Remember that video from earlier this week showing the guy hijacking Times Square screens with a homemade “video repeater?” Or that one from a little earlier in which a guy got his dome shaved clean by an automated shaving helmet? They’re both fake. No surprise there. But what is surprising is that they’re both professionally fake. Today’s Times has a piece on Thinkmodo (no relation), the New York City-based viral marketing company responsible for both videos. That video hijacking bit, it turns out, was actually promoting that forthcoming movie Limitless—I think it's about adderall?—which I encourage you to boycott because we have to send a message to these people that WE CANNOT JUST BE TOYED WITH LIKE THIS. [NYT]More »
Look, we know you know all about LED backlights, light diffusion, subpixels, and the things that turn them on, but not everybody does. The humble LCD you’re most likely reading this on still retains a level of mystery about the nitty gritty details of how it works for the vast majority of its users, so here’s a terrific video breakdown of both its component parts and method of operation. Bill Hammack, a self-appointed Engineer Guy, takes us from the LED arrays that provide the light for most current LCDs, through all the filters and diffusers designed to make that light uniform, and into the ways thin film transistors make it possible for us to show moving color images of cats diving into boxes on such displays. It’s exciting, deeply nerdy stuff, and it awaits your audience after the break.
For a man that spent the best part of his acting career representing a savvy dude from the future, William Shatner looks pretty well at home in the past as well. This video, dusted off from AT&T's Tech Channel archives, shows Shatner dressed in a casual tan ensemble and dropping some knowledge on the subject of microprocessors. Aside from the retro visuals and presentation, what’s great about the vid is that the seemingly lavish claims about where computers could take us — and their own move toward increasing importance, utility and ubiquity — actually seem pretty tame in light of what we know today. Beam yourself past the break to see this golden nugget from the Bell Labs archives.
Three presentations covering the various NoSQL usages at Twitter:
Kevin Weil talking about data analysis using Scribe for logging, base analysis with Pig/Hadoop, and specialized data analysis with HBase, Cassandra, and FlockDB on InfoQ
Ryan King’s presentation from last year’s QCon SF NoSQL track on Gizzard, Cassandra, Hadoop, and Redis on InfoQ
Three Little Pigs and the Secrets of a Popup Book (US $3.99) from Game Collage LLC brings something new to interactive children’s books on iOS. The original book was published in 1904 and illustrated by L. Leslie Brooke, a popular illustrator of the time. Along with the usual wheels, tabs and spring loaded animated object that move things around, they included X-Ray Goggles (really a tappable button), that lets you see the gears, clockwork, springs and pulleys that make the animations work on most of the pages. This fits in well with the tone of the book, since it was originally published during the second Industrial Revolution.
Just when I thought that publishers had run out of new ideas for this genre, this wrinkle arrives with a lot of fun. Outside of the well-known story, you are given a faux backstage peek of how it all works. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but it’s exceptionally entertaining, even for “older kids.” Often seeing how items are affixed to a gear gives you a good idea of what the page can do, providing a better experience playing with the movable objects after viewing the schematics. There are a lot of objects that can be manipulated either by pushing them around or tilting the screen and having the accelerometer do it.
There is a lot to see. On one screen, instead of a few objects, there are 20 apples, all connected to strings and a tab that feed out or pulls in the brightly colored strings. Looking at the X-Ray, you’ll find pulleys and gears that raise and lower the apples when you push a tab up or down. Another tap brings you back to the story. I would consider this a real benefit for kids who invariably ask “why.” You can compare the graphics and the X-Rays in the gallery below, and then hit the “Read More” link to read the rest of the review and see a whimsical video of how the book was developed.
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