Sony brings WiFi-enabled VAIO CP1 digiframe to the States
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/382749016/
Filed under: Digital Cameras, Displays
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
World's first "no lamp replacement, liquid-cooled" 1080p projector lands at CEDIA
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/382757288/
Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment
Sony busts out VAIO JS, LV and RT all-in-one desktops, includes Blu-ray
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/382774125/
Filed under: Desktops, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Media PCs
Continue reading Sony busts out VAIO JS, LV and RT all-in-one desktops, includes Blu-ray
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IOGEAR's USB to VGA transmitter gets USB-IF approval, October release
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/382845415/
Filed under: Displays, Peripherals, Wireless
Continue reading IOGEAR's USB to VGA transmitter gets USB-IF approval, October release
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Five-Faced Diesel Watch: Screw You Midwestern States [Watches]
[Diesel via Technabob via Boing Boing Gadgets]
Sierra Mercury: AT&T's Smallest, Sveltest 3G Data Card [3G]
Project Inkwell 'Spark' Aiming for OLPC's Head With Its Handheld Form Factor [Concepts]
There's no mention of touchscreen functionality, but the screen looks to be lined with buttons and comes with a case housing a foldout keyboard, plus room for a mouse and spare battery. Less visible features would include bluetooth and wi-fi. It's still too early to talk release or pricing details, but this seems like a concept that's very feasible to produce. [Tuvie via Coolest Gadgets]
Ultrasound Haptic Devices Can Project Tactile Shapes Into Thin Air [Lickable Holograms]
Teases for hologram technology are commonplace nowadays, but it is usually taken for granted that the projected images will provide no haptic feedback. Though the researchers have said little about integration with other projection systems, the possibility of a tactile hologram now doesn't seem totally out of the question. There's a major catch, though: the virtual objects won't be provide much resistance or seem very "hard," because at high enough levels the aurally imperceptible ultrasound will destroy your eardrums. Even considering the limitations, my hope remains: that we may soon be able to (very delicately) slap people though a webcam. [BBC]
First Nikon D90 DSLR Videos Show Off Stunning Effects, Low-Light Powers [Nikon D90]
While some have been skeptical of the D90's video recording as a useless gimmick, Nikon has posted a bunch of videos showing off some of the amazing things you can do with the camera. The above clip ticks off some of what you can do with a variety of lenses, toying with fisheyes or super-zooms, but the two below really show what the camera can do, like create stunning effects with a shallow depth-of-the-field, and the detail it captures in low light using a pumped ISO.
While some have been skeptical of the D90's video recording as Yeah, the sound sucks, but we're still sorta kinda sold on this as a solid bonus feature that has a lot of play in it—we can't wait to check it ourselves to see if it's as good as Nikon's making it look. [Nikon]
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Useful Google Talk Bots That You Must Add as Friends
Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/most-useful-google-talk-bots/4347/
Such features can be easily integrated into Google Talk through ‘bots’ which, in simple English, are like virtual friends who are online 24×7 and will always respond with a smile to your questions or requests.
Here are the eleven most useful ‘bots’ that transform Google Talk into a more useful program:
To subscribe to a website in GTalk, simply send a new IM message that says "sub labnol.org" where labnol.org is the site address that you want to read inside Google Talk.
3. imified@imified.com - This imified bot turns Google Talk into a real powerhouse.
Just add timer to your Twitter friend’s list and then add twitter@twitter.com to your buddy list in Gtalk. Now if you want to get a reminder after 50 minutes, send a direct message to twitter like "d timer 50 pick kids from school" and a reminder will automatically pop up in your Google Talk after 50 minutes.
For instance, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com to you friend’s list in GTalk and all messages you type in English will get transliterated in the language of your choice. Available only for a few Indian languages.
9. Xpenser - With xpenser, you can record travel expenses via email, SMS or even Google talk. Add xpenserbot@gmail.com as your buddy and send a message like "lunch 33.2 with Bill Gates" and that will be added as an expense to your online spreadsheet that can be accessed from anywhere.
Add pingdotfm@gmail.com to Gtalk and you can communicate with twitter, jaiku, wordpress, identi.ca, facebook, myspace, bebo, friendfeed, linkedin, tumblr, plaxo, friendster, delicious and more.
Also see:
» Add Google Talk Badge to your Site
» Play Live Music via Google Talk
» Put Google Talk in Firefox Sidebar
Useful Google Talk Bots That You Must Add as Friends - Digital Inspiration
How to Write Your Own IM Bot in Less Than 5 Minutes
Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tutorial-create-bot-for-gtalk-yahoo-messenger/4354/
To get started, all you need to know are some very basic programming skills (any language would do) and web space to host your “bot”.
For this example, I have created a dummy bot called “labnol” that listens to your IM messages and return related search phrases based on Google Suggest. To see this live, add labnol@bot.im to your GTalk buddy list and start chatting.
If you like to write a personal IM bot, just follow these simple steps:
Step 1: Go to imified.com and request an invite. You should also give your bot a decent name because you can have just one bot per email address.
Step 2. An email with a secret key should arrive in your Inbox the next minute. Copy that key to the clipboard and go here to redeem that key.
Step 3. Now it’s time to create a bot which is actually a simple script that resides on your public web server. It could be in PHP, Perl, Python or any other language. More here.
