How many times have you been at work browsing a popular torrent site when you find the latest (insert name of legally shared file) that you just had to get. But unfortunately downloading torrents at work is a no-no, and acronyms like VNC mean nothing to you. That’s why BitTorrent site Mininova has added a new personal bookmarks feature for logged-in users. Not only does it allow you to create a list of your favorite torrents wherever you happen to be, but it also provides them as an RSS feed. So if you’re using a BitTorrent client like uTorrent at home, you can actually subscribe to your personal Mininova bookmarks and every time you add a new torrent to the list it should automatically start downloading the next time uTorrent refreshes the feed.
Whatever your feelings about Windows Vista may be, you have to give credit to ‘Spec Works’ for putting together this truly impressive Vista iPhone theme. Of course since the iPhone doesn’t natively support themes or skins, you need to have a jailbroken phone with Summerboard and a few other apps to install it. (It even requires a few SSH steps.) At the moment the creator is working on an easy way to install the theme via Installer.app, but ModMyiFone.com has a pretty thorough tutorial on how to do it right now.
The theme includes over 90 Vista icons, custom boot and restore images, sliders, Vista login/logoff (lock/unlock) sound effects and has even recreated the sidebar application. You know it’s great that Apple has officially provided an SDK for the iPhone and is supporting third-party applications, but if you take a look at some of the truly impressive ‘unofficial’ software that’s available for the phone right now, they’ve got some stiff competition.
I swung by the Stanford Cool Product Expo yesterday to have a look at some of the… uh… cool products being showcased by companies from the Stanford University community (design groups, startups, etc.). I have a thing for nifty displaysystems, so BumpTop and their giant touchscreen caught my eye right off the bat. Take a look:
BumpTop is different from things like Surface for the simple reason that it’s software driven and requires no special hardware. You can use it with your mouse, or two mice to emulate a multitouch display. ‘Course, ideally you’d have a touchscreen to get the most out of the system, and by the time BumpTop launches later this year, hopefully we’ll have some affordable touchscreen computing platforms to choose from. I’m looking at you, Asus.
The prototype version (the one I saw appears to be a later beta version) showcases some neat little tricks that weren’t obvious in the above demo; you can see the prototype in action on YouTube after the jump. If you’re in any doubt how neat the little tricks actually are, you should know that the prototype demo video is ranked #10 in all time views in YouTube in the sci/tech category. So yeah, it’s cool. Read the rest of this entry »
This little web app does a fairly convincing job of turning one single 2D picture into a 3D scene that you can fly around with your keyboard. Since a single 2D picture doesn’t contain much in the way of depth information, researchers from Stanford University had to get creative to extract a depth map from an image:
“To convert the still images into 3-D visualizations, Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science, and Ashutosh Saxena, a doctoral student in computer science, developed a machine-learning algorithm that associates visual cues, such as color, texture, and size, with certain depth values based on what they have learned from studying two-dimensional photos paired with 3-D data. For example, says Ng, grass has a distinctive texture that makes it look very different close up than it does from far away. The algorithm learns that the progressive change in texture gives clues to the distance of a patch of grass.”
Sure, this is nowhere near as slick as Photosynth, but you can do it with any of your pictures without any additional information. It’s free; just register on the website and give it a try. You can upload any JPEG <5mb, and after some processing (it took about 5 minutes for me at 3am PST), you can fly around your image on the Make3D website. Since it's using purely visual cues, the algorithm is far from perfect, and it works best on landscapes. Best thing you can do is be patient and try a few different images... When it gets it right, it's very cool.
I usually try to leave the timewasters until later in the week when people have had a few days to get some actual work done, but this one’s just too fun to put off. Phun is basically a 2D physics playground program created by Umeå University student Emil Ernerfeld as their Computer Science thesis. While the goal of the software is to be educational and teach physics concepts like friction and restitution, it also encourages creativity and ends up being remarkably addictive. I could go on explaining why the software is worth checking out, but this YouTube video demonstrating what you can do with it is probably more convincing.
