Upcoming movie: “Paranormal Activity”

Paranormal Activity might very well be one of the creepiest horror movies ever.

It seems to be based on a true story; the story of  a young couple who believes their house is haunted. To prove this, they set up a number of video cameras around the house and start filming things.

What they find will terrify them.

And…  it will terrify you too !

Check out the trailer below. Fact is, I’m definitely looking forward to this one.

The whole movie is filmed with handycams, and give this “Cloverfield” and “The Blair Witch” look and feel… Only difference ? It looks way better.. and scarier. It’s the “Blair Witch Project” on steroids !

Links:

• Official website with trailer
• Bloody Disgusting (not my choice of name ) rated it 9/10 !

Firefox 3.5 released

From MozillaZine.org:

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has been released. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in more than 70 different languages, Firefox 3.5 is the most recent major Mozilla browser release since the launch of Firefox 3 in June 2008.

Firefox 3.5 can be downloaded from the Firefox product page or via software update. More information can be found in the Firefox 3.5 Release Notes.

European Community obtain agreement on a standard mobile device charger

As of as early as next year, we will finally be freed from the many individual chargers for mobile phones and other devices…

Under the agreement, manufacturers would start using micro-USB connectors for phone chargers used for smartphones. Apple joins other big cell phone makers including LG, Motorola, Nokia, Research In Motion, Samsung and Sony Ericsson in agreeing to the new standard. Chipset makers, such as NEC, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have also agreed to the deal.

The agreement comes after talks between the phone companies and the European Commission, which threatened legislation to reduce waste if agreement was not reached.

The EC estimates that discarded chargers create “several thousand tons” of waste each year, but a common charger means users can continue using old chargers with new phones.

EU industry commissioner Günter Verheugen said he was pleased the agreement was reached on the basis of self-regulation.

“As a result, the commission does not consider it necessary to introduce legislation,” he said.

Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Texas Instruments signed a memorandum of understanding submitted to EC.

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Consumer groups have welcomed the agreement, but have expressed disappointment that it is not international, but confined to the EU.

The agreement could help accelerate standardisation efforts by a GSMA-led alliance of 17 phone makers and mobile operators that includes five signatories of the EU agreement.

Along with LG, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, the alliance includes 3 Group, AT&T, KTF, mobilkom austria, Motorola, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Source: Europe Press Release

If the EU would now also agree on a standard EU officials, we would be paying less taxes

New iPhone = mixed feelings

Everybody has been waiting for it, and when it’s finally here… well… ahum… yeah… it’s here.

The new iPhone has a couple of new features, such as video (and basic editing); it’s faster (yeah right), it has a compass (Arrr matey), it has voice control (“Call da bitch”), a search function (mmm yes) and… (drumroll) you can now send MMSses…

All this is very nice, but I got this “is this all ??” feeling.

Three things really strike me however:

Thing 1

It’s price !!!! 199 USD for the 32Gb model !!!! ???

I paid 625 EURO’s (No comments please )

Thing 2

Version 3.0 of the iPhone OS… Look Ma, I can finally copy & paste !

See also Gizmodo’s list

Thing 3

Oh, let’s not forget TomTom’s new turn-by-turn navigation software offcourse !

Straight from the WWC:

“Peter-Frans Pauwels, TomTom’s co-founder and CTO, demonstrated TomTom’s navigation software in combination with a specially designed car kit on the iPhone- during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 8th, 2009.

The TomTom solution combines two new TomTom products to provide users with state of the art in-car navigation on their iPhone 3G:

• The TomTom navigation application for iPhone; an Apple version of TomTom’s award-winning turn-by-turn navigation software, including IQ Routes and latest maps from Tele Atlas;
• The TomTom car kit for iPhone; a specially developed car kit for secure docking, enhanced GPS performance, clear voice instructions, hands-free calling and in-car charging.

The TomTom navigation application for iPhone will be available via the Apple iTunes App Store, following the release of Apple’s OS 3.0 operating system. Details regarding pricing and availability for both the application and the TomTom car kit for iPhone will be made available in advance of the products’ launch later this summer.”

You better not scratch that disk then…

General Electric announced that it made a breakthrough in holographic disc technology, alllowing affordable 500 GB optical discs (!) that measure the size of traditional DVDs.

Rewind… So, one hundred DVD’s on one and the same disc ?
Cool. Until you scratch it

Holographic disc technology is capable of dwarfing traditional optical media due to its density. The discs make use of microscopic holograms encoded with light information, which are then accessed by a laser.

While several tech companies have been developing holographic discs for years, GE’s successful demonstration is significant because its technology uses smaller, less complex holograms, according to the New York Times.

GE expects its holographic disc could make it to mass production in 2011 or 2012, and cost less than 10 cents per gigabyte.

Source: http://www.ge.com/research/grc_2_3_1.html

Bored during the weekend? What about meteorite hunting ?

