Technology posts

Zinio, a company focused in digital publishing tech, has just released Zinio Reader 4, an Adobe AIR application that enables access to thousands of magazines — interactive magazines too, and National Geographic celebrates with a freebie. Zinio Reader 4 allows users to instantly access over 2,000 magazines by utilizing Adobe’s AIR framework. It is essentially a cloud-based digital library that will be synced to your devices. Users who install this application can pay once for a digital copy of a magazine, and it will instantly be available to the user for reading in its entirety on any platform…

As a photographer, I understand how difficult it is sometimes to make people not only smile, but have a naturally looking smile. Stefan Stubble and Adnreas Schmelas of the University of the Arts in Berlin, have came up with a camera that no matter what, will take your photo with an artificial smile. The camera uses an array of smiling photos that were taken before to basically replace photoshop and instantly give you that artificial but award winning smile. Not sure if I would actually pick up this product because as a photographer sometimes you want to convey emotion in your photo with somebody…

So I decide to cook something in my microwave that takes 4:52 to cook and look, Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday comes up on the screen. Life is good. The CastOver developed by researchers at Keio University in Japan features a 10.4 inch screen instead of a window on your microwave. It runs Adobe Air and will grab videos from your internet and with the built in intelligence, pulls videos close to or exactly the length of the time you put on the microwave. Slowly our kitchen appliances are turning into quite the smart technology. I can see the day where we put food in our microwave in the morning, and with our…

Customers of AT&T will soon be able to buy into an option that makes the phone work the way it’s supposed to, for the one-time low price of $150. It’s called the Microcell–just set up this little baby wherever you happen to be–it supports up to 4 phones at a time and it taps into an existing DSL or Cable connection, becoming its own AT&T mini-tower. (DSL or cable connection not included, AT&T subscription also not included). This has been in limited rollout for a few months in Raleigh, NC and one or two other cities, but it’s being made available nationally now, and you can almost hear the…

For some time now there has been talk of Google just going out and building experimental fiber optic networks in the US to test out the infrastructure, and the response has been extraordinary. Including cities renaming themselves to Google to draw the company’s attention. Other mayors have swam with sharks and dove into frozen lakes. Personally, I think we could use more guys like these in the federal government. Google’s official blog announced last night that the deadline for applying to get the free ultra-fast internet is now over. As of that time, last night at 5:26 PM, they had received nearly…

Pictured above, an unmanned drone taken from the military blog Armybase.us. Washington’s unmanned drone airplanes will not just be Washington’s anymore. Robert Gates, the U.S. Defense Secretary announced plans to start selling and giving them to other countries, including Pakistan. In the past they had been sold only to Italy and Great Britain. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Canada, and Spain have also shown interest, as well as a whole host of other countries to whom nobody would ever sell them. Never mind The Missile Control Regime pact from 1987, which makes the sale of autonomous fliers…

Yesterday was a day for robots; today is a day for things that don’t need to exist. A team of students a the University of Tromsø, Norway, have gone to the trouble of creating the means to play Quake, with their hands, on a wall. This is by no means not awesome, but one has to wonder why. One really, really has to wonder why. Alright, so really it’s just a proof of concept – there are plenty of reasons for displays this large to exise, and the video below proves that gigapixel photo navigation on a wall like this all but promises to make ‘travel’ a thing of the past.

 Even now, the word is fading from…

I really, really hope I never get audited like this. Surely you know of EnergyStar – if you’re a PC user, you probably see their logo every time you boot up your machine. They’re the guys in charge of setting up guidelines to regulate the power consumption and efficiency of products. Recently, a bunch of Congressional auditors went to work to test the thoroughness of the EnergyStar program. And they were hella sneaky about it. …If you can call this sneaky: they submitted a bunch of very-clearly-fake products for approval, including an ‘air purifier’ that consisted of a feather duster…

Flexible displays might be on the way and widely used sooner than we think. 

Recently, HP unveiled a new idea in a demo of its flexible display technology. CTO Phil McKinney rolled up one of HP’s flexible displays…and it was immediately destroyed. “You’re probably good for about half a dozen times before the material will just fail,” explained McKinney. Uh, Phil? That doesn’t sound like progress. But that’s not the point. The displays aren’t meant to be rolled up – at least, not after the manufacturing process. What HP’s real goal is, is to produce a new, cost-effective…

For all the talk of a reading revolution and Amazon, Sony and now Apple are creating, all of this new technology doesn’t actually change reading very much. There’s some text on a blank background and – well, that’s about it. But a new concept developed by Swedish firm Tobii Technology promises to change all that by turning the tables on the reader – in this case, the book reads you. By using a combination of web programming languages and a tracking camera, what Tobii Technology call Text 2.0 actually tracks your eye movements to see what you are reading. Focus on a word for a while with a screwed-up face…