For the first recipe in our MacGyver Chef series, I tackled one of the lowliest of kitchen gadgets: The coffee maker. Since it sucks at brewing coffee, I wondered if there was some other use for it…
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Equipment: Just your bog-standard, hotel-issue drip coffee maker. Mine was $25. They’re all pretty much the same.
Ingredients: • Boneless skinless chicken breasts (tenders are smaller and cook faster) • 1-2 pats butter or margarine • ~ 1/2 cup couscous • Water • Seasonings—I used one of Trader Joe’s herb/spice blends
Notes: MacGyver Chef is about doing something with as little gear as possible. So even though I have a full kitchen at my disposal, I limited all prep to the coffee maker and its carafe. I used this guide from WikiHow as a starter, though I veered from the recipe in flavoring the chicken and in my choice of a side. Remember to salt and pepper everything—this dish dangerously toes the line between edible and horribly bland, so season the crap out of it.
Step 1: Measure out about a centimeter of water in the carafe and dump it in the coffee maker’s reservoir to heat up. Then stick your chicken and butter in the carafe and douse it with seasoning. Flip the coffeemaker on and hot water will soon flow into the carafe.
Try to get the water to cover less than half the chicken; we’re poaching, not boiling, so if the water gets too high, dump the excess out in the sink. Let it cook 15 minutes on this side, stirring once so the butter mixes in with the poaching liquid.
Step 2: Flip your chicken. You’ll notice here that the chicken is cooking, but there’s no Maillard reaction (that’s what Alton-Brown-loving nerds call browning). Coffee makers just don’t get hot enough to brown meat. I later tried to pan-fry a cutlet on the burner and it refused to take on any color even then. It’s probably just as well, because if the coffeemaker got hot enough to brown meat, it’d burn the crap out of your coffee—and your mouth. Let it cook for another 15 minutes on this side, then remove from the carafe. It’s time to prep your side dish.
Step 3: I chose couscous. The original recipe suggested instant mashed potatoes, but it also used the word “flakes” to describe these so-called potatoes, which is creepy enough to be discouraging. I decided to try an entirely different starch. Couscous cooks incredibly fast and all it takes is hot liquid, which coincidentally we already have. Taste your liquid, and if it needs more seasoning, adjust it. I found mine needed extra everything: herbs, salt, pepper and even a little more butter.
Step 4: Dump in couscous in a 1:1 ratio with the liquid. I just eyeballed it, but be careful not to put in more couscous than liquid or it’ll end up crunchy. Put the couscous-filled carafe back on the burner and let it sit for about five minutes or until the liquid’s all absorbed.
Step 5: Finally, plate it up and serve with wine. I selected a Cabernet Sauvignon from the esteemed Charles Shaw (2008, an excellent year) to pair with the dish. It didn’t seem to complement the chicken until I’d drunk three-quarters of the bottle, at which point it became delicious. Such is the subtlety of this particular bottle, I suppose. If you’ve got more than $2 to spend on wine, a Chardonnay might be the more obvious choice.
Glory shot. If I’d had any, I’d have steamed some asparagus in the basket where the coffee usually goes. (To steam veggies, you just run water through the machine a few times.) I could have then layered it with the chicken and couscous for some color, but one can’t be too picky.
The Results: Well, it tasted like poached chicken breast. That’s pretty much the most boring way to prepare the most boring cut of any animal I can think of, but the coffee maker did a perfectly fine job of it. The chicken was moist and the texture was about right, and it is an incredibly easy way to make a meal. I could see this recipe being useful if you’re stuck in a hotel room somewhere—and just happen to have a raw chicken breast on you.
Tomorrow’s MacGyver Chef recipe will be an urban-legend favorite: Fish steamed in the dishwasher. Stay tuned.
Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.
If you’re wanting some quality analysis of what’s under the PlayStation 3 Slim‘s hood, you’re still gonna have to wait for that. However, if you’re the sort that just needs to see hardware broken down into as many simple pieces as possible, boy have we got some pictures for you.
Update: The results are in and well, there isn’t a lot of excitement to show for it except for maybe the large 17-blade fan that stretches 95mm in diameter. There’s also a video slideshow of the process, seen after the break.
Giant LCDs require giant robots. On a tour of Samsung’s LCD factory in Cheonan, Korea yesterday, I got to see how cutting-edge TVs are put together – and it was the closest to Cyberdyne Systems I’ve ever encountered.
