Next time you go to Titan—one of Saturn’s moons—remember this cool factoid: "The atmosphere is so thick and the gravity so low that humans could fly through it by flapping ‘wings’ attached to their arms" as pointed out in Robert Zubrin’s Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization. How awesome would that be?
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You need to see how incredibly awesome Disney’s new animated snow technology is. They created it for Frozen—their new (non-Pixar) 3D animation feature. This video presented at the latest Siggraph shows how it works:
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Thank you Japan for oshizushi, nigirizushi, manga, sukiyaki, anime, Akira Kurosawa, Majinga Z, katsu, shabu-shabu, tentacles, Gatchman, and now this space bus that belongs in sci-fi movie. Sure it’s gimmicky, but where else can you find a bus with a flight joystick to play games on each seat?
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Redditor Ma Petit Choufleur did something really cool: mark all the deaths in the Game of Thrones novels and then take this cool photo. Yeah, that’s lots of deaths. "All the marked deaths are present tense confirmed deaths. No flashbacks, and no implied deaths," he says.
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Azarkant—a 3D short by Andrey Klimov—doesn’t have much of a plot, but it’s delicious computer generated eye candy for lovers of spaceships, robots, dead cosmonauts and Haloesque things in general.
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Late-night TV commercial stalwarts Neat may seem a little chintzy at first blush, but rest assured that their products – essentially very simple document scanners – are surprisingly good. Their latest version, the $499 NeatConnect, is a completely wireless scanning solution that lets you scan documents to services like Dropbox, Evernote, Box, Skydrive, and Google Drive. You can also scan documents into Neat’s own cloud solution, NeatCloud.
Neat scanners are good for a few things. First, they’re great for moving from a paper filing system to an online storage solution. To use the scanner you simply put documents, receipts, or business cards into the right slots (they’re marked on the front) and press scan. In this new iteration you can select where you want to send the documents by tapping on a small business-card sized touchscreen. It’s here that you set up your various accounts as well, including email accounts, Evernote, and Dropbox.
Users of Neat will remember the love/hate relationship with the Neat desktop app. This app held documents in a big bundle, ensuring that your anger knew no bounds when all of your business cards got mashed in with your tax documents. To be fair the optical character recognition did make it easy for you to search through documents with a few keystrokes but it definitely felt less than user-friendly.
The first thing you’ll notice about the NeatConnect is that it only needs a single power cable. You don’t have to connect the device to a computer but it does have a USB port and an SD card slot to use it as a TWAIN/Image Capturedevice or to store data right to an SD card. All of the setup is done on the screen by way of a surprisingly usable onscreen keyboard. It connects to your Wi-Fi network automatically (I did notice a few issues latching on to a WPA connection but those were intermittent). All of the settings – color/black and white, dual-sided scanning, and DPI, are selectable from the screen.
The NeatConnect is clearly expensive because of the hardware built in. The small screen is actually a tiny mobile computer that handles scanning and transmission wirelessly. The UI is as simple as can be – big buttons set the destination and the various settings – and everything can be managed from the device itself, thereby allowing you to put the Neat anywhere. Scanning is very quick and uploading on a good Wi-Fi connection takes a few seconds.
How well does it read documents? I’d give its OCR abilities about a B+. As evidenced from the above business card most of the important stuff is there. Names and phone numbers tend to pop up without problems but unique fonts will mess things up. Luckily the images are stored alongside the text so you can edit them as necessary. As long as your receipts are placed in a separate folder the app will collate them, add up the expenses (when it can read them) and include receipt images. I also use the app to store receipts and simply drag them onto the desktop or our expense manager when I need them. It’s a great solution to a surprisingly annoying problem.
Where Neat excels is at creating expense reports. To build one you simply move your receipts to a folder, name it, and run the report. The result is usually an accurate representation of the receipts inside complete with a total as well as an easy-to-read collation of your receipts. You can also just pull receipts out of the cloud and upload them to your device.
NeatCloud also bears a bit of attention. This solution allows you to store almost anything on Neat’s servers and you can even email items to the cloud and search other services like Evernote when you search in the cloud app. You get three months of NeatCloud access when you buy the scanner and the annual plan costs $60 up front or $6 a month. Because you can upload stuff right to Evernote and Dropbox, however, NeatCloud is a “nice-to-have” rather than a “need-to-have.” It depends on your own preference.
Why is the NeatConnect important? It does one thing and it does that thing surprisingly well. It is a single purpose device, to be sure, but if you have a lot of paper there is no easier way to scan and store it without fuss. There aren’t a lot of devices that can make that claim. Neat has been doing one thing – scanning documents – for years, and the NeatConnect is a nearly perfect home or small office scanner. It doesn’t scan negatives and I wouldn’t run precious family heirlooms through it but it will definitely help reduce your paper clutter and streamline your expense process immensely.
I love Lego everything, but spaceships are by far my favorite subject. The great ones—like this one by sioka sculpting—are outstanding examples of sci-fi design and engineering—it’s the best way to materialize your future space exploration dreams.
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Voyager I is now officially flying into interstellar space. In the future, an alien spaceship may come across it. When they do, they will find two things: a golden disc and a record player. These are the contents of that disc and how to interpret it.
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If you are a fan of aviation or just beautiful design you should attend the Aluminum Overcast tour: this perfectly preserved B-17 Flying Fortress will touch down on airports all over the American North East so you can fly in it. Here are the dates and cities.
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I’ve had a love affair with Neat scanners for a while now and the company has just updated their roster with two new cloud offerings, the aptly-named NeatCloud and a mobile scanning system called NeatMobile.
For those not in the know, Neat is essentially a scanner for receipts, documents, and business cards. It’s surprisingly fast and efficient and has allowed me, personally, to reduce my paper load considerably. NeatCloud is a fairly simple concept. It’s basically a cloud backup service for Neat documents. The service is a lot like Evernote in that it allows you to save documents via email and grab information on the fly.
NeatMobile is a bit more interesting. Like the Neat scanner, NeatMobile lets you take photos of documents and upload them for instantaneous OCR. If you’re handling a lot of receipts, for example, you can grab shots and send them to the cloud as soon as you get them, rather than running a batch when you get back to the office. Both services offer improved search and filing thanks to server-side algorithms.
Pricing plans range from $5.99 to $24.99 a month. $6 gets you NeatCloud while the other two plans give you access to NeatMobile.
While it will never beat the sound of a few hundred business cards thunking through a Neat scanner, these improvements put Neat in a more interesting position vis a vis the cloud.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
