Buzztown's Shared Items

The balance, the precision aiming. The man: Woz takes a piss on his Segway. If this is Photoshopped (or the world's most convincing Woz lookalike), there truly is no God. [Macenstein]

New York Times art director Steven Heller interviews Sol Sender, whose firm designed the ubiquitous Obama "O."

via Design Observer

(more...)

A few days back, I showed you the new touch interface for Media Center PCs running Windows 7, and though I had to pull the video, I promised a walkthrough of proposed Windows 7 Media Center features. I say "proposed" because, like everything else about Windows 7, this is all alpha and subject to change. But these features are very cool, and really should be included. One more thing: These screens were projected on a wall in a well-lit room, so they look horrible, but anyone familiar with Media Center (and Microsoft has shipped like 100 million of them, so that should be plenty of ya) will have a good idea of the pleasantness to come. Or you can just drink in the following prose descriptions:

Mercedes-Benz new myCOMAND system has appeared at the Los Angeles Auto Show, taking on the fourth-generation BMW iDrive. Whereas the latter has an Xbox 360 feeling, this one gets some clues from Apple's, specially Coverflow and the menu navigation, which reminds me of the first version of the Apple TV and Front Row. One big difference is that myCOMAND is connected to the web, grabbing information wirelessly and presenting it through their own on-screen apps. Looking at the high resolution screens and the feature list, it looks very good:

djupedal notes a story up at the BBC about the Associated Press's suspension of the use of Department of Defense photos after a photo of General Ann Dunwoody was found to have been altered (before and after comparison). "The Pentagon has become embroiled in a row after the US Army released a photo of a general to the media which was found to have been digitally altered. Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added. The Associated Press news agency subsequently suspended the use of US Department of Defense photos. 'For us, there's a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting actual content from an image,' said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sagem Orga, in partnership with BlueSky is targeting the array of cellphones (and presumably mobile-internet enabled PCs and such) that currently don't have GPS with this new invention: a SIM card with AGPS aboard. Clever stuff indeed, packing all the chips for a "highly accurate GPS receiver", wiring and antenna into a thumbnail-sized space. We've got to wonder how good its satellite fixes will be with such a small device though, and since it looks like every gadget that comes out has GPS aboard nowadays, adding GPS to a device via its SIM card might just be a temporary stopgap option. But it'll undeniably have lots of applications when it hits the market. [BGR]

Wondershare Photo Collage Studio is a simple yet powerful tool that makes amazing photo collages and digital scrapbooks for print. With plenty design templates, clip arts and photo frames, you can easily assemble your still photos into an artistic compilation. Try to make your holiday more fun with it!

Features:

• Turn photos into collage and scrapbook
• Plenty collage templates and layouts
• Multiple-page Designs
• Wordart, cliparts, stamps & more
• Photo retouching and effects
• Magic doodle drawing
• DIY personalized calendar
• Print & share anywhere
• Quick and helpful online support.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)

There are luxury brands, Mercedes-Benz and Lexus come to mind, then there are luxury brands, cars with the leather from a herd of cows and wood from a whole forest. Spyker, Ferrari, and Bentley all showed off hand-crafted cars at the 2008 Los Angeles Auto ...

Originally posted at The Car Tech blog

Viewers reportedly egged on the man, who overdosed while on live Internet video.

Defense Department suspends use of USB drives as experts warn of USB-related virus outbreaks.

With so many broadcast networks making their content available via the Internet, you may find yourself catching up with shows on your PC more often than on your television. But now there's a product that lets you stream that same PC content directly to your TV.

The Neuros Link ...

Tellart turned an iPhone into a duiPhone with its latest Sketchtools kit. Combine a 3G iPhone, an ordinary store-bought breathalyzer, and the NADA Mobile, which consists of a communication board, sensors, and actuators, and get a useful iPhone application. Blow into the mouthpiece, and the iPhone will inform you if you can safely drive, or if you should call a cab.

We’d like to find out more about the NADA Mobile, since it looks like it could be the start of a lot of fun projects. It’s the latest of Tellart’s Sketchtools line, which can only be accessed if you work with Tellart as a consultant, or if you work with them to organize a workshop for your organization.

[via Digg]

German designer [Michael Schoner] of NL Architects turned an ordinary street bench into a public sound system that can be accessed by passersby with iPods and cellphones with Bluetooth. Boom Bench features 60 watt co-axial speakers, two subwoofers, and a bass shaker in the seat that’ll allow you to feel the vibrations of your music choices. It was on display in Amsterdam last month for the Urban Play event. It remains to be seen whether this new urban development will make your daily wait for the bus more entertaining or aggravating.

[via Notcot]

iPhone only: When you see a book, CD, DVD, or game at a friend's house you want to look up and bookmark instantly, fire up SnapTell Explorer on your iPhone and take a photo of it. Similar to a bar code scanner (except you photograph the item cover, not its bar code), SnapTell automatically looks up your item and gives you links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Wikipedia, and straight-up search engines so you can compare prices and find out more about it. SnapTell's results aren't 100% accurate—once it gave me a strategy guide result when I photographed a video game cover—but everything else I tried it on, the results were spot-on. Here's what the result for the Halo 3 photograph looked like.

[Lynne] had this crazy idea to build a piece of clothing that would give you feedback about your surroundings using sonar. She started with a carefully selected thrift store jacket. She wanted something that looked good and also provided plenty of places to hide electronics. She used the LilyPad system, with a vibration pad and a sonar range finder. When the system detects an object within a certain distance directly in front of the wearer, it warns them with some vibration. Not only is it practical, it looks pretty cool too. Did we mention she designs clothing?

She notes, in the comments section, that while it can detect an obstacle, it cannot detect a void. How could she detect a drop in the floor or a step down?

The BBC has a fantastic, 3-minute clip touring a frozen pizza factory that manufactures 2 million pizzas a week. There's something about precision, large-scale automation, even when the technology isn't necessary cutting edge, that's even more telling of our technological place in the world than sleek touchscreen phones and GPS navigators. Notice the eerie lack of humans, the cold airshot of sauce onto crust and the phallic towers of pepperoni being diced to scraps by machines. Has Man sold his soul to the robots so soon? And just for some crappy frozen pizzas? [BBC via MAKE]

In terms of audio--and video--what do you want that has yet to exist?

It's the worst thing about phone cameras (except for the image noise, poor low-light performance, desaturated colors and incessant motion blur): the picture delay. Scalado says they've managed to eliminate it by constantly recording and displaying actual JPG images of the frame in real time. In other words, when you take a picture, rather than calling the camera to snap a completely new hi-res image, the Scalado Camera Engine simply saves what you can already see. Popular sensor makers Aptina, OmniVision Samsung and MtekVision are already licensing with the tech, so your camera phone experience might become slightly more bearable before too long. [Slashphone]

Neuros, who built their reputation with weird, chunky (but wonderful) modular MP3 players, has long since moved exclusively to the home entertainment field. Their latest attempt at eroding the Apple TV's market share is the Link, a set-top streaming box that will pull video from a wide range of online TV sources — Hulu, NBC, ABC, etc. — as well as stream local audio and video content from any USB hard drive. As is always the case with Neuros set-tops, the Link's software is open source and ready for modification. This time, mercifully, that might not be the box's biggest draw.