Photron’s APX-RS video camera can capture 250,000 frames per second at top speed, and it can get megapixel+ resolution at 3,000 frames per second. It’s one of a dozen or so cameras in Photron‘s lineup that can shoot very, very fast video. How fast is a thousand frames a second? How fast is several thousand […] » about 300 words
I needed to pick some colors for a new website recently. I’m color blind, so that complicates things. Thing is, color relationships can be defined mathematically and “good” or “bad” color combos can be selected by a formula, so it possible to pick colors that go together without actually being able to see them. I’ve […] » about 300 words
An entry at the WordPress support forums{#13505} gave me the list I needed. How do they work?
“You can use [these] in a conditional to display certain stuff only on [certain] page[s], or to omit certain stuff on [those] page[s].”
Here’s the list:
So there you go.
My friend Will was in meetings all day Friday, and there are few better times to have SMS messaging than in meetings. Thing is, I didn’t want to type on my phone’s numeric keypad when I had my computer in front of me, so I went looking for the details of this old hint that […] » about 200 words
Regular expressions are a pain. Jan Goyvaerts’ RegEx Reference helps.
In a related tip, the following will eliminate any non-numeric components in a string: ereg_replace(“[^0-9]”, “”, $string) . I guess I’ll have to admit that I’d not used the exclusion operator before (the carrot immediately following a square bracket). Now I know.
Who doesn’t love tagging? No, tagging as in annotating, not graffiti. Anyway, Rixome is the latest among a bunch of plans/projects to enable tagging of geographic spaces/real-life environments. The good people at We Make Money Not Art had this in their post: rixome is a network and a tool that turns mobile screens into windows […] » about 300 words
Guido Ooms has some pretty neat ideas. Engadget got high on his Anti Gravity Machine (you must watch the video), but there’s a lot more to see. I wish I could link to examples of his furniture, bottle holders, personal transportation devices, or dohickies, but his Flash-based site won’t let me. His Glassbulbs are pictured […] » about 100 words
Zach likes tall buildings. Perhaps it relates to his superhero obsession (leap giant buildings in a single bound and all), but it’s undeniable that he likes them. Here, he gushes about the details of what makes a tall building and how it is measured. Judging can be to the top of the highest occupied floor, […] » about 200 words
Everybody else may know this, but MacOS X includes the command-line utility to make Windows-compatible ZIP files. It works a lot like tar, but without needing any switches.
> zip {target file} {source files}
Engadget yesterday had a story about the Mobile Plate Hunter 900, a device that mounts on police cars and scans 500 to 800 license plates an hour. More details are in the Wired News story, where LA County police commander Sid Heal notes that the system is hands-off: “It doesn’t require the [officer] to do […] » about 200 words
I’ll be switching hosting providers this week. At some point I’ll have to turn off the comments here so that I can synchronize the database and prevent loss of comments as the DNS changes propagate.
**Update:
**
The switch seems to have gone well and the DNS changes have propagated to the networks I’m using. Comments are on again. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
UPDATE: bstat has been updated. I’ve finally added a clean admin interface to my bstat WordPress stats tracking plugin and cleaned up the code for release as a public beta. Quick Start Installation Download and unzip bstat.zip Place bstat.php in you wp-content/plugins directory Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory Log in to your WordPress admin […] » about 900 words
Last week I got excited about the as-yet unreleased geolocation API for BBC Backstage. Now Larry D. Larsen of the Poynter Institute is excited too. In a post titled The Future of News (… Hint: GPS) he talks about putting news in geographic context with geolocation tags. Eventually, clicking an article in a news/Google Map […] » about 200 words
Geolocation by GPS my be the most straightforward approach, but we mustn’t forget the other ways to get lat/lon coordinates. All current cell phones support aGPS positioning to comply with federal E-911 mandates, but not all phones make it easy for the user to get that information out of them. Still, some do and GPS-enabled […] » about 400 words
I imported the content of my old referrer tracking database as hits in my new bstat stats datatabase so I could have more data to work with. I mixed this with a fairly simple graphing routine and now we can see the “pulse” of the whole site and each story. Take a look at the […] » about 300 words
I’ve been hard at work on my bstat stats tracking plugin for WordPress and you can see the results in the sidebar and in the story views here. The work has been made especially easy because of the great documentation, including writing a plugin, plugin API, and related pages at the WordPress codex.
