Hasta La Gadget!

Got your Instapaper bookmarklet prepped? This is a bit of a long one: Wired UK has put together an in-depth creation history for the soon-to-be-released Kinect. While a “one man against all odds” story might be a little quicker to read, the story of Kinect (or Project Natal, as it’s been known for most of its lifetime) is actually a pretty remarkable collaboration. An original demand and vision for the Xbox 360 from Don Mattrick (in pretty obvious response to the Wii), project leadership from Alex Kipman, gameplay creativity from Kudo Tsunoda, camera technology from PrimeSense, computer vision algorithms from Andrew Blake and Jamie Shotton — and that was just the incubation stage! The vision was cast in 2007, the project really started in 2008, and we’ll have the finished product (along with the all-important games of course) in our living rooms in November. While the most immediate battle for Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft is who can sell the most games and the most motion control hardware, it’s clear that Kinect is a major technical achievement with some pretty broad reaching implications for human / machine interaction going forward. Still, we wonder: can it run provide an effective user interface for Doom?

Oh, and if you need a little more Kinect in your life, check out our Engadget Show with Kudo Tsunoda where he dives into a bit of the tech and gameplay.

Wired chronicles the (brief) history of Kinect originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In 1956, IBM’s Ramac computer storage system squeezed 20MB of data into a large office room. Big Blue’s new mid-size storage rack packs over a million times more data (up to 24TB) and fits on a desktop.

Size and storage aren’t the Storwize v7000’s only selling points; IBM also touts its performance, particularly for high-volume cloud computing or transactions over the web. It uses a mix of efficiency software that IBM either developed through its own R&D or recently acquired.

For example, Storwize’s GUI is modeled on Israeli storage startup XIV’s. In 2008, IBM purchased XIV, founded by the highly-regarded Moshe Yanai, former head engineer for IBM’s storage rival EMC, for $300 million; an analyst called Yanai’s move to IBM akin to a Boston Red Sox star joining the New York Yankees. No pressure there. Yanai left IBM in August; the Storwize’s success or failure will test whether the high-profile acquisition has paid off.

Storwize’s Easy Tier software, developed by IBM Research, automatically scans files for high I/O usage and moves them to higher-performing SSD drives for quick access. ProtecTIER, technology IBM also bought in 2008, eliminates duplicate files; real-time compression software (also the result of an IBM acquisition) further reduces the storage footprint. IBM also promises non-disruptive migrations, meaning you can move data around, but you and your customers can still access it, reducing one of the main causes of planned downtime.

I wonder what storage downtime in 1956 looked like — probably just someone turning off the lights and going home.

See Also:

• A Storage Tank Like No Other
• Wired 8.04: Instant Access Memory
• April 7, 1964: IBM Bets Big on System/360
• IBM and Intel Getting a Makeover for Mobile
• Big Blue's Big Brother Lab
• 22 Years Ago, One Gigagbyte Looked Like This
• Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline
• Finally: Drobo FS for Networked Storage

Timur Civan is a director of photography for movies, and a photographer. He’s also a tinkerer, and he got his hands on an old Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat, a hand cranked movie-camera lens from 1908. You see it above, wedded to his Canon 5D MkII. But where did it come from?

Civan got a call from his friend, known mysteriously only as “a Russian lens technician”:

He found in a box of random parts, hidden inside anther lens this gem. A circa 1908 (possibly earlier) 35mm lens. Still functioning, mostly brass, and not nearly as much dust or fungus as one would think after sitting in a box for over a hundred years. This lens is a piece of motion picture history, and at this point rare beyond words. So I say to him, “Wow… what do you have in mind?” he smiles, and says, (in the thickest Russian accent you can imagine) “I can make this fit EF you know…”

The results are astonishing. This century-old hunk of glass and brass makes a great picture. There’s vignetting at the edges, a softness and a lack of biting contrast. There’s also a color-shift in the non-black-and-white images. In short, the lens adds all the tweaks you might do in post-processing to Holga-fy your pictures. Civan is planning on shooting some footage with the lens, too, which is its purpose after all, and promises to share the results on the Cinema 5D forums, where he posted his photographs.

