Hasta La Gadget!

Whether you think it’s a fantastic expression of creativity, or a horrible waste of money, for the next two years San Francisco’s Bay Bridge will be illuminated every night with 25,000 animated white LEDs. And that like all large-scale projects, there’s a fascinating story behind it. More »

The famous Bay Bridge over at San Francisco is one iconic sight (although not as famous as the Golden Gate, but still..), and it is going to get even more famous now when 25,000 LEDs light up along a section which measures a whopping 1.8 miles in length, every single night for the next two years. It was from Tuesday evening when the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was transformed into a massive, two-year-long public art project that is known as The Bay Lights.

The Bay Lights will be “up for display” until 2am the next day, as a dazzling array of 25,000 LEDs get the job done. Sporting an assortment of seemingly-animated patterns, these LEDs were strung vertically on the bridge’s twisted steel cables. To make matters more interesting, individual LEDs can be addressed over an Ethernet, copper wire, and fiber optic network, where they are filtered by 528 power and data supply boxes. Word has it that a constant stream of around 32Mbps of data flow across that network in order to provide full control for all 25,000 LEDs.

The entire piece of art cost around $8 million in private donations, with a total of approximately $22,000 in electricity bills throughout the two years being part of it, while the rest include installation, maintenance and removal, of course.

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Sprint has added new locations to its 4G LTE network, mainly in the San Francisco area, New York City and Washington, D.C as s part of their nationwide rollout of the 4G LTE network. The service seems to be great in some neighborhoods, while not so good in others.

The site deployment has started in San Francisco and coverage will become better as more sites are added.  The sites being added are an addition to 58 locations announced by Sprint in January.  More sites will be added later and announced once Sprint reaches good coverage .

According to Engadget’s testing team, the highest speed they could get was 16.7Mbps for download and 9.4Mbps for uploads.  The service seems to vary location wise and it seems reliable in Potrero Hill and South of Market areas. Sprint is  following a strategy where it’s launching the 4G LTE network in locations and then getting customer feedback.  Although Sprint has not been able to completely follow its projected network launch area, but they seem to be doing well and should have the network updated before the end of 2013.

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This is what benign paroxysmal positional vertigo feels like. Director Borja V. Conde had suffered from the debilitating effects of this disease in the days leading up the shoot for Barcelona-based Begun’s first music video, “San Francisco,” so he incorporated many of the visual distortions he felt into the project. More »

Looks like you’ll have to start keeping your AR drone on a leash, what with a new breed of wireless virus floating around the skies. The winning entry into this year’s San Francisco Drone Games, James “substack” Halliday’s Virus-Copter can wirelessly infect AR Drones around it with amok.js. This script wrests flight control from the pilots and redeploys them as autonomous infectious agents against other nearby drones. See if you can spot it in action in the highlights above. [Drone Games via Boing Boing] More »