How nice it would be if we can go back in time to those good olden days, get nostalgic about those days. Now you may have to wait for a few more decades or centuries for time travel (in more than one direction) to be a reality. For now Google maps let you go back and check how your world looked at that time.
Courtesy to another blog post on Makezine, I am made aware of this cool tool from google. If it were to be only about this particular feature, this article would not have deserved any mention here on my blog. Make also gives us direction to a host of other links, which allow you to play with Google Maps. Now the ball is in your court.
For all those who got excited of time travel, you may need to hold your reins as we have a few restrictions. In a blog on Zdnet by Garett which was the source for the post on Make, we also get to see the exact nature of the maps available. Please visit this Google Earth in 4D for details.
I am sure the day is not far of when another Web2.0 company sells you prime real estate from the past !!
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I have a lot to write. However, my schedule prevents me from doing it the way I would have wanted to. I was pressed to find a solution? The solution, publish a summary of things that I felt was interesting and would interest you. Until I can write regularly or we have more people contributing this space, this might be the arrangement. Please continue reading for the first ever wiztec weekly roundup.
FTIR: This is about FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection), nothing new but something very interesting with promise. Read on what Han a researcher at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences has to say about it. The touch driven interface is so lovely. Catch Han in a video on TED in TEDTalks in Monterey. (source Slashdot.org)
Update: Check this video by Han at TED 2007.
Virtual Fabric: Another thing that interested be was this blog on Engadget. There is a research going on in University of Geneva that will incorporate touch into your online shopping. Now will that not be fantastic. Now will it be a success !! Whatever happened to online aroma sensing, that I last heard of when I was in college.
Penny Powered LED: Have you ever wondered what you would do with all your old coins that have piled up since your fad for coin collection passed. Of course you can always display it to no one in particular or give it to your child who does not need it. Now you need not worry about all this, Makezine brings you an interesting way to power a LED. Check this following link on one of the many ways to put those pennies to use.
Alien World: Since you are already on flickr, have a look at the following pics in the album Halloween 2006. Those of you who shudder at the thought of aliens please refrain from clicking this link.
Visual Search: Gadgetell brings to us a search engine "Quintura". One more search engine, yes it is, but it might hold your interest for a few more seconds than that one more search engine. What appeals to me is the following features it has to offer. "Context Management", "Dynamic Data Clustering", "Visual Symantic Map" all these coupled with a friendly clean interface. The search results themselves look very impressive, though I cannot comment much until I put it to extensive use.
First Speaker Phone: Many a times the past looks more beautiful than the present and the future. More so when it is presented in a elegant manner. Another one from Makezine is a post on "First Speaker Phone". The phone for sure is impressive. However, what hooked me is the blog itself. This blog named Modern Mechanix, has the history of many things, categorising them under various heads of Automation, Computers, Aviation, Cool and so on. Its is a must in the feeds of all blogdicts.
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Looks like the flavor of the season is photography. In my previous post I was talking about a company which produced an 8.6Gigapixel photo. Now I bring you the news of a few geeks come up with the photograph of fastest waves ever. The second from the other end of the spectrum, a camera which works with just a single pixel.
Slashdot as was the case with the earlier post is the source for this post on "Fastest Waves Ever Photographed". Now this many of you may ask, I take a photo in light, so I am taking photograph of light, so what big deal about this. Yes there is nothing wrong in your understanding. Only you should realise that you do not take the photo of light. The content of this post talks about photographing particles that travel very near the speed of light, 99.997% to quote the lay language paper describing the research. You read a more details at this post on Physics Buzz.
From what I gather with my little understanding of particle physics, the above research might provide a breakthrough in the area particle accelerators (table top accelerators might be a reality). Hopefully this will pave way for taking the research to the next level, on the lines of Planck's Quantum theory kicking a new era in the area of Quantum mechanics.
The second one may not spawn a new era. However, it might address some of the shortcomings of the current day technology. This is called Single Pixel Camera and falls in a new category of Compressive Imaging, the source for this is post is Physics Buzz. The concept is very simple, instead of an array of pixels capturing the picture use a single pixel to capture the whole picture. What I understand from the research of some physicists at Rice University in Houston is like this analogy. It is like philosophy. You actually get the whole gist in one go, later the more thought you spend on it, the better you understand it. We first capture the image, then you apply the algorithms to recover the signal.
The best part about the above technique, is you can improve the quality of an image in retrospect. That is if I decide to enhance the resolution of an image after an year, I can do it. This is one more technology that will host a range of products in the times to come.
PS: Being alien to the above mentioned technologies at this stage, I might have misunderstood or mis-communicated some things. Please educate me.
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"How many mega pixels?", its a typical question from anybody who sees a digital camera these days. I just came across a blog, it was talking about some one creating a 8.6Gigapixel photo. Big deal I have a 8.1 Mega pixel camera. Hold on! Hold on! he's talking of 8.6 Giga that's a thousand times bigger than what I currently have and for sure a thousand times bigger than that offered by any other commercial camera available.
I just could not hold my excitement to let you all out there know of this little large wonder. Please go to this site(http://haltadefinizione.deagostini.it/) and see for your self what they have created. The source for the above information is this post on slashdot. Its interesting to see the details of the making of the above picture. I am not sure, you will have the time to refer to another link, so I will copy the slashdot post over here. Please do visit this site, it has some amazing posts.
