this is the coolest thing i’ve ever seen!
a group of stanford students developed the prototype of a digital camera that allows to digitally refocus the whole image *after* you’ve taken a picture.
and it allows (minor) changes in perspective.
it’s called light field plenoptic camera. what makes this camera so special – for what i understand – is a microlense array between the actual lense and the sensor.
go check out the information video, it’s stunning!
sometime ago, the us military published a censored pdf on the shooting of an italian journalist in iraq.
apparently there are still enough stupid people in this world – they censored the document digitally by setting a black background.
all you have to do to bypass this, is copy the text and paste it somewhere else (word, notepad, …) – and you have the full report. :cool:
i know it’s not breaking news, but it’s worth pointing your finger at, shouting “ha-ha!” :mrgreen:
firesomething: a reaction to the numerous name-changes of firefox (phoenix >> firebird >> firefox); seems fun, but it doesn’t exist for v1.04 yet, and i just upgraded 10 minutes ago.
uh, and try this: telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl in your console*, and you will get an ascii-version of star wars episode 4.
i wonder if they really did the whole movie, or just the first 5 minutes that most people will watch.
* open [start]-[run], type “cmd” and then enter “telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl”
in german: [start]-[ausführen], “cmd” eingeben, und dann “telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl”
currently, there are 7 drafts waiting to be finished in my wordpress home.
and yet, i have to start another one and get this out first:
i’ve rediscovered blogger.com and i think i’m going to use it for some major advantages.
blogger is a free service by google, which has also “assimilated” picasa, a company dedicated to image storage etc. eventually, the two services were (at least partly) merged together, and now you can post pictures to your blogger-blog.
when i looked around, there was no sign of any limitation of pictures to post there, and when i digged a little deeper, i found this:
“there is currently no limit on the number or amount of pictures that can be posted. The only limit is that you can post a picture with a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768.”
the best part about this: i couldn’t find any signs of blocking external use, either.
so i think i’ll do a few test-runs and upload my pictures to the other server, using them here, on my website.
it is, however, likely to happen that firefox (as i assume, everybody is using by now) will block those external images, confusing it with external website ads. if that’s the case, you might want to right-click one of those “broken” image-placeholders and uncheck “block images from photos1.blogger…”
there’s not much time at the moment, but i have one test-image up already (yes, it’s the photo from my last post): [go here and try it]
***edit***
it didn’t work out so well…
i know that at least firefox and opera can cause problems, so i have to abandon this idea…
it was kinda like the perfect legal crime, though.
i took the time and implemented some keyboard-shortcuts for my gallery.
when you open the single-picture view, there’s three possibilities:
[<--] (left arrow) or [-] (minus) will get you to the previous photo, [-->] (right arrow) or [+] (plus) leads to the next one. [end] ([ende] in the german layout) will close the window.
i haven’t tested the little javascript in the background with a mac computer yet, but it should work.
above the photo, there are two new menu items:
[link] is a permanent link to that photo (for copy&paste).
[?] will pop-up the keyboard-shortcuts
last month, nearly 1.5 GB of data have been transferred from this website.
this is a lot, compared to may 2004’s 84 MB!
after the indexing of my photos around march, the transferred data increased nearly exponentially:
february: 620 visitors*, 650 MB
march: 1349 visitors*, 970 MB (+50%)
april: 2881 visitors*, 1520 MB (+50%)
* search-engines are already excluded in this list!
with over 100 visitors a day, and being 50% over my transfer limit, i’ve decided to at least think about measures to keep data transfer down.
a possible way to achieve that would be shrinking all the images, or deleting the old ones, which i really don’t want to do. for now.
instead, i have zipped most of the movies and soundfiles on the server to prevent from streaming. since those are many times the size of a single photo, and they’re getting more attention as well, this should do at least some good.
please let me know if i forgot to update a link. (BTW, you’ll see all the posts that contain files (photos, videos, mp3s, …) in the category “media”.
at this point, i’d like to thank andi and tom again for the webspace.
following eric cartman’s “screw you guys, i’m going home!” (wav), i went to buy a new computer on friday.
nothing too fancy – 1.6 ghz, 120 gb, 256 mb (…i’m going to have to get another ram-bar.) – only cost me 300 euros.
it’s really quiet, and it supports usb2.0, which i’ve dreamt about for sometime ;-)
it broke my heart to break the warranty seal only two hours after i bought the pc. i *did* a complete install first and checked if everything works, but then there was a lot of stuff that i wanted to “transplant” from the old pc (disk drives, graphics cards, harddisk…).
something i never mentioned:
my t610 died in mid-february, because it fell off the desk. it was just dead, didn’t react to anything.
so i bought another t610 at ebay – because i LOVE the t610, and the new models (except the t630) lack of design. the seller knowingly didn’t mention the crappy vodafone-branding (buttons reassigned, display messed up with poor images and icons, …), now i had to buy the proper hardware to get the original software up.
i plugged in my old (and pretty dead) t610, just because, and *tadaah* it works fine again. i didn’t even do anything, just plugged it in. no pc-cellphone-communication!
it acts as if nothing ever happened. which means, i now have a spare t610 lying around…
i will probably trade it in for some good asthma at ebay.
since i have two identical phones with different software versions, i played around a bit. it turns out, with the newest software version, the phone takes only half the time to save a photo!!
my super-social run was continued over the weekend, by the way – there’s no end in sight.
that’s another reason why it took me so long to have my pc set up again.
