Hasta La Gadget!

Popping bubble wrap is pretty calming. It’s an unconventional means to deal with anger or frustration, but hey, it works and it’s way cheaper than a session with a therapist.

Taking bubble wrap to the next level is LA-based comedy “imaginator” Eric Buss, who came up with the fascinating contraption that’s aptly called the Bubble Wrap Bike.

The bicycle isn’t made of bubble wrap, although bubble wrap is a huge component of it. The front of the bike is outfitted to hold and dispense a sheet of bubble wrap as the rider goes along. The bike’s wheels run over the bubble wrap with each push to the pedal, popping it along the way.

It’s weird, it’s strange, it’s all about bubble wrap and I think it’s amazing in a cool-but-I’d-never-ride-this-myself sort of way.

On a side note, what a waste of good bubble wrap!

[via Reddit and DPaF via Laughing Squid]

It’s been a little while since we’ve heard about the recently-announced Samsung Galaxy NX Android-powered camera, but it is indeed still here and ready to mingle. According to a couple of UK retailers, the camera has made its way to the region and is ready to start selling with a price tag that rivals the Canon 70D that’s coming later this year.

Jessops and Wex Photographic both have the new camera listed on their website. Wex Photographic has the camera in pre-order status, while Jessops actually says that they have it in stock and ready to ship. However, don’t go grab your credit card thinking this is an impulse buy. You’ll be spending a lot of cash on this camera, to the tune of £1,299 (around $2,000).

The Galaxy NX is the first-ever Android-powered interchangeable lens camera, and it comes with a 20.3-megapixel APS-C sensor and an 18-55mm kit lens to get you started, but you’ll be able to snap on other lenses to get that perfect shot you need. The camera also comes with 4G LTE, WiFi, and 16GB of internal storage.

On the inside, there’s a 1.6GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM powering the operation, with a capability of shooting 8.6 frames per second, with a fast shutter speed of 1/6000. It certainly seems like a decent camera for all the hobbyists out there, but it’ll be interesting to see how it caters towards the professional crowd.

There’s no official word on a release date yet, and it could just be a simple mistake on Jessops’ part about the availability of the camera. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a retailer has made a false start and listed something early. Now we’re just waiting to see when we’ll see the camera arrive in the States.

VIA: ePhotoZine

Samsung Galaxy NX arrives in UK for a hefty figure is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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The keyboard was a technological spin on the piano, and in that way really changed the instrument, but the keyboard itself has not really adapted to take advantage of modern tech. But TouchKeys, a new Kickstarter project that launched recently, introduces a way to add multi-touch input to any keyboard with a DIY kit, exponentially changing the range of expression possible when playing.

Created by London’s Andrew McPherson, the TouchKeys multi-touch musical keyboard is available in both DIY and pre-installed versions, and adds touch-sensitive surfaces to the keyboard’s keys that use capacitive input (just like that used in smartphone screens) to convey touch data that can then translate into vibrato, pitched bends, additional sounds and more via software plugins for popular audio programs like Kontakt, Logic Pro X and Reason.

The end result is that you can add a number of effects to your music that normally have to be added afterward or controlled via clumsy sliders and wheels while playing, in real-time, on the very keyboard where you’re playing the original composition itself.  Each key supports up to three separate touches, and the set uses USB 2.0 to connect to your computer.

McPherson developed the TouchKeys over two years at the University of London’s Centre for Digital Music, and at Drexel University. McPherson has ample experience researching and creating innovative music projects, and previously designed the magnetic resonator piano, a modified piano that can generate new sounds acoustically from the piano strings themselves (sort of an analog version of the TouchKeys in many ways). McPherson is an assistant professor in digital media at Queen Mary University of London and has completed graduate schooling in engineering and music at MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel.

The TouchKeys are going to be made entirely in the U.K., and the pre-built editions will be hand-assembled at Queen Mary and the London Music Hackspace, hence the limit of 50 on pre-orders of the pre-built editions. Pre-installed editions start at £660 (just over $1,000 U.S.), and both they and the kits should ship around January 2014 if everything goes according to plan.

It’s not cheap (the basic 25-key DIY kit costs £330) but it’s a unique experience for musicians and researchers that could be a precursor to a very different kind of musical keyboard to come, should the tech get commercialized and adopted by keyboard manufacturers.

Microscopes are a dime a dozen in universities, so there’s plenty of fun to be had hacking ’em any way you can—like a team of researchers from Caltech, who have developed a cheap and easy way to increase their resolution by a factor of 100.

Read more…

Apple has been granted a new patent related to camera tech by the USPTO today (via AppleInsider), which uses three different sensors and three different lenses to improve color-capture accuracy and image resolution for photos shot with an iPhone or other mobile device. The system is similar to the two-sensor Apple patent around mobile cameras the company applied for recently, but it solves a different kind of imaging problem.

This sensor arrangement would improve upon most mobile camera designs by using two chorminance sensors, each of which is placed to one side of a luminance sensor. The luminance or light sensor would determine light levels of the image, while the chrominance sensors would be responsible for accurately capturing color data. Two chrominance sensors arranged in that manner would be able to compensate for blind spots in each other’s field of view, ensuring accurate color rendering for all scenes.

If color info is missing from any part of the scene, as can happen with traditional combined sensor arrangements, then overall photo resolution suffers, too, because of a lack of data, so this would improve not only color rendering but overall image quality. And the information drawn from the two chrominance sensors would also be useful in automatically correcting for distortion caused by the camera lens.

Last week, as mentioned, Apple patented dual-sensor imaging for iPhones, that would automatically combine two separate images to correct for flaws in either. Combined with this sensor design, it begins to be apparent that Apple is doing lots of work on the imaging side of its mobile offerings. The iPhone has long been held up as an example of the best camera in smartphones, but competitors are starting to focus innovation on their own camera designs, the Lumia 1020 being probably the most recent memorable example.

Apple probably doesn’t have much to fear from Windows Phone devices, feature rich as they may be, but a significant camera improvement is a good way to attract customers with something new. Don’t expect changes like these to iPhone cameras coming in the next update this fall, but definitely consider this an area to watch over the next few years.