Hasta La Gadget!

Propose to your girlfriend with technology and you’re bound to get blogged.

There’s
no shame in that, though. If the idea of Cupid were conceived in modern times,
he’d probably be sending messages through an RSS reader rather than shooting
arrows with a bow, right?

OK, probably not. But even so, geeks have come a long way since they were mocked and despised a couple decades ago. Now that we know nerdiness can lead to fame, power and riches, it’s possible to be a geek and get the girl. To prove the point,
we’ve rounded up a list of the geekiest, tech-inspired marriage
proposals that were sweet enough to work. They might even get a cold, dead heart like
mine thumping a little.

Proposal 2.0

Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google employee, deserves a lot of credit for this one. What better way to show the world your love than displaying it on Google Maps? Weiss-Malik got his buddies on the Street View team
to give him a heads-up on the next time the Street View car was coming
out to take pictures. And when that day came, he was well-prepared,
holding a banner that read "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!" (see above) After
that, all he had to was lure Leslie into loading Google Maps and zooming in on
the precise coordinates of his romantic stunt.

Now, that’s clever.

iPropose with iPhone

We’ve
heard two stories of tech-savvy Casanovas using their iPhones to
propose to their girlfriends. Just this week Bryan Haggerty coded a
custom iPhone application to send his girlfriend Jeannie Chou on a
scavenger hunt throughout San Francisco. The web app included a map
containing location points, each one accompanied with a video providing
clues on where to go next. In the end, the map points connected to form
a <3, and the final destination was the top of a hill in Dolores
Park, where Haggerty busted out the big question. Tell us that isn’t
cute.

And then there’s Dan Deeble, who concocted a similar idea in
October 2008. He found an iPhone app called Scribular, which works with the
handset’s GPS and allows users to tag locations with notes. Deeble put
on his geeky-romantic thinking hat, and he came up with a creative way
to use Scribular. He drove around Sacramento, leaving notes for his
partner Crystal Gardner at various locations. He loaded Scribular on
her iPhone, too, and had her friends calling her throughout the day,
telling her to check the app. Finally the two met at a restaurant,
where Gardner checked Scribular one more time to see another note:
"Almost one year ago, I found you — and I found love…. I ask if you
will grant me the greatest privilege of my life and marry me. Forever
yours, Dan."

Awwww.

Playing games with her heart

YouTube user TheRealPfhreak’s proposal method was arduous, not to mention retro nerdy. He hacked a ROM  of the old Super Nintendo role-playing game Chrono Trigger while
his girlfriend was playing through it. Before tweaking some of the
game’s dialogue to ask her to marry him, he modded the game to recreate
some of their favorite memories such as stargazing and dancing. And he
even added in her favorite song lyrics from The Princess Bride. Whoever said nerdy computer scientists couldn’t be romantic?

Virtual diamonds

Game geek Bernie hacked his way
into his lady’s heart, too. He modded his girlfriend Tammy’s favorite
game, Bejeweled, to work on a Nintendo DS. Only, it was slightly
different: At some point the jewel pieces formed the shape of a diamond
ring, which he used to pop out the question. Looks like it took a lot
of time, but it’s safer than buying an actual ring, right? Just kidding
— he got her one of those, too.

Here’s the way to get your ad shown free — make it awesome. Here we see Tech Restore hawking its Modbook upgrade program, a $1150 service which adds a touch screen to your MacBook while simultaneously rendering it useless by removing the keyboard.

The twist is that the video shows the whole process in stop motion video. Initially, I was entranced. And then I started to see how similar this is to the rather easy keyboard replacement on a MacBook, or the hard drive swap-out in an iBook.

We’re not sure just how much the 256-level, pressure sensitive touch screen costs, but we doubt its more than a couple hundred dollars. And given that the mod is available as a swift overnight service, that $1150 is starting to look pretty steep. In fact, you could buy a second MacBook for that, complete with a keyboard.

Product page [Tech Restore]

See Also:

• Review: Modbook Tablet Is a Designer’s BFF
• Axiotron’s ModBook, Here At Last
• Macworld 2009: Wozniak Demos MacBook Mod

Meet Mrs. Muyonjo, the Ugandan MacGyver. Mrs. Muyonjo used to ride her bike 20 miles to the next town over in order to charge her cellphone, but after the dodgy wheeler-dealers in the charging shop swapped out her fresh battery for an old one that could barely hold a charge, she did what any self respecting maker would do — she built her own charging station.

It’s simple — five D-Cell batteries are connected in series, and the business end of the charger has been cut off, the wires bared and then joined to the + and – terminals. Mrs. Muyonjo says "it works perfectly".

The only problem we see is that you have to keep buying D-Cells, which is a rather expensive way of doing things. We suppose that, compared to riding 20 miles and then paying some cowboy to charge your phone, this may actually be a cheaper option. Still, a great hack.

Housewife Designs Mobile Phone Charger [Wougnet via Afrigadget]

If camera hacks had heels, then this story would come hot on those of yesterday’s Canon DSLR video recording hack. Actually inspired by that story, ace programmer Olivier Giroux decided to try it out with his Nikon D700.

Olivier grabbed the software development kit from Nikon’s site and set to coding. A few scant hours later he had an application which would capture video using Nikon’s low-light wonder. Like the Canon hack, Olivier’s method just captures the live view stream from the camera’s sensor — you have to hook the cam up to a computer via USB and from there the software records the information sent over the wire. Olivier:

Good news: it is a viable video source. It’s fast enough, and the quality is sufficient.

Bad news: it’s a bit too low-quality to be really exciting. It’s roughly 30% below 480p resolution.  The most unfortunate thing is they create the Live-View image by decimating the sensor data rather than downsampling it – as a result it aliases, moirés and looks terrible in low light.

That’s it for the bad news though.  The feed travels over the wire at 100fps (I measured), within which maybe 30fps’ worth are unique frames.  Each frame is basically a NEF embedded thumbnail, each one is a fully-formed high quality JPEG file.  The result has the potential to look as good (or bad) as a DVD, roughly.

This isn’t going to be a replacement for a real video camera, but if Olivier gets around to releasing the software, it should certainly be fun to play around with.

D700 Shoots Video [Mutable Conclusions via Nikon Rumors]

See Also:

• Hack Adds Hi-Def Video to All Canon DSLRs
• Hands-On With the Nikon D700
• HD Video Shot With Canon 5D MKII Looks Stellar
• Nikon D90: First SLR With Hi-Def Movie Mode

Hacker Luke Hutchison has successfully brought multi-touch to the T-Mobile G1 Googlephone. The video shows that it’s a rather clunky implementation right now, but as Luke points out, this is v.1.0:

 

This is a proof of concept, people — of course it will be optimized over time — the fact it’s not done yet doesn’t mean it can’t be or won’t be. Apple’s engineers were paid mega moola to implement their bling, I was not.

How does it work? Luke has patched the Linux kernel of the Android OS to tweak the (Synaptics) touchpad driver. As this is a software only modification, we assume that the abilities to sense multiple fingers are built in to the hardware already.

You’ll also need modified applications to take advantage of the new multitouch capabilities. Luke has provided a browser, a maps application, a photo viewer plus the vector-style demo app you see in the video.

Best of all, you don’t need to do any hacking yourself. There’s a downloadable, pre-patched version of the firmware available, ready to be installed. Proceed with caution — you could kill your G-1, although you’ll probably be fine. Right up until you get sick of the clunky zooming and throw the phone out the window at least.

Get Multi-Touch Zooming Support on your T-Mobile G1 TODAY [Luke Hutchison via Boy Genius]