According to our Samsung guide, LCD TVs have four basic parts: there’s a layer of liquid crystals sandwiched between two sheets of glass, all placed in front of a backlight unit. The back sheet of glass has colored pixels embedded in it; the front sheet has transistors that alter the liquid crystals’ state to hide or reveal the filtered light.
At Samsung’s factory in Cheonan, it takes about ten days to make an LCD TV. I got to see the last part of the process, which takes four hours: assembly. Down a nearly endless, white hallway I peered into several large windows to find giant robots – and the occasional white-garbed Samsung quality control worker – hauling and assembling 46″ screens.
As you shove your way through the crowd in a baseball stadium, the lenses of your digital glasses display the names, hometowns and favorite hobbies of the strangers surrounding you. Then you claim a seat and fix your attention on the batter, and his player statistics pop up in a transparent box in the corner of your field of vision.
It’s not possible today, but the emergence of more powerful, media-centric cellphones is accelerating humanity toward this vision of “augmented reality,” where data from the network overlays your view of the real world. Already, developers are creating augmented reality applications and games for a variety of smartphones, so your phone’s screen shows the real world overlaid with additional information such as the location of subway entrances, the price of houses, or Twitter messages that have been posted nearby. And publishers, moviemakers and toymakers have embraced a version of the technology to enhance their products and advertising campaigns.
“Augmented reality is the ultimate interface to a computer because our lives are becoming more mobile,” said Tobias Höllerer, an associate professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara, who is leading the university’s augmented reality program. “We’re getting more and more away from a desktop, but the information the computer possesses is applicable in the physical world.”
Tom Caudell, a researcher at aircraft manufacturer Boeing, coined the term “augmented reality” in 1990. He applied the term to a head-mounted digital display that guided workers through assembling electrical wires in aircrafts. The early definition of augmented reality, then, was an intersection between virtual and physical reality, where digital visuals are blended in to the real world to enhance our perceptions.
Augmented Reality Today Total Immersion is one of the most successful augmented reality providers today, having created interactive baseball cards, a 3-D tour of the Star Trek Enterprise, and now, a new line of Mattel actions figures based on the upcoming sci-fi-flick, Avatar.
Here’s a quick look at how their augmented reality technology works. Take the baseball cards. Users have to first log on to a URL (www.toppstown.com) and enter a 3-D section where they enter an interactive code found on their baseball card to activate the software. Then, they can hold the card under a webcam and Total Immersion’s software goes to work. continue reading…
Futurists and computer scientists continue to raise their standards for a perfectly augmented world. Höllerer’s dream for augmented reality is for it to reach a state in which it does not rely on a pre-downloaded model to generate information. That is, he wants to be able to point a phone at a city it’s completely unfamiliar with, download the surroundings and output information on the fly. He and his peers at UCSB call this idea “Anywhere Augmentation.”
But we have a long way to go — perhaps several years — before achieving Anywhere Augmentation, Höllerer said. Augmented reality is stifled by limitations in software and hardware, he explained. Cellphones require superb battery life, computational power, cameras and tracking sensors. For software, augmented reality requires a much more sophisticated artificial intelligence and 3-D modeling applications. And above all, this technology must become affordable to consumers. The best possible technology that is available today would nearly cost $100,000 for a solid augmented-reality device, Höllerer said.
Given the cost of creating decent augmented-reality technology, early attempts have focused on two areas. One, augmented reality for your computer is prominently appearing in attention-grabbing, big-budget advertisements. And a few consumer applications of the technology are just beginning to surface in smartphones.
A recent example of augmented reality appeared in the marketing campaign for the sci-fi blockbuster District 9. On the movie’s official website was a “training simulator” game, which asked computer users to print a postcard containing the District 9 logo and hold it in front of a webcam. The postcard contains a marker; when the game detects that marker in the webcam video, it overlays a 3-D hologram of a District 9 character on the computer screen. From there, players can click buttons to fire a gun, jump up and down or throw a human against a wall in the game. (See video above.)
Mattel is using the same type of 3-D imaging augmented reality in “i-Tag” action figures for James Cameron’s new movie Avatar. The toy includes a card containing a marker, which is projected as a 3-D action figure on a computer. This way, children can battle each other’s virtual characters on a computer screen.
