The screen technology in a few years

Posted: September 27, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: ideas, multimedia | Tags: , | Leave a comment »

This is the result of TAT’s Open Innovation experiment. It is an experience video showing the future of screen technology with stretchable screens, transparent screens and e-ink displays, to name a few.

New hobby. DIY electronics with Arduino

Posted: September 3, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: development, DIY, ideas, multimedia | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment »

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

This is the official Icon introduced for the l...
Image via Wikipedia

Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software on running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled; the software can be downloaded for free. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs.

Arduino received an Honorary Mention in the Digital Communities section of the 2006 Ars Electronica Prix. The Arduino team is: Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis. Credits

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BMW from the future

Posted: January 29, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: ideas, multimedia | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

No comments please….

BMW!

More here…

iPad

Posted: January 27, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: ideas, Λειτουργικά, multimedia | Tags: | Leave a comment »

Jobs and iPad

Image viewer

Browse the web

Youtube and iPad

Movies

New York Times

Various

Need for Speed and iPad

Keyboard

Keyboard (2)

Ημερολόγιο

ιΒοοκ

iBook (2)

iWork

iDoc

$

Case (1)

Case (2)

Μερικά χαρακτηριστικά:

  1. Ο Jobs είπε “It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had.”
  2. iPad είναι μισή ίντσα και ζυγίζει μόλις 1.5 pounds.  Έχει καλή οπτική γωνία για να βλέπεις την οθόνη από πλάγια.
  3. 1GHz Apple A4 chip και έχει 16GB μέχρι 64GB  flash δίσκο.
  4. Θέλουν να αντικαταστήσουν το συμβατικό βιβλίο και την εφημερίδα. Και τα δύο θα τα αγοράζεις online και θα τα κατεβάζεις στην συσκευή. Το iBook είναι κάτι σαν το Kindle της Amazon. Βίντεο εδώ.
  5. Συγχονίζεις τα πάντα: photos, music, movies, TV shows, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and applications, like the iPhone.
  6. Τον Ιούνιο θα βγεί εκτός Αμερικής
  7. Έχει WiFi και 3G. Η AT&T θα είναι πάροχος για 3G
  8. Βιντεάκι με demo του Google maps
  9. $499 δολάρια με 16GB χωρίς 3G…
  10. Ο Steve Jobs είπε  “our most advanced technology in a magical & revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

Dokan SSHFS. Read/Write at Linux partitions from Windows

Posted: November 9, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Windows Software | 3 Comments »

SSHFS is getting very popular. I use it almost everyday at work with FUSE, but only when I tried to read/write from a Linux machine to an another Linux machine.  I had always troubles getting Linux partitions explored from Windows. The best solution for the everyday use comes from Dokan SSHFS.

Dokan SSHFS is a program that mounts remote file systems using SSH. It is written by Hiroki Asakawa. Before installing DokanSSH you need to install dokan library. When you want to create a new file system on Windows, for example to improve FAT or NTFS, you need to develop a file system driver. Developing a device driver that works in kernel mode on windows is extremely difficult.By using Dokan library, you can create your own file systems very easily without writing device driver. Dokan Library is similar to FUSE(Linux user mode file system) but works on Windows.

I downloaded dokan-0421238×86.zip and dokan-sshfs-0201226.zip from the dokan web site. You need to extract both zip files to new directories and double click on the msi (setup) files.

dokan_post_installI installed both under Program Files, and a typical installation creates the file hierarchy of the above image. Your Start menu should contain a new entry for DokanSSHFS. So click at the Start button and select Dokan under your menu. A dokan window pops up. Fill the textboxes with your settings:

dokan_connect

The practical use of DokanSSHFS is that it creates a new entry to “My Computer” with a new drive that corresponds to the filesystem of your Linux Box. The file permissions are granted according to the Linux settings. In a few words, you must be root to read/write under /root. Or better under K:/root. The following picture shows the contents of /lib64 at the windows explorer.

lib64

Dokan is running and all active connections have a shortcut at your taskbar. Next to the clock.

corner2

That’s all. The easiest way to integrate between these filesystems. The most convenient issue is that you don’t have to change nothing to your server. You are just using the ssh capabilities that are preconfigured for the Linux accounts.

5 stars.

Youtube in my TV with Wii

Posted: October 31, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: FreeTime, ideas, multimedia | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

The last 2-4 years Greek houses have fast Internet connection. The prizes are tolerable and most of us realize that the Web is a service that everybody should experience and have in the everyday life. On the other hand the time someone spends in front of the television is shrinking. One argument for the former statement is the fact that the quality of the media, I can talk for the Greek TV/press only, that is being delivered via the television or the printed press is not anticipating the average viewer/reader. Most of the Greeks can talk and understand English and this important fact in conjunction with the enlargement of the new Web Media and the fast internet connections led us to solutions like youtube, vimeo and various services that provide online media.

alexa.com provides us with a list of the top visited urls as far as it regards the Greek audience. At the first place is Google, at the second Facebook and third comes youtube.com. Youtube comes third, however the 3rd place among millions of pages is a serious thing. Greeks, and most nations – a few days ago youtube.com announced that it receives 1 billion (billion with a B) request per day-, spend a serious portion of their active Internet time watching videos at youtube. This is reasonable: You had a bad day, missed a couple of hours due to traffic jam and you didn’t watch your favorite team winning the critical game? Don’t worry it is already uploaded to youtube or some other video hosting service.