But aside from the great pictures, and the wonderful story of the mysterious Russian, we can learn something from this tale. Camera-tech comes and goes, but photography is really just about light. That’s why you should buy the best lenses you can afford. They will probably last longer than you.

102 year old lens on a 5DmkII [Cinema 5D forums]

One of the pleasures of writing in pencil is the friction of two solid materials in contact. One of the delights of writing in pen is that you can write continuously without having to stop to sharpen your stylus. Writing in metal, while expensive, provides some of the benefits of both while exhibiting its own unique beauty.

These two (that’s right, two) different metal pen manufacturers come to us by way of champ design blog Dornob. Both models work on the same principle: A tiny amount of metal alloy transfers from the pen to the page. Unlike pencil, it can’t be smudged with your hand, and unlike ink, it doesn’t need to dry. The amount of alloy for each stroke is so tiny that the pens are expected to last a lifetime without needing to be refilled or replaced. You can sharpen the tips for a finer point with a little sandpaper.

Each company takes a slightly different approach. The Inkless Metal Pen by Vat19 ($27.95) goes with a full stainless-steel barrel. Their marketing department, as you can see from the video above, also has a sharp, playful, dudely sense of humor. (The word “awesome” gets thrown around a lot, and there’s a Scrooge McDuck reference.)

Grand Illusions goes a little more highbrow with their Metal Pens (£13.99/$21.54). They have two short versions (including one that can be worn as a keychain) and a Beta Pen (£12.99/$20.00) which comes with a full-length extension in either black or silver metal or cherry-stained wood.

Grand Illusions also appends a short history on writing in silverpoint: “In the Medieval period, artists and scribes often used a metal stylus in order to draw on a specially prepared paper surface. Generally known as Metalpoint, or Silverpoint when the stylus was made of silver, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Rembrandt all used this technique.” My friends, this is music to my early-modern-loving ears. (Luckily, you don’t have to rub your paper with pumice to get these 21st-century pens to make an impression.

The alloy in the Vat19 pen (at least) has trace amounts of lead, so it’s not so good for kids. Both are targeted for designers, lefties (who often have to deal with smearing or smudging ink/graphite as they trace their hand across the page), and geeks who like even their handwriting to be all shiny. (Note: The writing isn’t actually very shiny, more kind of a matte titanium, but you can pretend).

Images via Vat19 and Grand Illusions. Story via Dornob.

See Also:

• Continuous Pencil Means No More Stubs
• Sharpie Reinvents Pen with Liquid Pencil
• The Hidden Link Between E-Readers and Sheep (It's Not What You …
• Drawdio: A Pencil That Lets You Draw Music
• Livescribe Updates its Digital Smart Pen With the Echo
• UDraw Pen and Tablet for Wii
• German Multi-Tool Pen Engineered to Outlast its Owner

Kindle DX Promotional Photo from Amazon.com

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.

Carl Pyrdum, who writes the blog Got Medieval while he finishes his Ph.D. in Literature at Yale, has the skinny on book sizes. You see, before Europeans learned how to make paper from the Arabs (who’d learned it from the Chinese), books were made from parchment, which was usually made from sheepskin. Sometimes, they’d use calfskin, too; if it was really primo stuff, it was called vellum. Like reading a whole book made out of veal.

We eventually mostly gave up on parchment, because it was expensive, and hard to work with. (There’s a reason medieval monks wrote manuscripts; preparing the parchment was penance.) But all of today’s book sizes (and by proxy, most of our gadget sizes) were established in the Middle Ages, and printers and paper makers carried them over. Booksellers and publishers still use these terms today:

• Fold a sheet of parchment once (two leaves/four pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (8pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (16pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (24 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.

All images via Got Medieval.

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