… you’ll have to go to Texas though…

Look ma, a fallig star !

On the afternoon of February 15, 2009 a television cameraman covering a marathon in Austin, Texas captured a spectacular fireball on video.

Eyewitnesses to the north in McClellan County saw the fireball close up. Many reported hearing loud sonic booms and someone even reported that the shock waves broke a window in his house.

By studying first hand accounts, specialists were able to predict that meteorites made it to the ground north of Waco, Texas about 120 miles from the Austin cameraman who filmed the event.

This meteorite was found only six days after it fell to earth. Note how this stone has partially buried itself in the ground, forming a small impact pit. Photograph by Geoffrey Notkin © Aerolite Meteorites.

Source: http://geology.com/meteorites/meteorite-hunting.shtml

GoogleSync or NuevaSync ? Let’s give GoogleSync a try…

UPDATE 04 March: I’m switching back to NuevaSync for now… Main reason: my contacts don’t sync well with Google (I use Zindus). Stay tuned.

Until today I’ve always been a happy NuevaSync user. A very happy user indeed.

Their service not only is free, but it also works fast and is rather stable.

On Feb 9, Google announced the release of their own GoogleSync solution, also using the native ActiveSync Exchange protocol, Microsoft kindly (well, kind of ) ) provided to Apple.

Since that day, I started doubting whether or not to stay with NuevaSync. Today, I switched. Mainly to check out the Google “native” solution, and… I must be honest… because I didn’t like the fact that NuevaSync keeps switching colours of my calendars. (“I want to be blueeeee !! and not purple )

GPS Navigation finally coming to iPhone ?

The xGPS project is about to release their turn-by-turn navigation software, as early as March 7th !

The app has been around for a while, but the upcoming 1.2 update is the first to add a voice engine in order to bring the often asked for turn-by-turn functionality. You can even use external GPS units to add the capability to a first-gen iPhone or iPod touch.

You can download and cache an area of the map before you head off. Presumably this works over Wi-Fi for those of you with prohibitively expensive data charges or tiny data allowances.

One thing is for sure – Apple needs to take a good, hard look at whatever stopped “legit” developers bringing desirable, valuable functionality to the App Store table before hackers brought it to Cydia…for free.

A whole different kind of sea snakes…

They look cool, and could potentionally provide “green” (or is it “blue” ? ) ) power for thousands of households: The “Wave Snakes”.

Portugal is one of the first countries to actually use the technology. Check out the BBC News article.

The new technology has been inspired by the way fish swim, consists of cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs.

As water flows past, the cylinder creates vortices, which push and pull the cylinder up and down. The mechanical energy in the vibrations is then converted into electricity.

Cylinders arranged over a cubic metre of the sea or river bed in a flow of three knots can produce 51 watts. This is more efficient than similar-sized turbines or wave generators, and the amount of power produced can increase sharply if the flow is faster or if more cylinders are added.

A “field” of cylinders built on the sea bed over a 1km by 1.5km area, and the height of a two-storey house, with a flow of just three knots, could generate enough power for around 100,000 homes. Just a few of the cylinders, stacked in a short ladder, could power an anchored ship or a lighthouse.

Systems could be sited on river beds or suspended in the ocean. The scientists behind the technology, which has been developed in research funded by the US government, say that generating power in this way would potentially cost only around 3.5 USD per kilowatt hour, compared to about 4.5 USD for wind energy and between 10 USD and 31 USD for solar power. They say the technology would require up to 50 times less ocean acreage than wave power generation.

The system, conceived by scientists at the University of Michigan, is called Vivace, or “vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy”; in Portugal they call it “Pelamis”.

Similar ideas:

A similar idea uses rubber “snakes” and the movement of the waves alongside of them:

Kick-ass Video manipulation from Adobe

The Whiz-kids from Adobe’s R&D labs have been playing around with really nifty video technology…

Although there are no immediate plans to build this technology into any of their existing products, it is clear they have a couple of nice surprises in their sleeves.

Check out this movie:

As they explain it them selves on http://www.adobe.com/technology/graphics/video_visualization_and_interaction.html

Existing approaches to interaction with digital video are complex, and some operations lack the immediacy of interactive feedback. Our research in video annotation, visualization, and interaction harnesses computer vision to aid users in understanding and communicating with digital video. We are developing new approaches for computing the motion of points and objects in a video clip, and interactive systems that utilize this data to visually annotate independently moving objects in the video. We have applied this interface to construct visualizations of a short video clip in a single static image, using the visual language of storyboards. The principal advantage of the storyboard representation over standard representations of video is that it requires only a moment to observe and comprehend but at the same time retains much of the detail of the source video. The layout of the storyboard can be optimized to place the elements in a configuration that maximizes the clarity of presentation. We also explore novel interaction techniques for random video frame access using the natural spatial dimensions of a storyboard representation or an individual video frame.