Hasta La Gadget!

Panasonic has developed a unique technology that doubles the brightness of color photography, by using micro color splitters instead of conventional color filters in the image sensor.
These two photos were taken using CCDs with the same sensitivity. The one on the right was taken with the color filter system used in nearly all digital cameras. The one on the left was taken with Panasonic’s new micro color-splitting system.
Until now, image sensors have produced color pictures by using …

Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.

I have many interests: mountain biking, martial arts, video games, running, reading, cooking and horror movies. For each one of these, there is an internet rabbit hole so deep, so full of information and compatriots that it’s a miracle I ever actually follow through on them. Ask yourself this: Do you do what you say you do online?

The internet is great at allowing people to nerd out on their particular interests. While it serves up news and media like a champ, many of us spend our time deep-diving into whatever rabbit hole interests us. When we nerd out about technology here at Engadget, for instance, we’re getting a double dose: reading about technology in a tech environment. It’s a beautiful thing; it’s addictive and we lose sight of reality while we’re going deep. We could be in a bar, at home, at the office — wherever it is, we lose sense of our environment.

Filed under: Misc

Comments

The team at Breakfast NY never leaves us hungry when it merges the digital and physical worlds — and this time it’s created something that hits it out of the park for the start of this year’s US baseball season. Here at the Major League Baseball Fan Cave in downtown NYC, the team has just unveiled its space program-inspired Mission Control Center. As creative director and co-founder Andrew Zolty explained, “the idea is try and pull in pretty much everything you can possibly imagine that’s going on during the 2013 MLB season, and do it in a way that feels reminiscent of NASA’s control room: Mission Control.”

The 20-foot-long installation houses two sets of 15 small screens (roughly eight inches each), broken up in the middle (one side for the American League teams and the other for the National League teams) by a large LCD and a consumer-grade webcam. Below the screens you’ll notice a plethora of switches with LEDs, info lights and a trio of odometers. Both sides feature three rows of five screens, each pertaining to one of the 30 MLB teams and their stadiums. At the flick of a switch, the screens display real-time connected data like recent Foursquare check-ins, weather, Facebook likes and Instagrams, along with team stats and facts and more for each individual stadium at once.

Those smaller screens, by the way, are actually physically modded Android-tablets — unfortunately, Breakfast wasn’t at liberty to tell us exactly which kind they are. Essentially, they are all running custom apps, with support from MLB.TV to pull real-time, live streams from each stadium in the league. In total, we’re told that 13 APIs and seven languages of software work in conjunction to makeup the Control Center. The setup will also allow players visiting the Cave to have live chats with with roughly 10 fans at a time who participate from MLB’s site (sort of like Google+) — of course, the chats allow an essentially unlimited number of spectators. Curious for more of the nitty gritty? Join us past the break.

Filed under: Misc, Alt

Comments

Source: Breakfast NY

Do you listen to Spotify? Do you have a Raspberry Pi? Well, Pi MusicBox might just be the thing for you. It’s a bootable Debian image for RaspBerry Pi that implements Modipy, a music server which enables playback from local storage, Spotify streaming and remote-control from any MPD (Music Player Daemon) client or web browser (see screenshots above). There are MPD apps for most platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows and Mac OS. Pi MusicBox also supports WiFi, USB audio and AirTunes streaming right out of the, err, box. So, if your Raspberry Pi is jonesing to play some tunes, go ahead and hit those links below.

Filed under: Misc

Comments

Via: adafruit industries blog

Source: Pi MusicBox

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The power of crowdfunding is that, by aggregating relatively modest donations from what is often hundreds or even thousands of backers, consumers can help artists and inventors turn ideas or concepts into reality. The Pebble smartwatch that set the record for funds raised on Kickstarter was noteworthy for breaking the $10 million barrier. That money, though, came from nearly 69,000 backers.

Today, the two biggest crowdfunding destinations, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, offer different approaches to what gets presented on their sites. Indiegogo is a completely open site; there is virtually no screening of projects. Kickstarter, on the other hand, is a curated site. Projects must meet a range of criteria. As co-founder Yancey Strickler recently explained at Engadget Expand, the roots of Kickstarter were in the funding of creative and social pursuits. Kickstarter has been a haven for artists such as photographers looking to create a photo book or musicians seeking to cut a first album or create a music video.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

Comments