Nostril LED Accessoire
2011-12 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Io9 points to a Make magazine article on a nostril LED jewel accessoire by Noda Akira (video), which glows in rythm with your nose breathing. First introduced at Tokyo maker faire.

Picosecond Camera
2011-12 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Slashdot points to a New York times article on the MIT picosecond camera (video). Only one pixel row at a time, the device is time-exact enough to capture only one wavefront returning from a short-length light pulse. Repeat on a static scene until all lines, for all returning wavefronts, have been captured: Voila, wavefront photography.

Art from Geodata
2011-11 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Nerdcore points to a creators project report on interactive movies created from geological data such as Google streetview, headed by Aaron Koblin from Google Data Arts. Projects range from a post-apocalyptic streets browser (rome) to, not-very-geo, the sheep market, a shop with 10.000 sheep drawings from Amazon mechanical turk workers.

User Interface: Images under Glass
2011-11 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Io9 points to a good Bret Victor rant about future user interfaces, when compared to the current "images under glass" (e.g. smartphones, tablets) paradigm. Considering human haptic capabilities, he considers the current state of the art less expressive than a sandwich.

Rotoscoping
2011-10 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
FX guide outlines the art of rotoscoping, a film production technique where each frame is edited separately, but the goal is still to have fluent motion. From the manual beginnings with e.g. Disney to modern approaches with e.g. Adobe After Effects.

Video recording: Big Freeze
2011-10 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Nerdcore and Creative Review report of Krump360, a dance video with Matrix style freeze-rotate shots, made by Ryan Hughes and the Big Freeze group, using 48 synchronized Nikon D700 cameras (making-of). Allows slow motion in space, even with long exposures, but no slow-motion in time.

Coding in Egoshooter Game
2011-09 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
An egoshooter game with code snippets as ammo: Nerdcore reports of Code Hero, where you grab a lot of source code and use it to make things happen, or just as ammunition. In unrelated news, Nerdcore also reports of the new Humble bundle, a pay-as-much-as-you-want indi game pack.

Countour Waterproof Video Camera
2011-09 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Evolving from underwater cameras, now underwater video cameras: Engadget reports of the CountourRoam HD camcorder, usable 1m submerged for 30 minutes, at 200 EUR. In related (but overwater) news, Engadget also reports on the movie industry Sony F65 CineAlta 4K camera, recording 4K at 72fps, at 65000 EUR.

Postgres Database with Replication
2011-09 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Heise reports of the new Postgres 9 database, which finally supports synchronized replication. If you have a cluster, any write access is only completed when all active DB have it confirmed, so any action is atomic over the cluster. Oracle has had it for a long time, and now it is a first among open source databases.

Siggraph 2011
2011-08 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Siggraph 2011, the largest computer graphics conference on the planet (5-minute run-down), again showed the newest in research: CT scanned textiles, focus blur hardware, realtime fluids, ray beams (research papers); and lots of artwork and emerging technologies. More on the Siggraph blog.

HTC Desire Guide
2011-08 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Know Your Cell has a whole list of articles on the HTC Desire (Bravo), including hard resetting and rooting (e.g. with Cyanogen mod). I still like the phone because it has actual push buttons.

Pwnie Awards 2011
2011-08 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
And it is time again for the pwnie awards, featuring both server-side and client-side security exploits of bugs in software -- a friendly reminder to not only code safely, but also securely. Bonus points go to RSA, who got their private keys stolen but did not consider this to be a problem for their customers.