Imagine that you are sitting on your sofa or watching some TV before you sleep at night and number 1 button of your remote TV control is for a hypothetical YouTube channel. Are you pressing the button or not? Most of us will prefer it. For two reasons:

  1. Local TV media do not invest. They do not have the power to surprise the TV viewer. They afraid to risk. They are establishment. Local media are businesses that are moving too slow. They don’t evolve. Bottom line: We are bored with the same TV shows.
  2. YouTube has a vast amount of videos. If you want to see a documentary for the Forbidden City because you intend to visit China, YouTube is the right place. You are one click away. Online media services like this, give you the opportunity or even the hope that you can find a response to your “media request” in no time.

No more pshycology. Nugh said. In a few bullets I will present you the way to turn your TV to a YouTube station using your Wii console.

  1. prerequisites: Wii Console and Wireless Internet Access.  You need to make your Wii capable of connection to the Web. This is easy and you can check either your Wii manuals or numerous of web pages for step by step instructions.
  2. create an account at club.nintendo.com. Do it with your internet browser it is free and easy. With your club nintendo account you can access areas at their web site in order to buy games, access several channels and e-facilities. These goodies can be bought with your credit card. A short comment here: The youtube/tv service was not free about a year ago. Nintendo sold this service for  a few bucks (worth spending), however it was not free. Today is free.  This is correct decision and I don’t want to comment on that right now.
  3. From your Wii console go to the Shop Channel. This selection will connect you to Nintendo’s site and from there you will search for the Internet Channel. Confirm that you want to download it, wait a minute and an Opera browser will be installed at your Wii console for free. Nintendo will responde with “OK”.
  4. From the Wii Main Menu navigate to your new Internet channel and access web sites typing with Wii’s remote control your favorite URLs, at the address bar.
  5. In order to watch YouTube you need to type the address www.youtube.com/tv
  6. You can customize your preferences. It is quite easy. You can even login with your youtube account in order to watch your playlists, if any.

Those steps are adequate to bring this service at your sofa. Bottom line: Don’t forget that you just installed an Internet browser at your Wii Console. Of course you can navigate to your favorite sites, read email, update your calendar, read your feeds, send tweets via your twitter.com account.

 

Computer vision does magic

Posted: October 10, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: ideas, multimedia | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

I will briefly comment on two amazing videos related to computer vision and computer graphics. The work comes from Universities, ie academia, and I am pretty sure that will be included in commercial software in the near future.

Sketch2Photo is a program that takes a freehand sketch as an input and it searches for images on the internet that match the “description of the sketch”.  The work is better explained at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University National University of Singapore.

Look at the following image:

sketch

The sketch is the grey picture at the top right. A freehand sketch with the tag “throw frisbee” and a few others “tree”, “dog”, “frisbee” is the input to the Sketch2Photo system. The algorithm search images that match the tags and the position. This is truly amazing.  Computer vision makes magic.

From the original paper: We introduce a system for progressively creating images through a simple sketching and compositing interface. A large database of over 1.5 million images is searched for matches to a user’s binary outline sketch; the results of this search can be combined interactively to synthesize the desired image. We introduce image descriptors for the task of estimating the difference between images and binary outline sketches. The compositing part is based on graph cut and Poisson blending. We demonstrate that the resulting system allows generating complex images in an intuitive way. The complete paper can be found at the ACM portal.

Quite impressive, isn’t it?

Impressive indeed.  The second work is called seam carving and is related to image resizing. From the original paper:

“Traditional image resizing techniques are oblivious to the content of the image when changing its width or height. In contrast, media (i.e., image and video) retargeting take s content into account. For example, one would like to change the aspect ratio of a video without making human figures look too fat or too skinny, or change the size of an image by automatically removing “unnecessary” portions while keeping the “important” features intact. We propose a simple operator; we term seam carving to support image and video retargeting. A seam is an optimal 1D path of pixels in an image, or a 2D manifold in a video cube, going from top to bottom, or left to right. Optimality is defined by minimizing an energy function that assigns costs to pixels. We show that computing a seam reduces to a dynamic programming problem for images and a graph min-cut search for video. We demonstrate that several image and video operations, such as aspect ratio correction, size change, and object removal, can be recast as a successive operation of the seam carving operator.”

