Hasta La Gadget!

Before I tell you what the digital Holga D doesn’t do, let me recap what Lomo’s plastic-fantastic Holga medium-format film camera does do.

The Holga has a cheap plastic lens, an even cheaper light-leaking plastic body, settings so sparse that they’re almost superfluous and, as with all film cameras, delayed gratification in the form of the need for chemical processing before you can see your blurred, distorted photographs.

Onto the Holga D, invented by designer Saikat Biswas and noticed on the internet by impossibly handsome Wired.com photographer Jon Snyder. The plain box lacks an LCD screen of any kind, and the camera is controlled by manual focus, shutter, ISO and aperture dials. The status of these controls is shown on a small e-ink circle, and there are switches to choose a B&W mode and also pick an aspect ratio. To keep things low-fi and cheap, the sensor is either a full-frame or crop-frame model from last generation designs. That is, when technology moves on, the Holga D uses what is left behind.

The box itself is beautifully minimal, and if Biswas ever gets this into production then he’d probably sell a bunch to hipsters based on looks alone. In lieu of an actual working product, how should we fill the vacuum in reality left by the Holga D? This holiday weekend, why not take your digicam, switch off the LCD, turn on full manual control and take some chances. I guarantee two things: you’ll have a lot of fun, and you’ll get a lot of bad, bad pictures.

Holga D [Saikat Biswas via Twitter]

See Also:

• Top 10 Wired Holga Photos, Decided by You
• Holga
• The Digital Holga, Or How To Waste A Million Pixels
• Digi-Diana: Lomo Lens Adapter for Canon, Nikon DSLRs
• Lomo

Google Voice is packed with more features than you can shake a stick at. Here’s what you need to know to get started with the free phone service. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-20009499-2.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Webware/a/p

Palm CEO John Rubinstein will continue to head up his webOS team under new boss HP, and will be working on smartphones, “future slate PCs and netbooks,” according to a statement from HP

The computer giant completed its acquisition of Palm yesterday, and announced that Palm will continue to develop both hardware and software, headed up by former Apple employee Rubinstein.

This will include new phones (the Pre and Pixi lines are now also owned by HP), but most exciting is the confirmation that there will be webOS tablets. After all, apart from iOS, name another operating system that is as suited to a tablet as the webOS (sure, Android is close, but still a little too clunky).

Better still, HP has the deep pockets to go up against Apple, and if Rubinstein and team are left to work on great machines their combined experience (many of them are also Apple alumni) should finally provide an iPad competitor. And even if you are a total, unashamed iPad fanboy, this should still excite you. Competition is good for us buyers. Take a look at the iPhone 4: Do you think it would be this good if Android and Palm weren’t chasing so close behind?

HP Completes Palm Acquisition [Yahoo]

Photo: Lisa Brewster/Flickr

See Also:

• HP's Windows 7 Slate Strikes at the iPad
• HP Slate Details Leaked: $550 Netbook, Minus Keyboard
• Official: HP Slate Will Run WebOS
• HP Slate Could Get a Makeover With Palm's WebOS
• HP Slate: About $500, Atom Processor, June Launch
• Report: HP Kills Slate

When they’re not rolling sheets of metal into tubes and stuffing them with conductive foam to make iPhone styluses, the smart engineers at Ten One design are hacking away at the iPad. And quite miraculously, they have managed to turn the iPad’s screen into a pressure sensitive drawing tablet.

Proper graphics tablets like those from Wacom have pens which detect thousands of levels of pressure, but the iPad offers just two levels: one and zero. To get around this, the Ten One people, makers of the Pogo stylus, have hacked Apple’s private UIKit frameworks to enable the screen to detect pressure. The video above shows the test software in action (the delay in drawing is due to “an issue with [the] demo application code.”

Does this mean that the iPad’s screen is somehow able to know how hard you are pressing? Maybe not. Although the Ten One blog post doesn’t mention just how this information is gotten from the iPad, my guess would be that the size of the tip is being measured by the standard multi-touch detection. As you press on the foam, the tip grows. This also explains how the test software is able to ignore the side of the hand while still reacting to the pen.

Ten One plans to release its hack to the world for free inclusion in any software. This rests on Apple opening up the private software framework, which is a notoriously slow process. Still, it would be pretty awesome, and would add a lot of finesse to drawing and painting apps like the excellent Brushes.

Pressure-Sensitive Drawing on iPad [Ten One designers blog]

See Also:

• Pogo Stick Turns Mac Touchpads into Graphics Tablets
• Pogo iPhone Stylus Bounces Back. Again
• Pogo Stylus: The Most Useless iPhone Accessory. Ever

When politicians get desperate they turn to otaku for help.

For a while there were rumors floating around that the ruling DNP party was hoping to use virtual character Hatsune Miku in promotional videos for candidates. Well, it seems that the makers of Miku weren’t keen and denied the rights.

However, J-Cast reports that MP Kenzou Fujisue, who is pretty tech-savvy for a statesman, has claimed that he has a “secret plan” for trying to make the July election more accessible to the younger generation.

[Pics via Reuters and Vocaloid Wikia]

Hatsune Miku was originally a software release for the Yamaha Vocaloid 2, a sound system that allows you to synthesize singing by typing in your own lyrics. Since then she has become very popular, spawning manga, robot versions and legions of cosplay copycats. The politicians clearly wanted to use Miku to push their propaganda message.

In the end, Fujisue used cheerful “Minshu-kun”, the DNP’s own red mascot character, for a YouTube promotional video. However, keen listeners will detect that the theme song “We are the ONE” is in fact sung in Miku’s voice! Apparently, though the rights to use the actual character were not granted, it was fine to use her voice as long as you did not identify her by name.