is searching Google and Yahoo at the same time. At the site's home page, you can enter your search term once, hit Search, and get back a dual-paned view of the results from both sites. For some kinds of searches, your results won't differ all that much between the two views, but for others they will.

In particular, I have found SearchBoth to be good for searching for images. For example, if I enter Linus Torvalds as my search term and toggle SearchBoth to find images, I'll get back two completely different views of Torvalds images–both scrollable as they would be when using the sites on a standalone basis–and I get a mixed bag of photos that I might want to use.

SearchBoth can also be useful for comparing prices for technology products you may be in the market for. I entered Asus Eee PC as my search term in SearchBoth, and found the lowest prices on the Google pane on the left of my screen, but for other products, Yahoo! pulled up the lowest prices.

You can also use SearchBoth to pull up news stories and blog posts that both Google and Yahoo! find. This is useful when a particular piece of news  is breaking and I want to see who may have picked it up.

If you like the idea of seeing your search results in ways that you're not used to, and you haven't tried it yet, you may also like Redzee. Redzee returns thumbnail graphical images of your results, and lets you drag to cycle through them. They cycle by very much like the Cover Flow feature works on an iPod, and this can be useful if what you're looking for is an image or graphic rather than text.

Do you use any alternative search engines?

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200,000 Core Supercomputer to be Built, Still Not As Clever as HAL [Supercom...

 

 

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200,000 Core Supercomputer to be Built, Still Not As Clever as HAL [Supercomputers]

via Gizmodo by Kit Eaton on 9/4/08

Recently green-lit to be built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IBM's future Blue Waters supercomputer is peta'd all over. It'll have up to 2-petaflops processing speed, more than a petabyte of memory and a 10 petabyte disk storage system. It'll also have more than 200,000 processor cores, and cost around $208 million, which is even more 000s. All this power is going to be used for proper hard science like simulating the Sun's coronal mass ejections, studying black holes, and molecular biology. Probably developing on IBM's previous Roadrunner supercomputer power, it should be accessible nationally, at campus-level. And you can bet someone'll program it to sing "Daisy, daisy" pretty soon after it goes online in 2011. [NetworkWorld via Slashdot]

 

 

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Yuko Adachi

 

 

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Yuko Adachi

via Changethethought™ by Christopher on 9/4/08

Interesting art in varying styles and executions by someone who no doubt must be an equally interesting person and that person is 'super fine' artist Yuko Adachi.

Artist statement:
"My work is about a celebration of human creativity and being alive in the present moment. I do not do any preliminary sketches for any of my works. I dive into the unknown and just follow where my energy and curiosity takes me in the given moment. Through the creation of my work, I want to become one with the universal energy and tap into unlimited well of my imagination and express it.

Art is love and it is my life.
-YUKO ADACHI"

 

 

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