Gigapixel writes to point us to what is claimed to be the
largest digital photo on the Net, at 8.6 Gigapixel. It is a composite photo of the "Parete Gaudenziana," a fresco painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari, dated 1513. This fresco is in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the convent of Varallo Sesia, diocese of Novara and Province of Vercelli, Italy. The site uses Flash to let you explore the fresco over a zoom range of more than 180 to 1. The photo is made up of 1145 images, each 12.2 Mpixel and 16 bits per color channel. Read on for more technical specs of the photo.
Photo Shots: 1,145
Computed Data: 84 Gigabyte
Computed Pixels: 13,982,996,480
Color Depth: 16 bit per channel
Cropped Image Size: 8,604,431,000 (w. 96,679 x h. 89,000) pixel
Image Size before the final crop: 10,293,864,000 pixel (w. 103,560 x h. 99,400) pixel
Size on Hard Disk of the 3x16 bit final image: 51,625,586,000 byte
Size of Photographed Scene: 10.80 m x 9.94 m (35.43 ft x 32.61 ft), corresponding to 107.35 m2 (1155.37 ft2).
True Scale Resolution: 227 dpi
Pixel Density: 80 pixel/mm2
Linear Pixel Density: 9 pixel/mm
Hard Disk space dedicated to 16 bit computing: 1.8 Terabyte
Ram: 16 Gigabyte
Processors: 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) 885 Dual Core 64 bit
Shooting on January 30, 2006
Shooting time: 13 hours
Computing time: 3 months
Final Image generated on June 15, 2006
-------------------------(Slashdot post ends)-----------------------------
The size of the above photo is about a big one BHK(Bedroom-Hall-Kitchen) or infact a small two BHK in the city of Bangalore. Now surprising how much time and resources it took them to make it. May be I will ask these guys at
Gigapixel for a photo of mine at 8.6GigaPixel (I still can't imagine) .
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Now, technology needn't mean something that has to do with physical products. What I am going to present is about one such virtual entity that has taken us all by storm. I am talking about blog and the all the technologies that made it possible. If we are happy with that, that would have been the end of the story.
However, humans can never be satiated. And that's the reason we keep getting so many new things day in and day out. I here present a few things that I have come across today. These are Websites as Graphs, and few other apps for your blogs. I should thank Ashish Sinha for all the wonderful stuff he has on his blog.
What do you think is the picture on the right. If you don't get it in spite of the huge hint early on in the post, its not my fault. To end the suspense it is the web graph of my other blog . For more detailed explanation please go to the following post by Ashish. I know you are a bit impatient, you may do well to first check out the site which lets you do this. Please visit "Websites as Graphs".
All of us bloggers, sorry there, many of us. I am excluding all those who just blog, but do not care for any other blogs. Are always curious and feel good to know who has linked back to us.
Webzari is a cool way of checking on all those who link to you. If the link is a bit to work initially, that is because it is from Yahoo! Korea and their are high chances the language displayed is Korean (assuming it is really Korean and you have the right fonts installed), else their is a high chance of it being not more than gibberish. Either way it should not deter you from entering the blog site address in the box. (what did you think they have it for). Isn't it a cool.
Now there are two more apps that Ashish describes in this post of his. Kartoo is very promising to me but I have decided against discussing it here for some not so very obvious reasons. Since I have come to discuss some of the apps for blogs, let me go ahead and mention here a very useful tool for all those bloggers like me, who have little or not traffic at all to their blogs. This is a site called Blurb. This guy Ashish is going to kill me but I don't have a choice but to link to one more of his post. (You tell me, is there any point reinventing the wheel -:) ). Coming back, I sure some of you might love to get your blog published. I am thinking the omnibus I am going to publish. (Height's of optimism).
Please post a comment here on the cool apps that you know for blogs.
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Just came across this concept of Kancept. The New Scientist Technology Blog points is where I picked it up. Now this is what I call cool, I am not worried about the fesability of many of the things that they suggested.
Now going one step ahead, why would it not be good if we have a place where we can have outlandish conepts on display. What those outlandish things can be, a phone with wings, which will fly to you where ever you are after locating your presence over GPS. If that is not enough how about a personal screen which uses air as the display device by illuminating the air molecules with a light source.
If I spend some more time I possibly can go on. I am sure you folks out there can exceed my imaginations. Any way to summarise, take this "Kancept" forward.
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What a coincidence, or is it divine Providence. Just today I wrote"Laws of the Intellectual Land: Patents for Dummies". I google to figure out what to write in my first tech blog. I land up at Geoff's blog. His post on 19th (Thursday, October 19th, 2006) catches my attention. I wish him all the best and hope he finds some investors.
Now though there is nothing technical to it, I put it here for a reason. At the time of writing this, I am pretty tired from my days work and lot of travelling on the dusty roads. But, this bug of blogging has caught up with me, would it not be great that I have this device to which I can dictate (Voice recognition), it then connects to my computer wirelessly, logs on to my blog and publishes it. Now isn't that tech enough?
In my current physical state where I am half asleep, nothing can be better than such a device. On second thoughts a good application for chumby(read my post on another blog).
Geoff if you reading this hope you try to have the above invention up your sleeve.
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