Hasta La Gadget!

You probably already know exactly how each and every one of your friends would feel about seeing an autonomous robot photographer at your next shindig. Crave Asia managed to snag one of Sony’s new Party-shot docks for the office, and while the set up is described in an almost heartbreaking tone — “We’ve got the lights, we’ve got the disco ball, but unfortunately we’ve got no friends,” says the narrator — you do get a pretty good feel for how the gizmo would work in a more celebratory setting. The swivel seemed to move a lot slower than we expected it to, although we can’t be convinced without seeing it firsthand in a setting with more than two people. Now all that’s left to prepare for is how to convince your camera shy guests that there’ll be enough narcissistic attendees blocking the lens anyway. Video beyond the gates of the read link.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Sony’s Party-shot dock crashes faux festivities to prove its potential for automated blackmail originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Take this rumor with a fairly large grain of salt and please hold your “bag of hurt” comments until the end. Boy Genius claims he’s got it on word from a “pretty reliable source” that the next big iTunes revision will include better organization options for your iPhone / iPod touch apps, something vague concerning integration with Twitter, Facebook, and Last.fm, and… Blu-ray support. To be fair, the HD disc format wars are all but over at this point, and the most recent Final Cut Pro actually lets you burn video directly to a third-party BD drive, only to have to play the discs on another, non-Mac device. This is all pretty sketch at the moment, and we doubt the boys in Cupertino will be showing their hands until just after the eleventh hour — let’s not forget, also, that iTunes is also available for Windows which does have other third-party Blu-ray playback software. In possibly related whispers, AppleInsider has offered some none-too-descriptive hints at possible iMac refresh with some improvements catering to the “semi-professional audio / video crowd.” Between this and talk about a tablet, we can’t wait for the next Apple press conference, if only to subside all the rumors for a few months.

Update: Our resident HD expert Ben Drawbaugh has chimed in on the matter, hypothesizing that this might be referring to support for Managed Copy, a digitized (and DRM restricted) copy of the film that you would save onto your local hard drive. But in that scenario, it still doesn’t behoove Apple to add that to iTunes unless it was looking to put Blu-ray drives on its own machines, which makes this (still very faint) rumor all the more interesting.

Read – Apple iTunes 9 details, Blu-ray, app organization
Read – Apple’s next iMacs rumored with compelling new features

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Blu-ray support coming with iTunes 9? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What could possibly replace the ubiquitous barcode? The new Bokode might be able to. Bokode is a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor.

Bokodes open up a whole new range of applications in the areas of tagging, user interaction, machine vision and near field communication not possible with traditional barcodes. For example, it can be used in street mapping services such as Google Streetview: shops use Bokodes to provide meta information to the trucks as they drive down the street taking pictures.

Plug 'em into an iPod or your computer

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

A couple of days ago I blogged about possibly (hopefully) the world’s most expensive speaker, Transmission Audio’s Ultimate ($1,000,000 each), so I guess it makes sense to write up a dirt cheap speaker, Kikkerland’s Woodchuck iPod/computer speakers.

Thing is, Kikkerland’s Web site doesn’t list the Woodchuck, but I see it’s on Amazon going for $13.99 a pair. So I guess I can’t complain too much, but the sound is so weak, bassless, trebleless, and dynamically compressed the Woodchuck is without doubt the lamest sounding speaker I’ve ever heard. Kinda sounds like the speaker in my Panasonic answering machine.

…

Originally posted at The Audiophiliac

This article was written on September 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

It has been awhile since I have seen any changes to the Google Calendar but there are a few new features that got announced today. Now you can see things like the weather, moon phases, and even Google Doodles (those special logos Google puts on their homepage for certain days/events)!

In order to get any of those features you need to first configure them. For the Weather you will have to go to the Settings and select either the Fahrenheit or Celsius option. Make sure you enter in a location (located above Fahrenheit/Celsius option) otherwise nothing will be displayed.

To add the Moon Phases or the Google Doodles you need to:

Click the plus symbol (+) next to “Other Calendars” on the left side of your screen. Select the “Browse Calendars” tab and then look in the “Fun Calendars” area. When you find the calendar you want, just click the “Add Calendar” button.

The weather is definitely my favorite but I wish it would give you some more information when you hover over the icon with your mouse. I think it would be cool if a box, similar to the size of the Google Doodles, would popup and tell you other info such as the wind speed, humidity, chance of precipitation, etc… but this is still really convenient. Nice job Google!

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