But augmented reality isn’t truly useful in a static desktop environment, Höllerer said, because people’s day-to-day realities involve more than sitting around all day (outside of work, at least). And that’s why smartphones, which include GPS hardware and cameras, are crucial to driving the evolution of augmented reality.
Brian Selzer, co-founder of Ogmento, a company that creates augmented reality products for games and marketing, recognizes the need for augmented reality to go mobile. He said his company is working on several projects coming in the near future to help market mainstream movies with augmented reality smartphone apps. For example, movie posters will trigger interactive experiences on an iPhone, such as a trailer or even a virtual treasure hunt to promote the film.
“The smartphone is bringing AR into the masses right now,” Selzer said. “In 2010 every blockbuster movie is going to have a mobile AR campaign tied to it.”
On the consumer end of the spectrum, developers have recently released augmented reality apps for the Google Android-powered HTC G1 handset. Layar, a company based in Amsterdam, released an augmented reality browser for Android smartphones in June. The Layar browser (video above) looks at an environment through the phone’s camera, and the app displays houses for sale, popular restaurants and shops, and tourist attractions. The software relies on downloading “layers” of data provided by developers coding for the platform. Thus, while the information appears to display in real time, it’s not truly real-time: The app can’t analyze data it hasn’t downloaded ahead of time.
“This is the first time media, internet and digital information is being combined with reality,” said Martin Lens-FitzGerald, co-founder of Layar. “You know more, you find more, or you see something you haven’t seen before. Some people are even saying that it might be even bigger than the web.”
Cellphone giant Nokia is currently testing an AR app called Point & Find, which involves pointing your camera phone at real-world objects and planting virtual information tags on them (above). Users of the app can view each other’s tags on the phone screen, essentially crowdsourcing an augmented reality.
“This year we’re feeling a real urgency to work on augmented reality because the hardware is finally catching up to our needs,” said Rebecca Allen, director of Nokia’s research center in Hollywood.
Georgia Tech is also busy tinkering with augmented reality. The video demo above demonstrates an augmented-reality zombie shooter called ARhrrrr. The smartphone in use is a prototype containing an Nvidia Tegra, a powerful chip specializing in high-end graphics for mobile devices. How do you play? Point the phone camera at a map containing markers, and a 3D hologram of a town overrun by zombies appears on the phone’s screen. Using the phone, you can shoot the zombies from the perspective of a helicopter pilot. And you can even place (real) Skittles on the physical map and shoot them to set off (virtual) bombs.
As for the iPhone, officially there are no augmented reality apps in the App Store yet — because Apple doesn’t provide an open API to access live video from the phone’s camera. This barrier prompted augmented reality enthusiasts and professionals to write an Open Letter to Apple pleading for access to this API to make augmented reality apps possible in the App Store.
Brad Foxhoven, Selzer’s partner at Ogmento, said Apple has told him the next version of the iPhone OS (3.1) “would make [AR developers] happy,” implying the live-video API will become open, and AR apps will become available very soon.
Meanwhile, some augmented reality developers have already hacked away at the iPhone’s software development kit to code proof-of-concept augmented reality apps. The video above demonstrates an app called Twittaround, an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone. The app shows live tweets of mobile Twitter users around your location.
“We’re doing as much as we can with the current technology,” Selzer said regarding the overall augmented-reality developer community. “This industry is just getting started, and as processing speeds speed up, and as more creative individuals get involved, our belief is this is going to become a platform that becomes massively adopted and immersed in the next few years.”
Remember the winking, nodding magical collectible cards of famous witches and wizards from Harry Potter? French company Total Immersion has something similar for Muggles: The company helped create baseball cards where 3-D avatars of players emerged on the desktop to pitch and bat with real-world users, and is also now working with Mattel to create a new line of action figures based on the upcoming sci-fi-flick Avatar.
Digital magic known as augmented reality made it possible. “Augmented reality is a composite experience–a video stream merged with a synthetic component and manipulated in real time,” says Greg Davis, general manager at Total Immersion. “We are taking video and superimposing a digital layer over it.”
Total Immersion is one of the most successful augmented reality providers currently. Here’s a quick look at how the company’s augmented reality technology for the desktop works. Take the baseball cards. Users have to first log on to a URL and navigate to the 3-D section of the website, where they enter an interactive code found on their baseball card to activate the software. Then, they can hold the card under a webcam and Total Immersion’s software goes to work. It identifies a target on the baseball card, then overlays a virtual baseball player on the video onscreen. Users can then rotate the baseball player and make it perform a select few actions.
