In the Easter Egg

First post in so much time…

A white Easter has come and gone, with some friends from the UK over to visit us. It was nice and we had a good time, toruing around and eating lots of good stuff…

Also, they acted as surrogate Easter Bunnies, delivering to me a new pair of isolating ear-phones for my MP3 listening, plus the ultimate gadget, a GPS-enabled watch with cardio-pulse recorder…

Now I can finally track my errings, up and down belgium, within a few metres… Now particularly interesting I know, but it’ll come in handy when I want to geo-tag some pictures during trips and so on… Plus I can upload my tracks and treks to Google Earth, to look at them frm above and brag about with my friends

Ain’t that nice?

Happy Easter to everyone!!!

Let’s try to embed a podcast

The one from The Economist, for example:

It works!!!

Gufodotto’s Shared Items

Look up there…

Since I often comment about news I read on the i.net, and now I don’t get much time to wrte on them, I put up a new feed burner with a few of those I think it would be nice to share with you. It’s all thanks to google’s reader, which I restarted using since my blogroll was getting too long to keep a daily eye on all of them…

On the diary side of my life, I managed to start correcting the paper and hopefully will get it done by the end of the week. If I can get away from the internet, that is…

IR or Time-lapse? Questo e’ il problema.

Ho comprato una webcam x 8 euro, ieri. dovevo aprirla x levarne il filtro IR, ma alla fine non ce l’ho fatta. Me la son portata appresso a lavoro, ed ecco che mi vien in mente un’altra cosa. xke’ non usarla x fare un time-lapse movie della vista dalla finestra, con l’albero che lentamente riprende vita con l’arrivo della primavera?

edit: ci provo, con l’aiuto dell’unico sw free che mi consente di prender meno di un fps – HSSVSS.

x ora una semplice ripresa a 1 frame x minuto del panorama fuori dall’ufficio. domattina se il risultato e’ decente, vediamo se si puo’ fare qualcosa di piu’ lungo.

e’ un peccato che la qualita’ della webcam sia cosi’ bassa:

magari se questo va a buon fine prendo una webcam decente o trovo un modo di usare la vecchia digicam.

EDIT: in verita’ la cam va piu’ che bene, solo che era messa di default ad una risoluzione schifosa e la interpolava via sw, il che la rendeva estremamente lenta. Ora fila che e’ una meraviglia. Wow!!! solo 8 EUR x l’equivalente di una webcam hercules con ottica in vetro (che di euro ne vien 50).

Infrared photography

I recently heard on the naked science podcast that pointing a remote control to my camera phone I could see it flashing, because the sensitivity of the CCD inside extends to the near-IR.

It wrks! And it gave me a terrible case of cognitive dissonance to look at the remote through the screen, then with the naked eye, then with the screen again and so on. I just could not believe it, PhD in physical chemistry notwithstanding my mind was not prepared to accept it.

Anyway, the cool factor of the thing pushed me to show it to all my friends (real, as virtual) and to look on the i.net for more info about it, and possibly for how-to on how to build a proper IR-camera.

I discovered that few of them IR-capable cameras are sold, mostly for forensic use, possibly because you can see through clothes. In general, CCD are screened against IR not for this reason, but because the color yield is altered by the IR noise.

Anyway, there are plenty of descriptions on line and may be this evening I’ll buy a 9.99 EUR webcam to open it and remove the IR filter. I already have a ten diode IR lamp at home, so may be it’ll be enough to get nice pictures of my house in human-eye darkness.

More to follow!

Mac v PC

Cut-Off from the grid…

Some people are resorting to cell-phone jammers, illegal in the states (and elsewhere too), to avoid being pestered by loud people conversing close-by.

So say the NY Times.

I believe that the right of a person to enjoy silence is stronger than the right of another person to communicate when it is not strictly necessary…

What do you think?

DMC-FZ18 Reviews, finally!!!

I have finally found some reviews of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18. Here, and here. I am sold. I am ordering it as soon as I can from the US, together with a DMC-TZ3 for my lady. I still can’t understand why prices in the EU are so outrageous, with the TZ3 costing 400 Euros and well below 300 US$ on the other side of the pond. Even counting in taxes, it still makes no sense.

Stay tuned for my next pictures, probably starting with my trip to Rwanda at year’s end.

House prices from the satellites

Wow, this is very Web 2.0.

a website, http://www.housepricemaps.co.uk/, where you can check how much were the houses around yours sold for. Only if you’re in the UK, at the moment. But one day, all this power will be at our fingertips for the whole world.

Beautiful Pictures

Produced with the ‘processing’ language, but most of all a keen artistic sense: http://complexification.net/

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Thanks to Zimmer’s latest post for the discovery.