This is the source of the PHP script I wrote for the labnol IM bot - pretty self explanatory - it reads your message, gets the relevant data from Google Suggest and echoes it back to the IM window.
<?php // Get all the related keywords from Google Suggest $u = "http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar"; $u = $u . "&q=" . $_REQUEST['msg']; // Using the curl library since dreamhost doesn't allow fopen $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $u); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); $xml = simplexml_load_string(curl_exec($ch)); curl_close($ch); // Parse the keywords and echo them out to the IM window $result = $xml->xpath('//@data'); while (list($key, $value) = each($result)) { echo $value ."<br>"; } ?>
Step 4: Once your script is ready, put it somewhere on your web server and copy the full URI to the clipboard.
This was a very basic bot but the possibilities are endless.
For instance, you could write a bot that will send an email to all your close friends via a simple IM message. Or you could write one that will does currency conversion. See stuff that is already implemented in this list of most useful Google Talk bots.
How to Write Your Own IM Bot in Less Than 5 Minutes - Digital Inspiration
Face Recognition Comes to Picasa Web Albums Much Before Windows Live Gallery
Source: http://www.labnol.org/software/face-recognition-in-picasa-web-albums/4373/
While we were waiting for Microsoft to release an updated version of Windows Live Gallery with facial recognition support, CNET just broke the news that Google had already added facial matching features in their own Picasa Web Albums website.
Google will also release Picasa 3 for Windows desktop sometime later today that includes a new movie maker mode to help you make moving video clips out of your still photographs.
"It took me less than 15 minutes to tag close to 200 faces in a set of more than 100 photos, and that included some start-up time such as figuring out how the system worked, establishing names for various common subjects, and correcting a few errors.
The most impressive moments are when Picasa presents a large array of photos with the same face, and you can label them all with a single click. "
Face Recognition Comes to Picasa Web Albums Much Before Windows Live Gallery - Digital Inspiration
Add Inline Language Translation to your Website with Google AJAX API
Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/website-translation-with-google-ajax-language-ap/4367/
While these solutions work, the only problem is that when people translate your web pages, everything gets reloaded under a different URL and this is not the best user experience. You may therefore want to try this AJAX based language translation where the content is translated inline in real-time while the visitor remains on your site.
Inline Translation powered by Google AJAX Language API
Watch this screencast video to see how inline translation works or go here for a live demo.
There are many advantages offered by Google AJAX Language Translation API vis-a-vis the regular online translation service of Google. You are in complete control of page elements that are to be translated, all existing links and sharing features on your web page stay intact and best of all, visitors get a better experience.
If you liked what you just saw, it is something very easy to implement and internally uses Google API that you may use on any site without any restrictions.
How Inline Language Translation Works ?
The basic idea is that when a visitors clicks a language flag or selects a new language from the drop down, we invoke the Google Translate API and replace (actually hide) the existing text with the translated text returned by the Google API. The cycle is repeated when another languages is selected.
Your visitors can also switch to the original language of the web page anytime.
Add Google AJAX Language API in your Website
If you are ready to take the plunge, here’s what you need to do to get this working on your site.
Step 1: Edit your blog template and place everything that you want to translate inside a <div> tag with some unique id. - let’s say <div id="article">….</div>
Step 2: Now place this code - <div id="translation"></div> - near the article div you configured in Step 1. The second div will actually house your translated text so you may add it just above or below the article div.
Step 3: And here’s the actual translation code. If this looks geeky, don’t worry too much - just copy-paste it inside the <head> tag of your blog template as it is.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Initialize version 1.0 of Google AJAX API google.load("language", "1"); function translate(lang) { var source = document.getElementById("article").innerHTML; var len = content.length; // Google Language API accepts 500 characters per request var words = 500; // This is for English pages, you can change the // sourcelang variable for other languages var sourcelang = "en"; document.getElementById("translation").innerHTML = ""; for(i=0; i<=(len/words); i++) { google.language.translate (source.substr(i*words, words), "en", lang, function (result) { if (!result.error) { document.getElementById("translation").innerHTML = document.getElementById("translation").innerHTML + result.translation; } }); } // Hide the text written in the original language document.getElementById("article").style.display = 'none'; return false; } // Switch to the original language function original() { document.getElementById("translation").style.display='none'; document.getElementById("article").style.display = 'block'; return false; } </script>
Step 4: The last step is to include the translation flags or translation drop-down menu in your template.
I prefer having language names (see sidebar) instead of country flags because a flag may not always be the best representation of a language.
<a href="#" onclick="original();">Switch to English</a> <select onchange="translate(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value);"> <option value="de">deutsch</option> <option value="pt">português</option> <option value="fr">français</option> <option value="ja">日本語</option> <option value="ar">عَرَبيْ</option> <option value="it">italiano</option> <option value="ru">pусский</option> <option value="po">polski</option> <option value="zh-CN">中文</option> <option value="es">español</option> <option value="ko">한국어</option> <option value="nl">nederlands</option> <option value="hi">हिन्दी </option> <option value="el">Ελληνική</option> <option value="ro">română</option> </select>
Add Inline Language Translation to your Website with Google AJAX API - Digital Inspiration
Intel talks up shape-shifting "programmable matter," bugs us out
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/381366301/
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
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