Now for a peek under the hood. The first step is to capture video from the webcam. When users click on a URL, this streaming video appears on a display, which can either be a desktop, cell phone screen or a projector-based display. From a user perspective, the video capture is similar to watching yourself while using Skype, explains Davis.
Total Immersion’s augmented reality software then steps in. The software has three components–recognition, tracking and rendering. In the video stream, Total Immersion’s software hunts for a ‘target,’ which is a single user or a group of users. It then tracks the target and imposes a 3-D overlay by adding a virtual object, before rendering it back on the screen in real time. There are limits: the software can only track a few targets at a time and it has restrictions on range.
For users, this means they see a composite back on the screen– them playing with a baseball player avatar or having a virtual object on their faces. “What you are seeing in the reflected video is you and something that is not–effectively augmenting reality” says Davis.
Total Immersion offers variations of this technology for cellphones and dedicated camera set ups that can be projected on to a custom screen such as large outdoor displays.
Since we first heard about Florida going Slim with its PS3s, we’ve gotten numerous reports abut the console showing up on retail shelves in Best Buys and GameStops across these 48 contiguous states. We’ve also heard whispers that brick-and-mortar Sony Style locations are getting shipments and will be unleashing to the masses soon after — not to mention Amazon’s still promising at least some deliveries for tomorrow. Our calls to Sony haven’t been returned yet, but it seems like the release date now is more or less “as soon as your local electronics store gets a shipment.” Another shot of the boxes in the wild after the break, and let us know below if and where you’ve managed to spot one!
Update: We just got confirmation from Sony that retail stores are being told they can sell the Slim as soon as they receive it. Now let’s see how the the 160GB PS3 classic fares with its slender counterpart sharing price point and shelf space.
There are many options for adding effects to a photograph, but one way or another, they usually involve some sort of Photoshop-y sleight of hand. Not when you have a Lensbaby. These specially made DSLR lenses let you create pics with accouterments like selective focus or the rawness normally achieved with plastic Lomo cams. But first, take in some background courtesy of writer/ photographer Jackson Lynch:
Back in 2003, full-time photographer, DSLR devotee and part-time tinkerer Craig Strong felt his images were just too crisp, clean and well, boring. Yearning for the dramatic effects of a view camera’s tilt-and-shift selective focus and the organic randomness of plastic cameras like the Holga, Strong holed himself up in his Portland, Oregon tool shed for some serious hackin’ and hewin’. He emerged in early ‘04 with a Rube Goldbergesque marriage of flexible Shop-Vac hosing, a hand-machined mount and an uncoated lens element that fit onto an SLR body and focused by moving the lens plane with your fingers. It looked pretty rough hewn and funky, but he gave it to a few incredulous friends to try.
Strong’s friends didn’t just like it. They lurved it. And it turned out other photographers would too. Nearly six years later he’s sold thousands of lensbabies to over 40 different countries. We took the most recent model, the Composer for a spin. Again from Jackson:
The Lensbaby experience is a creative one and requires a lot of manual tweaking. Apertures on the double glass, single glass and plastic units range from f2 to f22 and you set them by inserting black metal discs into the front of the lens, not by turning a dial. Selective focus is of course, manual as well. Thankfully, the aperture priority setting on most modern cameras works with the Composer. It’s available for the for Canon, Nikon, Sony Alpha A/Minolta Maxxum, Pentax K, Samsung GX, Olympus E1, and Panasonic Lumix DMC in case you’re wondering.
You know, we wish we could say that there was more to this DIY cameraphone macro hack than tearing the lens out of an old DVD player and duct taping it over that of the cameraphone — but there really isn’t. And you know what? That’s OK. Some of the best mods are simple — so long as they work. And this one seems to work quite well, at least judging by the “before and after” shots after the break. And if you hit the read link, there’s even more where those came from. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have an old optical disc drive to smash open.
A product with one of the most head-scratching names in cell phone history got a boost this week when Samsung announced an update to one of its messaging phones. The Samsung Messager II (that’s right, it’s not a typo for messenger) is …
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For the first recipe in our MacGyver Chef series, I tackled one of the lowliest of kitchen gadgets: The coffee maker. Since it sucks at brewing coffee, I wondered if there was some other use for it…
