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Wednesday, January 15, 2014

This Video Shot With A Drone And A GoPro May Be The Most Incredible Surf Video Yet

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/gopro-drone-surf-video-2014-1

The "Pipeline" on Hawaii's North Shore is world renowned for its incredibly large and often dangerous waves, and a new video from aerial photographer Eric Sterman shows the area in all its glory.

Sterman attached a GoPro camera to a DJI quadcopter to capture this awesome footage of surfers on the pipe, according to The Next Web.

From The Next Web:

The result is a truly breathtaking video from a perspective which used to be impossible for filmmakers to achieve without hiring a helicopter. I’ve watched a few surfing films before (Billabong Odyssey and The Endless Summer are my personal favorites) but this is by far the best footage I’ve ever seen from Pipeline.

Check it out:

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Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Sworkit Pro Adds Custom Interval Lengths, a Workout Log, and More

Source: http://lifehacker.com/sworkit-pro-adds-custom-interval-lengths-a-workout-log-1501133024

Sworkit Pro Adds Custom Interval Lengths, a Workout Log, and More

iPhone/Android: We're big fans of Sworkit Pro, the exercise app that generates a custom workout for you based on the amount of time that you have, and the app recently added a few great new features. You can now customize your workouts even more, check out a log of your exercise, and more.

The big new feature here is that you can now change the interval length so you're no longer stuck with 30 second intervals. You can also customize the workout order so it's not completely random every time, which is nice if you find an order that really works for you. Finally, you also get a new workout log that shows what you've been doing, how many calories you've burned, and more.

Sworkit Pro (99¢) | Google Play

Sworkit Pro (99¢) | iTunes App Store

These Low-Power LCD Displays Work Like e-Ink To Prolong Battery Life

Source: http://gizmodo.com/these-low-power-lcd-displays-work-like-e-ink-to-prolong-1501024252

These Low-Power LCD Displays Work Like e-Ink To Prolong Battery Life

The simple black and white e-ink display inside your Kindle lets you read book after book on a single charge, but when it comes to devices displaying multimedia content like your smartphone, a monochrome display just doesn't cut it. You want color, and lots of it, so Japan Display has created a new type of full-color LCD display that promises fantastic battery by emulating many of the tricks that e-ink displays employ.

Horizon for iOS records landscape video no matter how you hold your phone

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/14/horizon-ios-app-horizontal-video/

On Vine and Instagram, square-sharing is the name of the game. But when it comes to YouTube or TV, you're going to insult viewers if you present them with a vertical video. Despite six years of smartphone innovation, Apple hasn't really solved what's come to be known as Vertical Video Syndrome, so one app developer is taking it upon itself to fix it. With Horizon, Evil Window Dog believes it can help shape a world with no more black sidebars. Where some developers ask users to hold their iPhone on its side before shooting, like Google tried with YouTube Capture for iOS, Horizon wants to make things a whole lot easier by letting you capture horizontal video from any angle.

Horizon works by using your iOS device's gyroscope to auto-level videos, keeping a horizontal focus on the action unfolding in front of you. If you rotate your iPhone 45-degrees, the app simply adjusts the frame to maintain its aspect ratio (it currently supports square 1:1, wide 16:9 and standard 4:3). But that's not all it has to offer. In the app's settings, you can set whether you'd like to rotate as you film, rotate and scale recordings or disable rotation altogether. Video quality can be tweaked to output VGA, 720p or Full HD recordings and there's also an option to mirror videos to your Apple TV using AirPlay. You can even apply one of eight pre-installed filters, if artistically destroying homemade videos is your thing. Horizon is available on the App Store for $0.99 for a limited time -- we just wish Apple and Google had bundled this as standard.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

Via: The Next Web

Source: Horizon (App Store), Horizon

Google Drive's new activity stream tracks changes to shared files

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/14/google-drives-activity-stream/

Tracking changes in those shared docs on Google Drive just got a lot easier. The folks in Mountain View have added an activity stream to the cloud-based file repository for keeping tabs on collaborative efforts. Once you're inside Drive, clicking the 'i' button at the top right will make the new list appear. Inside, you'll find the flurry of recent activity like moving/removing files, renaming, uploading, sharing/unsharing, editing and commenting. You can also select individual files or folders to view updates for only those items. Google says that the activity stream in Drive will be rolling out to users during the next week.

Filed under: Internet, Software

Source: Google

How Easy It Is To Spy These Days, In One Graphic

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-evolution-of-spying-2014-1

Ashkan Soltani, a privacy and security researcher who has been working with the Washington Post on the Snowden files, has published a graphic that illustrates how technology has greatly reduced the barriers to performing surveillance.

Soltani included the graph in a paper published in the Yale Law Journal that explores how this situation erodes Americans' privacy protections under the Fourth Amendment and what can be done to protect them.

The cost comparison involves the several location surveillance techniques of physical pursuit by foot and in vehicles, location tracking using a radio beeper, a GPS device, or a cell phone.

A few examples for understanding the chart:

Tracking a suspect using a GPS device is 28 times cheaper than assigning officers to follow him.
Tracking a suspect using cell phone data is 53 times cheaper than actual pursuit.
Tracking a cell phone is twice as cheap as using a GPS device.

surveillance In a blog post, Solanti explains what this means going forward:

"If technical and financial barriers previously provided some protection from large-scale surveillance by the government, these implicit protections have been essentially eliminated by the low costs of new surveillance technology. Once the cost approaches zero, we will be left with only outdated laws as the limiting function."

