Thursday, August 27, 2015

Special glasses that can fix color blindness in many cases


Company website

Here are some non-promotional videos of people reacting to them that really gave me the feels: 1 - 2 - 3

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Flow Hive - Honey on Tap!


A great concept with crowd funded implementation that looks promising. 

It still takes quite some effort to keep bees, but a great extra feature that may lure me into beekeeping.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Rainbow village?

In Spain, Entire Villages Are Up For Sale — And They're Going Cheap


The abandoned village of O Penso, in northwest Spain, is for sale for about $230,000. The last resident died a decade ago. The village includes 100 acres with half a dozen houses, two sprawling farms with room for 70 cattle and a stand-alone bread-making kitchen.

Full article...

Saturday, August 15, 2015

New post and comment notification

Rainbowboys can enable email notifications for new post and/or comment.
Add your email here: https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=32272597#emailandmobilesettings

Works great in combination with email filter and label.

The Sony Alpha A7s allows you to turn night into day with its ridiculously high 409,600 ISO sensitivity

Almost unbelievable that this video was captured at night with only the moon for illumination. My brain just can't seem to process it, as its light sensitivity is so vastly better than my night vision, and its in full color too!

 

Super awesome, though a bit unsettling that while you might think you are hidden privately in the dark someone with this camera could clearly see you. I don't think the girl in the video knew she could be filmed like that :)

Here is another impressive video with some more variation and comparison between ISO settings.

High end smartphone cameras are approaching the quality of compact cameras

Just came across this article comparing the Galaxy S6 camera to the Sony RX100, a €350 compact. It's not quite there yet, especially when you zoom to 100%, but I'm very impressed with how close the results are. It's amazing how quickly these things have improved, though maybe not so surprising considering it is one of the prime features of smartphones being carried around by nearly two billion people.

With so much funding behind it engineers have managed to make all kinds of innovations tackling some of the seemingly impossible obstacles inherent in having a smaller camera. I'm convinced they will keep doing so and the gap will be negligible in a few years.



Even at this point I don't think I will be buying a compact camera again but will go for a high end smartphone instead. Besides the much better form factor a smartphone can also do things like GPS tagging, timelapses, 4K video, slow motion video, HDR burst. And there is a large choice of apps allowing you to get your favorite interface and features.

A top of the line expensive smartphone now also looks like a much better deal to me as it saves me from buying a compact.

Friday, August 14, 2015

Best video so far of the two massive explosions in Tianjin


From wiki:

On 12 August 2015, at least two explosions within 30 seconds of each other occurred at a container storage station at the Port of Tianjin in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, China.[4][5] The cause of the explosions was not immediately known, but initial reports pointed to an industrial accident.[5] Chinese state media said that at least the initial blast was from unknown hazardous materials in shipping containers at a plant warehouse owned by Ruihai Logistics,[6] a firm specializing in handling hazardous materials.

 [...]

 Several reports stated that at least 71 people were severely injured, and more than 50 killed.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Holiday Villas (8p), Peloponnese, Greece

A collection of villas on the Peloponnese, Greece, that sleep at least 8.

Methoni

 





Plaka


 

Zykanthos



 

Kyparissia






Lafka






Sunday, August 09, 2015

Saturday, August 08, 2015

Some CSI-level photo manipulation

A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography


How Do Bikes Stay Up?

We discussed this a while ago, I don't know the supported arguments anymore, but it turns out we were both wrong/right. It's complicated and not exactly known.


A nice quote from the brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson:
You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.
This is also really interesting, a bicycle that steers in reverse and is only possible to control after a lot of practice:

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Lost and Found dog


Even though it's fake, still I think this is a great example of fun advertisement.

Monday, August 03, 2015

The Panda Bear Song

Thought mr wiggles would appreciate this.