The month-long saga of the Borg (in FSJ’s words) assimilating Yahoo might finally be coming to a close, with the two finally entering into actual merger negotiations, according to the NY Times. Microsoft has reportedly upped its original $44.6 billion bid by several billion. The deal might still fall apart, but they’re actively doing the dance. Looks like this could actually happen, folks. [NYT]
This isn’t a sandbox with a marble in it. Sysyphus V, a kinetic sculpture by Bruce Shapiro looks like a Zen Garden. But instead of a buddhist monk carefully raking gravel, it’s an autonomous steel sphere carefully crawling over and over, making polar geometric shapes that can best be described as iterative lilies or stars. A magnet on an arm on a two axis plotter sites underneath the half-ton set up, and Sisyphus is making its first appearance here, at Maker Faire 2008. An unrelated but cool Interview with Bruce, by Cool Hunting, after the jump. [TaoMC at Makers]
State what you’ll about the fiascoes leading up to the Beijing Olympics, but the event has brought along with it some breathtaking new architecture. Greeting visitors attending the Xicui entertainment complex near the site of the games is a 20,000 square foot wall of computer-controlled LEDs, the largest of its kind ever built. Better yet, the wall manages to power itself completely using only the sun.
The GreenPix Zero Energy Media Wall, designed by Simon Giostra & Partners and Arup, uses thousands of solar capture cells attached to each of its glass panels to charge up during the day and then release dazzling light shows at night. It’s the first time perforated photovoltaics laminated in glass have ever been used in a building in China, but if all goes off without a hitch, it most certainly won’t be the last.
The wall is a combination of three textured panels in low-, medium-, and high-transparency glass, employed together to create a “continuous carpet” of flowing design that’s actually roughly 7 feet deep. The wall will showcase low-resolution LED imagery, to help conserve energy and paint an artsy gauze on whatever does get shown.
The project will be completed in June and will feature performance works by artist from all over the world. [Technabob]
Professor Builds Steampunk Theremin for Playing ‘Electric Western’ Music SAN MATEO, California — You’ve seen theremins, and the cats that love them. You’ve seen steampunk. But have you ever seen a steampunk theremin? Lorin Parker’s all-vintage, no solid-state theremin is as close to a recreation of Leon Theremin’s original…
Lorin Parker’s all-vintage, no solid-state theremin is as close to a recreation of Leon Theremin’s original 1919 design as possible.
Parker unveiled it with a host of other new instruments at Maker Faire as part of a new project, Electric Western, a collaboration with his wife, Sarah Seeling, whose voice you can hear in the video doling out instructions.
The endeavor aims to, “connect futuristic synthesis with the western American past” by using antique parts to construct “vacuum tube theremins, steam-powered synthesizers, singing robot heads, spark gaps, telegraphs, and electrosparklaviers.”
You can catch a glimpse of the mustachoied creator, who instructs at the Art Institute of California in Los Angeles, in the background of the video.
Our dreams of the perfect, barebones camera come a step closer to being answered. Ricoh’s GR Digital II has been fully tested at the Photography Blog and the conclusion is that, while there are flaws, it delivers great photos and…
Our dreams of the perfect, barebones camera come a step closer to being answered. Ricoh’s GR Digital II has been fully tested at the Photography Blog and the conclusion is that, while there are flaws, it delivers great photos and is a joy to use.
Probably the most important for a serious photographer, the GR II shoots RAW. Adobe DNG RAW, which means no pesky compatibility problems with processing software. The camera does struggle to record these files to a memory card, though, with a write time of up to four seconds and no real burst mode (you can squeeze off two shots before the camera locks up).
Noise at settings above ISO 400 is a problem, too, even though not surprising as Ricoh has squeezed 10.3 million pixels onto a sub-APS sized CCD chip. Another possible problem for those too lazy to get up and walk is the lack of a zoom. The GR II comes with a fixed 28mm lens. The prime glass should make for superior images, though, and it also allows a fairly fast maximum aperture of ƒ2.4.
Ricoh has also decided to leave out an optical viewfinder. This seems like a serious omission until you realize that you can buy an accessory viewfinder for the hot-shoe slot. It seems even less important when you take into account just how crappy are the optical viewfinders in other compact cameras (we’re looking at you, Canon G9). The camera costs $700. This makes it more expensive than many DSLRs, and the same price as Sigma’s 2003 throwback, the DP-1. It’s still not the perfect pocket camera, but it’s baby steps, people, baby steps.
UPDATE: It’s official. Apple has issued a press release detailing the deal: Downloads will be available the same day as DVDs, priced at $15 (catalog titles remain at $10). The full list of studios on board: 20th Century Fox, Walt…
UPDATE: It’s official. Apple has issued a press release detailing the deal: Downloads will be available the same day as DVDs, priced at $15 (catalog titles remain at $10). The full list of studios on board: 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Lionsgate, Image Entertainment and First Look Studios. This week you’ll be able to buy American Gangster and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly concurrent with their DVD releases.
This day, Apple is expected to announce “day-and-date” sales on the iTunes store. Movies will be available to download on the same day as the DVD release. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Apple has deals in place with Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal, Sony Pictures, Lionsgate and New Line.
The article speculates that offering a simultaneous on-line release for new titles “risks cannibalizing DVD sales”. We see it as a smart move by the motion picture companies, pre-empting the inevitable decline of the plastic disk distribution model. In the US, at least.
Here’s a snagged screen pointing to video recording and playback coming to the Sidekick LX in a future update. Nothing definitive on which codecs will be supported, but possibly H.264, which YouTube encodes videos in for Apple, meaning you might be able to watch YouTube videos. Or it could be a different one, and there’s no word on whether there’ll be a dedicated YouTube app. Regardless, video capabilities of some kind seem to be in the pipe. [Hiptop3]
The month-long saga of the Borg (in FSJ’s words) assimilating Yahoo might finally be coming to a close, with the two finally entering into actual merger negotiations, according to the NY Times. Microsoft has reportedly upped its original $44.6 billion bid by several billion. The deal might still fall apart, but they’re actively doing the dance. Looks like this could actually happen, folks. [NYT]
This isn’t a sandbox with a marble in it. Sysyphus V, a kinetic sculpture by Bruce Shapiro looks like a Zen Garden. But instead of a buddhist monk carefully raking gravel, it’s an autonomous steel sphere carefully crawling over and over, making polar geometric shapes that can best be described as iterative lilies or stars. A magnet on an arm on a two axis plotter sites underneath the half-ton set up, and Sisyphus is making its first appearance here, at Maker Faire 2008. An unrelated but cool Interview with Bruce, by 
State what you’ll about the fiascoes leading up to the Beijing Olympics, but the event has brought along with it some breathtaking new architecture. Greeting visitors attending the Xicui entertainment complex near the site of the games is a 20,000 square foot wall of computer-controlled LEDs, the largest of its kind ever built. Better yet, the wall manages to power itself completely using only the sun.
Here’s a snagged screen pointing to video recording and playback coming to the Sidekick LX in a future update. Nothing definitive on which codecs will be supported, but possibly H.264, which YouTube encodes videos in for Apple, meaning you might be able to watch YouTube videos. Or it could be a different one, and there’s no word on whether there’ll be a dedicated YouTube app. Regardless, video capabilities of some kind seem to be in the pipe. [
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