The paper aims to contribute the specific cost data to the conversation of "how the Fourth Amendment’s protections can and should be applied to balance out the rapid technology-based expansion of the government’s power to collect information about its citizens."

(h/t Kenneth Roth)

SEE ALSO: The Best Hope Left For Americans' Privacy Is This 2012 Supreme Court Opinion

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Article: Hobbyists are now building tablets using a $35 computer brain

Hobbyists have been assembling personal computers from their components for decades, buying the processors and other parts and putting them together in their basements. Now they're doing the same for tablet computers. Among them is Michael Castor of Make, the publisher of geek do-it-yourself info...

http://qz.com/165822/pipad-hobbyists-are-building-tablets-using-a-raspberry-pi/

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Article: Netflix: ISP Performance Up in December Except in US, Mexico

Every month, Netflix updates its ISP Speed Index to show how each provider fared in the preceding month. The rankings rarely change, especially in the US where Google Fiber is always first. For December, however, a little tidbit stood out: "Performance was up in all countries, except the US and M...

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/01/13/netflix-says-isp-performance-december-countries-except-us-mexico/

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You Can Build This Elegant Raspberry Pi Tablet Yourself

Source: http://gizmodo.com/you-can-build-this-elegant-rapberry-pi-tablet-yourself-1500900271

You Can Build This Elegant Raspberry Pi Tablet Yourself

Hey, a new tablet! Crisp 10-inch touchscreen? Check. Luxurious carbon fiber and wood case? Present. Huge 10,000mAh battery? Yep. Linux-based and built at home? Err...

Sonyâs Xperia T2 Ultra: 2014â²s First Gigantaphone

Source: http://gizmodo.com/sony-s-xperia-t2-ultra-2014-s-first-gigantaphone-1500913706

Sony’s Xperia T2 Ultra: 2014′s First Gigantaphone

Sony's announced a new mid-to-high-end "phablet" model today, with its Xperia T2 Ultra arriving in both normal and dual-SIM options. It combines a 1080p display with a 13-Megapixel camera, with Sony plumbing its quad-core Qualcomm MSM8928 chipset into 1GB of RAM.

drag2share: Google Image Search makes it easier to sort results by licensing rights

source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/14/google-image-search-creative-commons/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

Google Image Search has allowed users to filter results based on how they're licensed since 2009, but the option remained hidden under an advanced options menu where few users ever look. Now, a request by law professor and Creative Commons founding member Lawrence Lessig has changed that. Bing added the option to filter by licensing rights last July with placement front and center, and Googler Matt Cutts tweeted that his company's search engine has a similar option, shown above. Perfect for bloggers in a hurry (cough) or anyone looking to whip up an image for a new meme, it can pick out images labeled for reuse, reuse with modification, or commercial variants of either.

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Monday, January 13, 2014

drag2share: Toshiba Haswell Chromebook 2014

source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/11/ces-2014-laptop-roundup/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

Toshiba Chromebook

It was a pretty quiet year for Toshiba. Other than a few TVs and a couple of laptop PCs, all the company had to show was a single Chromebook. Granted, this was Toshiba's first Chromebook, which is sort of an interesting story in and of itself: It's basically the last major PC maker to jump on board. The $279 Toshiba Chromebook, as it's so very appropriately called, has a 13-inch screen, which, for whatever reason, has never been used on a Chrome OS device before. Under the hood, it runs off a Haswell-series Celeron 2955U CPU -- a nice boost over the sort of ARM processor used in the identically priced HP Chromebook 11. Additionally, that larger footprint means the Toshiba Chromebook offers a more spacious keyboard than most, along with deeper key travel, too. It may not have been groundbreaking enough to win a Best of CES Award, but among Chromebooks, at least, it looks like it might actually be a good deal.

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drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Article: Early benchmarks suggest NVIDIA's new Tegra chip outperforms Apple and Qualcomm

The graph above comes courtesy of Tom's Hardware and, whichever way you look it, it suggests NVIDIA is onto a good thing. The company's recently announced Tegra K1 processor combines a handful of ARM Cortex-A15 CPUs with a GPU based on the same successful Kepler graphics architecture found in des...

http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/13/nvidia-tegra-k1-mobile-chip-benchmarks-vs-apple/

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This Amazing, Light-Bending Metamaterial Can Do Calculus

Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-amazing-light-bending-metamaterial-can-do-calculu-1498877144

This Amazing, Light-Bending Metamaterial Can Do Calculus

When we last saw metamaterials, they were helping us create real-life invisibility cloaks. But, in even more exciting news for true nerds, light-bending metamaterial can also do math. Not just simple math, but calculus.

Google Street View Uses an Insane Neural Network To ID House Numbers

Source: http://gizmodo.com/google-built-an-insane-neural-network-to-id-house-numbe-1499897368

Google Street View Uses an Insane Neural Network To ID House Numbers

Google Street View is brilliant. It finds us when we're lost, it shows us where we are, it reveals places we'll never get to visit, and so on and so forth. But you know what's even more amazing? The crazy neural network that Street View is built on.

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