Category: ifttt

By (author unknown), Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine – April 13, 2010 at 05:08AM

A saying I heard a long time ago that has stuck with me for years (because it’s true) states: Women want to see what’s on TV; men want to see what else is on TV… which pretty much sums up the typical male’s reluctance to ever give up control of the TV’s remote. Well now there’s a whole new way to see what else is on TV. A new system developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) called Surround Vision lets you use a separate handheld device to view additional content that doesn’t fit on the TV’s normal viewing screen. ..
Continue Reading MIT’s Surround Vision lets you see beyond the edges of your TV set

Tags: Broadcast,
MIT,
TV

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By Adam Frucci, Gizmodo – April 12, 2010 at 07:20PM

It’s gotta happen all the time, but it’s rarely captured on film. But this past Saturday, an unlucky comet found itself pointed right at the unforgiving maw of our sun. Guess how this ended? More »

By (author unknown), Daddy Types – April 12, 2010 at 05:08PM

It’s spring, not too hot yet. And the Gene Weingarten’s March 2009 story for the Washington Post just won the Pulitzer Prize. Which makes it an excellent time for every parent to get in the habit of checking, every single time they get out of the car, to see if your kid is in the back seat:

So, if it’s not manslaughter, what is it? An accident?

“No, that’s an imperfect word.”

This is Mark Warschauer, an internationally acclaimed expert in language learning and technology, professor of education at the University of California at Irvine.

“The word ‘accident’ makes it sound like it can’t be prevented,” Warschauer says, “but ‘incident’ makes it sound trivial. And it is not trivial.”

Warschauer is a Fulbright scholar, specializing in the use of laptops to spread literacy to children. In the summer of 2003, he returned to his office from lunch to find a crowd surrounding a car in the parking lot. Police had smashed the window open with a crowbar. Only as he got closer did Warschauer realize it was his car. That was his first clue that he’d forgotten to drop his 10-month-old son, Mikey, at day care that morning. Mikey was dead. Also:

The 2008 Cameron Gulbransen Kids’ Transportation Safety Act — which requires safety improvements in power windows and in rear visibility, and protections against a child accidentally setting a car in motion — originally had a rear seat-sensor requirement, too. It never made the final bill; sponsors withdrew it, fearing they couldn’t get it past a powerful auto manufacturers’ lobby.

As far as I can tell, there is no current legislative effort to require rear seat sensors or alarms that could prevent this type of infant death.

Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? [washingtonpost.com]

By Soulskill, Slashdot – April 12, 2010 at 04:13PM

blackbearnh writes “Usually, Gov 2.0 deals mainly with outward transparency of government to the citizens. But SeeClickFix is trying to drive data in the other direction, letting citizens report and track neighborhood problems as mundane as potholes, and as serious as drug dealers. In a recent interview, co-founder Jeff Blasius talked about how cities such as New Haven and Tucson are using SeeClickFix to involve their citizens in identifying and fixing problems with city infrastructure. ‘We have thousands of potholes fixed across the country, thousands of pieces of graffiti repaired, streetlights turned on, catch basins cleared, all of that basic, broken-windows kind of stuff. We’ve seen neighborhood groups form based around issues reported on the site. We’ve seen people get new streetlights for their neighborhood, pedestrian improvements in many different cities, and all-terrain vehicles taken off of city streets. There was also one case of an arrest. The New Haven Police Department attributed initial reports on SeeClickFix to a sting operation that led to an arrest of two drug dealers selling heroin in front of a grammar school.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Erica Ho, Lifehacker – April 12, 2010 at 03:30PM

Google expands their video search engine by adding a TV show filter that allows you to sort videos by season and episode. While YouTube and Hulu remain vastly popular, Google’s episode search yields surprisingly impressive results.

Google Video doesn’t restrict the results to sites that are licensed to stream TV shows, so many videos come from a variety of sources, from Amazon’s Video on Demand service to Russian streaming sites (of questionable legitimacy). Unlike YouTube, which also has content restrictions, Google Video no longer has the option to play videos inline. For longer-running shows like Doctor Who and South Park, the episode search filter proves exceptionally useful.

To use it, just perform your search at Google Video, then click the Episodes link in the search options sidebar. The simple filter addition makes searching Google Video a lot more akin to Clicker, our absolute favorite option for finding a show online without running around to all the various possible streaming destinations. Google Video’s search isn’t quite as polished or helpful as Clicker’s, but if you’re having a tough time finding something, it’s definitely worth a try.

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – April 12, 2010 at 03:00PM

Firefox: If you routinely use Firefox at a distance—during presentations or from your couch, for example—this clever combination of tweaks makes Firefox easier on your eyes.

Sure you could hit CTRL++ or CTRL+Mouse Wheel Scroll every time you visit a page that needs to be magnified but that’s tedious, inefficient, and it doesn’t address issues like a tiny address bar and too-small navigation buttons. Over at the blog Apple Media Center, a media center focused blog, they’ve put together a great set of tweaks to give Firefox a 10-foot display mode:

1. Download this userchrome.css file here.
2. Place the ‘userchrome.css’ in the following folder: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[profile-name]/chrome/ [Ed. Note: They’re using Mac OS X, visit this article at the MozillaZine Knowledge Base to find the location of the profile folder in your operating system.]
3. Install the No Squint plugin by clicking here.
4. Change the No Squint plugin’s ‘Default full page zoom level’ setting to 150%.
5. Install a theme that works with the increased text size. I chose Hexxya, which also uses smaller icons so you can see more of your address bar as well.
6. Enjoy your Firefox HD browser!

Check out the link below for information about tweaking the font in your new setup or for more tips and tricks for setting up a user-friendly media center setup. Have a favorite tweak or trick of your own to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments. Thanks darkgroove!

By caseypugh, Star Wars Uncut – April 12, 2010 at 12:09PM

I’m thrilled to release “The Escape,” a teaser from the finished Star Wars Uncut: A New Hope movie.

Hundreds of 15 second scenes were put back together in a finished film thanks to the work of several people:

Jamie Wilkinson, manager of video engineering, Bryan Pugh, sound editing master, and Aaron Valdez, video editor and general creative boon for the Uncut team.

We’ll be screening the entire Star Wars Uncut: A New Hope in Copenhagen at CPH:PIX Festival April 19 and have several screenings in NYC in the works.

Check back for the completely redesigned StarWarsUncut.com coming soon!

By Sean Michael Ragan, MAKE – April 12, 2010 at 10:14AM

A senior design project by Marcus Moche, Alexandra Morgan and David Schmidt at Northeastern University:

Elbow injuries suffered by pitchers in Major League Baseball occur frequently and result in tens of millions of dollars in losses each season, representing the money that must be paid in salaries to pitchers who cannot perform due to injury.

“No single device for measuring the quality of pitching mechanics currently exists, so we have proposed a shirt that is lightweight and can be worn during bullpen sessions or exhibition games,” said Moche. “The shirt can be used to show when a player becomes fatigued and his mechanics worsen, through a display of real-time information on a monitor in the dugout.”

[via ecouterre]

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By Joel Johnson, Gizmodo – April 09, 2010 at 05:20PM

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner has to withstand 150% of its wing’s load limit for three seconds. It looks like the upcoming airliner can handle the stress just fine. [Jalopnik] More »

By John Baichtal, MAKE – April 09, 2010 at 04:00PM

Russell Walks wrote in to share his Periodic Table of Imaginary Elements poster, which details 122 made-up elements ranging from Superman’s Kryptonite to Star Trek’s Corbomite to Futurama’s Crapcrapium.

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