Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, July 20, 2009

The World Through My Eyes

How would images look if we captured them on a camera that was based on the Human Eye? Taking into consideration our field of vision, optical sensory and the brain's perception of images, George Milde has developed the Human Eye Camera. This device combines modern technology with digital postproduction. When the light hits the "eye" of the camera, it is spread via a prism onto three arrange-able sensors. And like the digitalized version, this one too offers the RAW format, which is variable in focus and focal length. The outcome of images is like a stitching or overlay of pictures. Like a panorama picture that’s been curved and distorted coz the brain did not flatten the peripheral view.

Designer: Georg Milde

Human Eye Camera by George Milde

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This is a James Dyson Award Entry, You can vote for it here.

VLC 1.0 Records Video from DVDs [Ripping]

Have you ever wanted to save a segment of video from your favorite DVD for watching later without fast-forwarding all the way through the movie? VLC 1.0 adds a new "Record" feature to help you.

Over at the How-To Geek web site (my home away from Lifehacker), blogger Mysticgeek writes up how to enable the new recording features: just use the View -> Advanced Controls menu item, and then you can record videos by hitting the record button to start saving the video, and then pressing it again when you are done. You'll find the segment of the video in your Documents folder, saved in MPG format.

This isn't quite the same as ripping a DVD, which we've covered many times before—but you could use it for that purpose if you wanted to, especially if you wanted to cut out the stuff at the beginning of a movie that isn't necessary. Readers should note that it doesn't seem to work with just any video, but we've successfully tested it with a number of DVDs and even AVI files that seemed to work without problems.

Hit the link for the full walk-through, read up on how to turn your PC into a DVD-ripping monster, or check out the five best DVD ripping tools.

How To Copy a DVD with VLC 1.0 [How-To Geek]

TextDiff Compares Your Documents and Files for Changes [Downloads]

Windows only: TextDiff is a simple and portable tool for quickly comparing and merging changes in documents and files.

Plug in a pair of documents and TextDiff will quickly highlight all the differences by line and by the portion of the line which has changed. You can ignore spaces and special characters, edit the text from within TextDiff, and generate reports highlighting the differences. For file comparisons you simply point TextDiff at the two different folders and it will highlight which files share names but otherwise fail to match each other.

For another text comparison tool, check out our guide to WinMerge. TextDiff is freeware, Windows only.

TextDiff [via The Portable Freeware Collection]

UTube Ripper Saves and Converts YouTube Videos [Downloads]

Linux only: Video downloading utility UTube Ripper saves a copy of your favorite YouTube videos for your offline viewing pleasure, even converting them into a non-flash format.

Installation on Debian-based versions of Linux like Ubuntu is a breeze—just download the .deb file from the downloads page and double-click to install everything. You'll want to make sure that you have Adobe Flash and the ffmpeg library installed as well, or the utility won't end up working properly.

Once those steps are completed, you can launch the utility, paste in a link to a YouTube video and click the Download button to retrieve a copy. The Convert FLV section of the application will let you convert into MPG or AVI format, or you can use the "Rip audio only" option to convert a YouTube video into an MP3 file.

UTube Ripper [SourceForge via Addictive Tips]

How Modern Processors Are Made [Science]

I knew that processors—like castles—are made of sand. But I didn't know they required stuff like ion implantation at more than 185,000mph, electroplating, and the creation of up to 20 metal layers of transistor connections in 500nm.

Thankfully, Intel has put together a slide show to tell how the little things are made, from sand grains to the final packaging, going through all the dicing, the slicing, and the dancing. [Intel via Dark Roasted Blend]