The rest of the work can be found here. Don’t miss the web site of Ariel Shamir a senior lecturer at the Efi Arazi school of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. Finally the second video follows:

Project Natal

Posted: September 28, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: FreeTime, ideas, multimedia | Leave a comment »

The new immersive gaming system is Project Natal and it is being developed from Microsoft Corp. The ETA is 2010. A camera tracks gamers and matches their real life movements to those of an on-screen character. This tracking system is quite accurate and is based on Infrared technology. This is Microsoft’s response to Nintento’s Wii and the moto here is “You are the controller”. No more remote controllers or nunchucks.  In the following video a gamer expreriences the well known “Crysis”.

Milo is a character that can recognize us, talk to us and interact with us. Our motions reflect to Milo’s face. This is an amazing video.

Your days of escaping reality are numbered…

More details about this project at the official web page.

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Netbeans C/C++ with MinGW/MSYS and libxml2

Posted: May 14, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: DIY, ideas, Windows Software | 1 Comment »

It took me some time to configure this setup but I think it is worth mentioning these steps here. But first let me explain what is all about. I am using NetBeans IDE 6.5 for Microsoft Windows. Although this IDE is used primary for Java projects, with a little configuration it can be converted to the ultimate tool for writting code in Windows.

Navigate to Tools > Plugins from the top navigation bar and check if the C/C++ plugin is installed. If not use the plugin manager and install it. This is not difficult and it will not take time. I have version 1.4.1 installed.

Now you need a collection of tools in order to build and debug your C/C++ projects. There are two basic options in order to to that:

  1. Cygwin
  2. MinGW

I tried the second because it feets my needs. Cygwin can be used for more complex projects that need more tools to intergrate. MinGW contains the basic tools to compile and debug. This is all we need for our project for the time. Go to the official home page of MinGW and use the automated GUI installer in order to download, install and configure MinGW. This article should help. In order to follow this tutorial you need to install MSYS as well. MSYS is a collection of usefull binutils that most of UNIX people use at the everyday command line routine (make, gawk and grep to know a few). Follow the instactions that are published at http://www.mingw.org/wiki/msys . The installation of MSYS has a few postinstall steps that ask from the user the directory of MInGW. You need to type something like c:/mingw.  After the installation you will find out that you installed a minimalistic windows bash shell.

Netbeans settings

Netbeans settings

In the above picture you see a typical settings window after the installation of MinGW and MSYS (with this order).

You will be able now to compile and run applications written in C/C++.

The next goal is to compile and use a library that is not precompiled in the system. In a few words: I wanted to compile an application that used header files from libxml2. The core object of this project is libxml.so that is included in most of the UNIX systems by default. If you were developing in Linux for example it would be adequate to include one of the header files that are located under /usr/include/libxml, eg

#include <libxml/parser.h>

and link with -lxml2.

However MinGW and MSYS do not contain libxml2 so we need to compile one our one. Download libxml2-2.4.25-special.tar.gz and extract it in your MSYS home directory. Mine is C:\msys\1.0\home\cateof\libxml2-2.4.25-special. Via the MSYS console navigate to this point and first run ./configure. Wait the configure to finish and you are ready to execute make.  Type make and wait the build to finish. Copy the resulting file from ./libs/libxml2.a to c:/mingw/lib andcopy the libxml2-2.4.25/include/libxml folder to c:/mingw/include/libxml. Now you have the library and the header files. In order to compile you need to additionally:

  1. add-lxml2 -lwsock32 at the linking time
  2. add static info with-DLIBXML_STATIC

This last paragraph goes to gdb debugger. I download gdb-6.8-mingw-3.tar.bz2 from the MinGW download section and extracted the contents of this file at the root MinGW directory (this is c:/mingw for me). I pointed c:/mingw/bin/gdb as my debugger at the netbeans options dialogue (see the picture above) and it worked instantly with no problem.

Please do not hesitate to send me your feedback.

GOM Player review || Sweet water in hell

Posted: April 4, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: multimedia, Windows Software | Leave a comment »

Sweet water in hell. This is an amazing piece of software. It means it does what is says. You download an exe thatis not 200 megabytes, that is not pretending that is your browser that does not make pizza but is playbacks movies. Move your browser to http://www.gomlab.com/ click download get the exe. It takes seconds to save as, install etc. Open your movies/subtitles/etc and start watching your file.

There are some features to mention here: finds a codec if it is missing, plays broken avi (without knowing the index, it seems that this is a patent), it has embedded screen capture capabilities, it plays subtitles of various formats and it has all those adjust/change/modify things you can do with a player.

However what I like most is that it will make me uninstall all the crap under my Program Files that is related to movies.

Fantastic job guys.

There is a video encoder if you want to move your birthday_party.avi to youtube.com/birhtday_party.flv, however I cannot say much here. I haven’t try it.

Now let’s watch “L’Armée des Ombres”.

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