And the best part is that Phun is available as a free download as long as you don’t use it for commercial purposes. You can find the links to the Windows and Linux beta versions here, while a MacOS version is hopefully coming soon.
This interactive touch-based multiplayer game, called Firefly, is as far as I know the first example of a game designed specifically for Microsoft Surface. The premise is simple: use your fingers to corral colored fireflies into your jar, while squishing the flies on your opponent’s side. This is just the tip of the iceberg when if comes to the possibilities that Surface offers for gaming, but as a piece of platform-demoware, it kinda looks like fun.
Digital media is all over the place, in all kinds of different formats, and it’s often a huge pain in the ass to get it from one place to another, especially if the internet is involved. doubleTwist is an attempt to make all of your media play nice, especially with other people in social networking environments like Facebook. The idea is that the doubleTwist software will read all of your media, and make it available in one integrated, web-friendly place, doing all of the necessary reformatting and transcoding behind the scenes. You can then trade media back and forth with your friends just by dragging and dropping onto their online profiles.
As for DRM… doubleTwist was developed in part by the guy responsible for cracking DVD encoding as well as Apple’s FairPlay DRM. However, stripping DRM isn’t what this software is about. It will remove DRM from your iTunes music, sort of, but all it does it play the song in the background on mute while re-recording it to MP3, which you can do by yourself. And you have to have legally purchased and be authorized to play the iTunes music before it’ll do a thing. So, despite the root of doubleTwist, don’t expect it to perform any DRM miracles. Shame.
At this stage, doubleTwist supports relatively few (albeit the most common) file formats, and a limited number of devices. Also, the file sharing limits (when it comes to size and length) are quite restrictive. It’s a good idea and it’s completely free to download (it’s in beta at the moment), but if you’re serious about your media, you’ll probably want to keep messing with it the old fashioned way. For now, at least.
If this fantastic bit of software works as advertised, getting your stolen gadgets back from the miscreants who took them will become just a little bit easier. iHound Software is a free download that, once properly configured on your device, will automatically contact you as soon as it’s plugged into another computer via USB. You’ll get an email with the IP address of the computer it’s being used on, and it will even print out a dandy report which you can then bring to a police station. Hopefully you can then get your ISP to cooperate, and help locate the twit who thought it cool to swipe your iPod.
The software works on a variety of devices (list here), and is able to track up to three devices. The company plans on keeping this free, though they may release a Pro version in the future.
Even though the RoboDevelopment Conference was primarily about, well, robots, there was a lot of potential crossover technology that has huge applications for consumer electronics. One of the most impressive of these that I saw was the ViPR pattern recognition technology, under development by Evolution Robotics. ViPR uses a camera (like the one you probably have in your cellphone) to look for distinctive patterns in an image. For example, a piece of text would be a distinctive pattern of pixels that the software could then translate into a meaningful letter. But the technology goes way beyond that: whenever you see something, your brain is recognizing a distinctive pattern of light and saying “hey, that’s a tree!” or “hey, I’m in my living room!” Your brain can do this even if it’s seeing only a piece of an object, or seeing a place from a different perspective. ViPR is capable of making the same sort of inferences. It works with >80% accuracy at recognizing objects or places, even when it’s dark or when it has to deal with distortion. It can identify an object when up to 90% of the object isn’t visible. Basically, this lets electronics “see” in a meaningful manner, much in the same way that we do.
Applications for the ViPR system are everywhere. The military is using it to look for guys holding RPGs, since an RPG has a distinctive visual pattern that ViPR can identify, even if the RPG is being held at an angle and partially concealed at a distance in low light. Current commercial uses (in Europe, mostly) include ViPR acting as a tour guide on your cellphone: take a picture of a landmark, and your cellphone will recognize it and provide information. What I’d personally like to see is the integration of ViPR with Google Street View to provide a highly accurate urban pseudo-GPS system. All you would do would be to take a picture of where you were, the ViPR system would query Google’s Street View database and find a matching pattern, and you’d get your location back. Easy, right? Well, they’re working on it… They just need to get some major companies (cough Google cough) actively interested.
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By Evan Ackerman
