Hasta La Gadget!

The Safe House is something of a paradox: — a house that is light, airy and open to the outside thanks to windows both numerous and large, and yet almost impossible to break into. How is this done? By the magic power of Transformers.

The home, designed by Polish architects KWK Promes, exists in two states. When you are at home and feeling safe, you leave it open in “vulnerable” mode. One side of the house is all glass, and the open-plan interior is open to the outside world. There is even a drawbridge at second-floor level across to another building housing an indoor pool.

But at the first sign of trouble — over aggressive trick-or-treaters, for example — you hit a button and the house goes into lockdown, turning from home into fortress. A shutter slams down, protecting the front of the house, huge concrete slabs swing in to plug up the windows, and the drawbridge is hoisted up, isolating the building completely.

Who on earth would want such a home?

Organized criminals? Drug lords? Randy and Evi Quaid? Or just your plain, common or garden U.S paranoid? In fact, it is just an overly cautious client on the outskirts of Warsaw.

It seems to me that the best way to avoid the need for a panic room (panic house?) is to live in a country where home invasions don’t exist i.e anywhere in the world except the US. But as somebody who has far too many gadgets, I can appreciate the need for security when I’m not at home. If I lived in this amazing slab of a house, I’d be able to take off for a couple weeks of vacation and not worry about burglars.

On the other hand, I would spend the entire time worrying about losing my keys.

Safe House [KWK Promes via Home Designing]

See Also:

• Indestructible Mobile Home Keeps Out Mad Max, Zombies

Stalk people and see through their clothes with the Infrared Night Vision camera

Infrared photography used to be dead easy. You’d buy some IR film and put a dark, dark red filter on the front of your lens. Then you’d turn the focus ring a notch to the left to compensate for the fact that the IR light focuses differently. Apart from not actually being able to see anything through the viewfinder thanks to the IR filter, it was simple.

To do the same thing with your digital SLR you have to start by removing the IR filter over the sensor. If that sounds dangerous and hard to reverse, it is.

So you might consider the Midnight Shot NV-1, a night-vision camera made for infrared photography. The camera is as simple as it gets: 5MP sensor, fixed focus, a three-inch LCD and 640 x 480 AVI video capture. But switch it into night mode and things get interesting.

IR mode puts an IR filter in front of the lens to block all but IR light, and if it is already dark outside then you can switch on an IR LED lamp, invisible to human eyes but burning bright to the camera’s sensor. This gets some cool, night-vision effects, and lets you shoot in the dark without anybody knowing.

More creative, though, is to let the natural light. Shooting in daylight with the IR filter on will cause some weird color shifts. In B&W, blue skies will darken to black and foliage will take on an ethereal glow. In short, you’ll be able to snap some creepy pictures.

The Midnight Shot camera comes from ThinkGeek, and costs just $150. It is currently out of stock, but more should be available soon.

Midnight Shot NV-1 [ThinkGeek]

See Also:

• Grill Heats With Infrared, Gets Serious Geek Cred
• CCTV Busting Infra-Red Headset Makes You Invisible
• Japan Foils Movie Pirates With Infrared
• Infra Red Shades Protect You From the Man

David McCourt’s Slow Camera looks like a prop from 2001

David McCourt has come up with the idea of Slow Photography. Essentially, it’s a bulky, analog version of all the photo grungifying apps for the iPhone. The big difference, though, is that you’ll look way cooler when you’re doing it.

David’s Slow Camera is a box which treats your cellphone like a piece of film. You pull the front open like a drawer, slot in your phone and close the box back up. Now, you frame and view the image by peering into the top of the box, and select from three lenses by twisting a turret at the front. The camera itself looks like a prop from Kubrick’s 2001.

But why bother with all this extra trouble? After all, a cellphone camera’s greatest strength is its convenience. Because by slowing things down you have to take a more considered approach. If any of you has ever used a reflex camera with a top-down, reversed-image viewfinder, you’ll know just how much more attention it forces you to pay to composition.

The lenses are fun, too, and only add to the Hipstamatic-ness of the rig. You can choose between regular fixed, fisheye and macro lenses, and all of them deteriorate the quality of your pictures (see the results below).

I’m interested to see where this will end up. The current obsession with making perfect digital photos look like they were snapped with a plastic Soviet-era camera makes for some nice images, but it will start to look a little cheesy soon enough. Take a look at the 1980s fad for using tobacco grad filters and you’ll see how a certain look can date pictures strongly.

Pushing a camera to force weird images is as old as photography itself, though. I wonder if photographers will start to exploit digital noise and other defects the same way that film photographers exploited grain?

Slow Photography [David McCourt. Thanks, David!]

See Also:

• Lomo Diana+: Plastic Junk, Updated
• The Cheap Russian Camera That Could: Lomo Turns 25
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos
• Lomo-fy Your iPhone 3G With Brando's Telescope

The results of the Slow Camera. Photos David McCourt

This article was written on August 21, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
I’ll forewarn you that DeltaCopy is something you won’t want to use for all of your backup needs because it’s not the easiest thing in the world to set up. It is, however, useful if you’re backing up large amounts of data every night that doesn’t change very much.

DeltaCopy is different than most other backup utilities because of how it handles incremental backups. Normally a program will check to see if a file has changed, and if it has it will update the file with the new data. To do this it will copy the new file over top of the old one, which for most people is just fine. When you start dealing with large files on a regular basis, however, this can take a long time to process.

What DeltaCopy does is transfer only the pieces of the file that have actually changed. For example, if you have a 1GB file and only 2MB of data has changed DeltaCopy will only transfer that 2MB instead of the entire 1GB file again. When you’re talking about gigabytes worth of data this can save a bunch of time.

The catch? In order to do this you’ll need to install both a server and client app on the respective machines. This is needed so that DeltaCopy is able to figure out what has changed in the file before transferring any of the data. So it does require some extra steps, but it may be worth it for some of you.

Aside from that the program is pretty basic and offers only the necessary features:

• Incremental backup – Copies part of the file that is actually modified
• Task scheduler – Profiles in DeltaCopy can run based on a schedule
• Email notification – Administrators can receive email confirmation on successful as well as failed transfers
• One-click restore – Backed up files can be easily restored.
• Windows friendly environment – No need to manually modify configuration files or play around with command line options.

I know this is just a GUI to the rsync command (ported from Linux/UNIX), but it makes the whole process a bit easier to manage.

DeltaCopy Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)
Note: If running this on Vista/Win7 make sure to install it to a location that has write access (meaning a location that UAC isn’t blocking write access to). I noticed that DeltaCopy writes configuration files to the install directory, and UAC will prevent that from happening if you install it into the Program Files folder.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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CyberNotes: Backup Files When Your Computer is IdlePoll: Where Do You Backup Important Files?Backup Your Files To An Email AccountCyberNotes: Powerful Free Backup SoftwareMozy Makes Restoring Files Even Easier

Novatel 2372 MiFi owners could always stream tunes from the web, but now they can do it from microSD — after downloading Maintenance Release 1.0, that is, which finally brings DLNA server functionality. DLNA support means your mobile hotspot can share music, video and other content to devices over the network from an inserted flash card, even when the router can’t serve up 3G — especially useful on AT&T devices, which, you know, tend to suffer from occasional network congestion and data caps. The update also includes a new Customer Care Widget and a more intuitive MiFi OS web interface, so even average consumers might be able to configure one of these without consulting tech support. Sounds like a win for everybody.

AT&T’s MiFi 2372 gets DLNA update, streams media even without 3G connectivity originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Apr 2011 02:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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