I’m testing the plugin with a limited group now (thank you Sandee and Cliff). But with a few more tweaks and a little more time to prove itself, I think it will be ready for an open beta.
At least that’s the only thing a person can conclude from the stories at Copyfight earlier this week. This post reports on two stories where the photo services concluded that the photos to be printed were too good to have come from an average customer. Upon trying to order prints of her child, one Ofoto user found the following:
Your order has been cancelled because it appears your order contains one of the following… 1. Professional images.
And Wal Mart told another mother:
We can’t release the pictures to you without a copyright release form signed by the photographer.
At least Ofoto gave the mother the opportunity to sign an affidavit warranting that she was the photographer or had permission from the copyright owner. Wal Mart wouldn’t even accept that.
So, like I noted in the headline: Professionals apparently don’t use Ofoto or Wal Mart. I wonder if they promote that as a selling point…
Seltzer’s post notes the new copyright warning that Canon is putting in their camera manuals and the trouble{#157&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0} that the developers of the open-source Gallery image management software project found themselves in recently.
The APIs aren’t yet out, but the BBC has already won me over with their Backstage BBC concept. Of course, I’m a fan of anything with an API, but the real deal here is that it appears they’re planning on releasing a “query by geo-location data” API — and I’m all a gaga about about […] » about 100 words
I don’t know why IE has never displayed my transparent PNGs correctly, but I know now that I’m not the only one with this complaint. Bob Osola (name?) shares my frustration, and better, he sat down and coded a solution, shared the code, and posted a wonderfully informative guide to the problem.
Not sure if your browser can display transparent PNGs properly? Follow that link for examples.
I’m not sure what to think about Steve J’s WWDC announcement (video stream) of Apple’s switch to x86 processors. Coverage at MacNN, Mac Rumors, Ars Technica, etc. I’m not sure, but it would be easier to take if I wasn’t the only one who saw conspiracy in it. Does this relate to Intel’s recent shoehorning of DRM onto the CPU?
It wasn’t long ago that I was praising Apple for making devices that served the remix world that exists in the void between fair use and copyright infringement, but moves since then have concerned me. I live with iTunes DRM, but can I tolerate DRM throughout the OS all the way down to the hardware? Can I tolerate something that eliminates the (entirely legal) me2me sharing that I expect (and is revered in the analog world)?
Anyway, there’s some mixed news about PPC on X86 emulation that will be part of the next OS release, and I expect the jabbering about the effect of this announcement will last all summer. Here’s some now from MacNN, and PowerPage{#14641}. And here’s something I can laugh at.
We’ve all seen the ads they digitally insert on the field during football games and we’ve heard talk about inserting new product placements as old TV shows play in syndication. Ernie Miller has been thinking about this recently. Last week he noted that folks are creating ipod-able, independent audio tours of museums. “…Hack the gallery […] » about 300 words
…Well, not entirely, but I couldn’t help but read the posts on the PepperPad and history of the Newton. I’m a fan of computing devices that don’t fit the mold, so I eat up stuff like this. I noted the Pepper Pad previously, and written a few posts about the Newton and ultra-portable computing. Update: […] » about 100 words
Gary Wolf wrote in the June issue of Wired about how smart mobs in New York’s World Trade Center outbrained the “authorities” and enjoyed higher survival rates because of it. Wolf is talking about the NIST report on Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications (warning: PDFs). There’s also this executive summary and this looks like […] » about 300 words
Work on my bstats plugin continues. I’ve added recently commented posts tracking, begun work on a usage graph, as requested by Richard Akerman, and put together an interesting way to track usage of the Google ads. I’m using the Google ads to figure out how to best use them on another project later. I think […] » about 300 words
I’m more than surprised that there’s no (decent) stats plugin for WordPress, but that hasn’t stopped me from writing me own. It’s called “bstats,” and I’ll release a beta soon. In the meantime. the “today’s most popular” list comes directly from this new plugin.