Xeeban’s Musings

Today a nifty device arrived, the Oregon Scientific ATC3K.  It is a small battery powered video camera that stores video on SD cards.  It takes full color digital video at 640 x 480 VGA at 30 frames a second.  It is also waterproof up to about 3 meters, so it is good for all sorts of outdoor activities.

My friends and I have been taking some low quality video with my Sony Cyber Shot during our weekly rides, but the quality of the video is very poor even for uploading to YouTube.  This new camera at VGA resolution should be much nicer.  Not as nice as a real video camera, but not bad.  Plus it’s small enough to mount to a bike helmet and is relatively cheap so destroying it in a crash would not be too much of a loss.  The camera will hold up to a 4GB SD card and uses about 2 gigabytes per hour, so this should enable me to capture 2 hours of continuous footage before having to swap out the SD card.

It comes with several attachment accessories so you can mount the camera to a bicycle or to a helmet.  I’ll probably be helmet mounting the camera to get a little more stability.

So I jumped on the bandwagon and got an iPhone… I must say, it is a sexy and sweet device.  My poor iPod Touch is now neglected and will soon be given away to find a new home.  This device is the killer combination of phone, MP3 player, video player and PDA.  Not to mention the connectivity so you have the web and email all in the palm of your hand.  Amazing.

The new applications that are available are very nice too.  Some are real gems, like Shazam that allows you to identify any song that you might hear playing.  Midomi is a similar app that even identifies songs that you hum or sing.  Totally amazing!

I was interviewed recently by my good friend, Craig Oda. He has always been passionate about online community and community building. He gave me an opportunity to give some of my opinions and to recall some of the early days when I was just getting started with online communities.

You can read the entire interview here.

Pictures like this are so sweet. It hints at how totally fricken huge this universe is:

Click on it for the full version.

More amazing Hubble shots can be seen here: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/the_universe_collection/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

… okay, I love this meme.

A friend told me today that the Fonts on a Mac were blurry compared to Windows. I had no idea why this would be the case until I found this nifty article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

Ever stay awake at night trying to visualize the 4th dimension? Yeah, me too. It’s a bitch. Here is a site that not only helps… it helps you to visualize the 10th dimension! Halp, brane hurts!

http://www.tenthdimension.com/

The BBC is running
a very interesting article about a device created by Kimiko Ryokai, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab.

The brush can scan any external image or surface and use that to “paint” that texture onto a digital painting.

Ms Ryokai wanted to know what would happen if you could literally suck the ink from the environment.

The concept of the space elevator is one step closer to reality. The LiftPort Group, a company planning on building a space elevator, received FAA clearance (a waiver) to use airspace to start testing models of the elevator using a robotic device to climb a free hanging ribbon attached to a balloon initially as much as a mile high.

http://www.techzonez.com/comments.php?shownews=14880

My last entry about the Babble device led me on a thread of links that wound up at a Wired article about the company that produces it.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67951,00.html?tw=wn_story_top5