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Marc Levoy, an electronics professor at Stanford, has published a cool app called SynthCam.

The basic idea behind the app is to capture many (parallel) images, which are slightly shifted from each other, and recombine them to first increase resolution and to simulate a larger aperture. Being a direct result of ongoing research, it does not perform every time as expected and you have to be super careful about not tilting the camera while jiggling it around, but it is amazing never the less.

This is going to be the stuff the future cameras are made of. Just replace unreliable jiggling around of the camera, with an array of a few hundred cheap and low resolution lens camera assemblies, on the back of something the size of an iPad as Ctein suggests, add the technology behind this small app and you’ve got your self a super-flat, high resolution, cheap camera, which can be shifted and refocused after you made the exposure.

Exciting times that we live in…

Charlie argues, quite convincingly, why the world is in a better shape for a huge number of its (human) inhabitants than it was a decade ago.

The ecological and environmental issues are missing from his summary, but other than that, what he does mention gives some hope for the rest he fails to mention.

(via O’Reilly Rader)

I like Instagram. The best camera is the one you have with you, as they say.

Seth Godin writes and I quote:

The people who successfully start independent businesses do it because we have no real choice in the matter. The voice in our heads won’t shut up until we discover if we’re right, if we can do it, if we can make something happen.

This is probably one of the soundest (pun intended, sorry) investment advice that I’ve heard in a while. Buy an index if the market makers are listening to sober music, sell it if they start dancing a lot. Go read for yourselves…

The new Apple TV seems to be a great little piece of living room hardware, especially at $99

Oh wait, should I rather say 119€, or 100€ less tax, which is still like $128.

Tell me, why do we have to pay $30 more fore the same product Apple?

Why am I getting worked up about just $30 at all? Bottom line is: It is still much cheaper and better than the old Apple TV. Silly me, it must be the wine…

All airline services have been cancelled over the most of the European airspace today due to an eruption of a volcano under the Eyjafjallajökull Glacier in Iceland.

As the molten lave goes through the ice of the glacier, it quickly cools down and forms small glass shards. These shards practically sandblast any aircraft through them and can cause anything from engine failures to windscreens becoming opaque.

A Wikipedia article regarding the British Airways Flight 9 on June 24th 1982 illustrates the dangers very clearly. Quoting the captain of that flight, as a perfect example of british understatement some 30000ft from the ground:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

I just got my iPad thanks to I friend living in New York.

In general it is an interesting device but in my case it is severely limited by the fact that Apple does not allow customers with non-US iTunes accounts, for instance Germany in my case, to download and install iPad apps.

Other than that the keyboard is HUGE and needs some getting used to after the iPhone keyboard. Two-thumb typing is barely possible in the vertical orientation and impossible in the horizontal orientation, but the horizontal keyboard is large enough for 8-fingered typing.

And finally, I realized my new app for the iPad is very buggy on the actual hardware. A weekend of testing and debugging is ahead of me.

This is huge. iAds is definitely a game changer for free app developers. I can’t wait to take advantage of this.

Multitasking seems cool, too. I wonder how it’ll fare on an iPhone 3G, though, let alone an original iPhone. My iPhone 3G is slow as it is without multitasking.

Exciting times, we live in…

I’ve just come across this really cool toy which analyzes your last.fm profile and lists your most favorite musical keys. Not really useful but fun.

Apparently, I am a A-minor person. With C-major coming in a close second. I guess I don’t like the black keys that much.

(Via Music Machinery)