Hasta La Gadget!

Duality indeed exists in me. Just the other day I complained about membership cards and the hassle of having to carry them. Now I am about to rave about something that takes the shape of a card just so that you can carry it around easily.

(Credit: TopTech Products)

It …

A hummingbird’s neck is structured like a bucket that acts as a holding tank for liquids. If it hadn’t evolved this way, the bird would choke to death whenever it tried to take a sip of water.

This accidental discovery was observed not by human eyes, but through the lens of a super high-speed camera. It’s just one example of interesting phenomena revealed when video is played back in extreme slow motion. The hummingbird clip appeared in an episode of Time Warp, a show whose premise is to make the ordinary extraordinary with one trick: slowing it down.

“We’ve evolved for 5 billion years just to do what we needed to do to be alive … and we can see 30 to 50 things a second,” said Jeff Lieberman, co-host of Time Warp. “With high-speed cameras we can see a million things a second, and we’re looking at everyday things and seeing an entire world that exists underneath.”

Typically costing upward of $100,000, high-speed cameras are capable of shooting at amazingly high frame rates, stretching a single second into minutes of super slow-motion playback. In order to achieve this feat, each of these cameras draws its powers from a unique, highly advanced complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) — or, in simpler terms, an extremely beefed-up pixel sensor. The cameras were designed for military testing, scientific research and other industry applications.

Though earlier high-speed cameras used film, digital devices have since become the standard due to their more precise ability to capture serendipitous and unexpected phenomena, utilizing a special data-writing method. With hundreds of thousands of frames captured per second, the data needs somewhere it can travel speedily. The high-speed cameras process images using the fastest DRAM available, and writing is performed using a data structure called the circular buffer. The circular buffer keeps recently written data while overwriting older data when the buffer is full, thereby preventing overloading.

In Time Warp, Lieberman leaves the camera recording for as long as he wishes, and when he spots a segment he wants to keep, he hits a trigger. Then, the camera stores only those few seconds that he wishes to keep, erasing earlier, unwanted data.

“It’s not really feasible to record 20 minutes when all you want is 100 milliseconds,” said Andrew Bridges, sales and marketing manager of Photron, which manufactures some of the cameras used in Time Warp. “Digitally you have these various options…. And it’s a lot better than the old film way where the event had to occur in the brief amount of seconds the camera was actually recording onto film.”

Like the Rolly, it’s hard to say exactly why having an RFID-enabled Nano:ztag in your life will make sleeping, eating and breathing each day any easier. In fact, the jury’s still out on whether these things are simply novel or primed to take over where the Tamagotchi left off. Starting now, Violet is offering a rainbow’s worth of its micro Rabbit devices here in the US, with prices ranging from $6.90 to $12.90 depending on color. Now, if only you could figure out how to integrate RFID into your life, you’d be set.

Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless

Violet starts shipping Nano:ztags in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 May 2009 15:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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(Credit: Bonnie Cha/CNET)

By now, most of you know that Palm and Sprint finally announced that the Palm Pre will be available nationwide on June 6 for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and with a two-year contract on Sprint’s Everything Data plan or Business Essentials with …

Feeling blue? Let your phone say that to the world. Nokia has filed a patent for a system that would allow a phone to transmit the user’s basics emotions along a text or voice message and have the receiver’s device flash the appropriate light to indicate the emotion.

“Light messaging allows a user to express a mood while having an ongoing call or while sending a text message,” said Nokia in its patent filing. “The light messaging may set the tone of the communication. People react to lights and colors very deeply and emotionally.”

That means when a user sends a text message, they can choose an appropriate mood from the phone’s software options. A color corresponding to that emotion is embedded with the message and sent. The receiver’s phone then lights up displaying that color along with the message.

Here’s how the system would work, says the filing. It would consist of a transmitter, a light indicating signal such as an LED and firmware to select the mood. When, for instance, a text message is to be sent,  the user would select a color to go with it, such as red for high priority messages. When the message is received, the red color is displayed either through a special LED element or on the entire keypad or as a backlight of the appropriate color to the message.

It seems like a rather simple and easy system, one that Nokia doesn’t need to really patent. So the question is, is there really any value to a user from this? Does this improve the phone’s usability? We think not. But its a nice gimmick to have on a phone.

Nokia’s Patent Application [via NewScientist]

Photo: (turbojoe/Flickr)