Hasta La Gadget!

Clipping along through the crisp night air, comfortably cozy under a provided blanket, we experienced some San Francisco magic in a Pedicab. This was certainly the way to travel!
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Each Wednesday, I find myself tweeting the sentence, “Tonight’s #SVU explores every parent’s worst nightmare.” I’ve gotta hand it to the writers: it really is a skill, coming up with something more disturbing every week.
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Speakers are great for hearing your music, but most speakers look pretty boring. So when when you aren’t listening to music, they look terrible in your home. These Water Dancing Speakers deliver sound and are visually pleasing to look at, making the whole experience much nicer.

These speakers each have 4 colorful LEDs aimed upward, along with jets of water that bounce along with the beat. The color of the light changes at random, and the height of the water is determined by the volume and pitch of the sound. They connect to your computer via USB, and are completely sealed so you won’t need to refill them.

Pretty cool huh? They cost about $63(USD) for a pair over at Red5 and will add some color and movement to your room.

[via redferret]

Not happy with building mysterious gigantic structures in the desert, the Chinese are now building inter-dimensional portals in the middle of their cities. What the hell is this 515-foot (157 meters) high metal structure in the the city of Fushun, in northeast China’s Liaoning province? More »

Lytro is on a roll. After launching manual controls just last month, the company today release a real treat. The Lytro desktop software just received an update that brings two new features into the mix: perspective shift, which slightly adjusts the perspective of the camera after the picture’s been taken, and living filters. Best of all, these new features work with previously taken Lytro photos.

And just when you had finally wrapped your head around a picture changing focus after it’s been taken…

In case you’re late to the game, Lytro launched a brand new type of camera which captures an entire light field, rather than one plane of light, allowing for interactive images which can change focus with a single click.

This was magical enough in itself, but the company promised that with this disruptive technology would come even more creative benefits: changing focus was just the beginning.

Today, the company delivers on that promise with not one, but two, new features.

The first is shifting perspective, and it’s certainly the most important. One of the main reasons our eyes sense a third dimension besides length and width is the fact that we’re always moving slightly. These slight movements communicate with our brain to mark that the computer is closer than the coffee table is closer than the tv is closer than the wall.

It’s basic stuff, to the point where it’s so obvious you’d never think about it on your own, but Lytro has found a way to integrate it into its software. This means users can not only change focus of the photo, but swivel it around to check out the perspective.

All you do is hold click and move around within the frame. On the iPad, the experience is even better, as Lytro has used the gyrometer to control the perspective shift based on which way you tilt the device. It’s only a slight shift in perspective, the same shifts you make standing, walking, or looking around a room, but it’s a fundamental part of establishing distance and depth.

This is possible on exsiting photos thanks to the sheer amount of data embedded in each photo taken by a Lytro. There’s enough data for the company to keep building features for a long while on the software side, and they prove with this update.

The second new feature is called Living Filters, and it’s essentially adding photo filters but on steroids.

For example, Black and White is actually called “Film Noir” and it leaves just the slightest bit of color in a photograph. It’s with this color that you know the girl on the left is a red head and the girl on the right is a brunette.

Other filters like Carnival (think fun house mirror) and Line Art (which is like a cartoon drawing) are more on the fun side, while Crayon (for example) brings a professional grade quality to photos by letting you choose which parts of the photo are in color and which fade to black and white.

What’s important is that no matter the filter, all the images maintain the same interactivity.

To meet demand, Lytro amped up distribution in a huge way. The company’s previous backlog of orders has been fulfilled entirely, so if you order a Lytro today on Amazon, it would arrive tomorrow — something the company couldn’t previously state.

The update is available for all Lytro users in the desktop software, but once you’ve enabled the update and opted in to perspective shift for your library (which is undoable), all photos you’ve taken (even existing photos you took months away) will be enabled for perspective shift whether you’re in the software, on the web, or in a Facebook newsfeed.