Author: John

Lens For Your Cameraphone

About a year ago I saw a fisheye lens that was built like this. I’d like a set of these, the camera in my Motorola V300 absolutely sucks and needs all the help it can get.

Instead of screwing them onto your lens, there is a magnet built-in and they will stick on to the lens (I’m having some doubt here). They don’t seem to be a joke at all: the telephoto lens offers up to 2X zoom power, the macro lens offers up to 4X zoom and the wide angle lens allow you to zoom out 0.5X. Each comes with a cellphone strap, when you are done using it, they turn into a charm!

[via Picturephoning]
Lens For Your Cameraphone

Taxi Cell Phone Charger

Rooftop Wind Turbine

Now this is clever. Here’s the idea: the roof top turbine convert the breeze created by the moving car into electricity and is routed back into the car’s battery. Passengers are invited to charge their cell phones while using the cabs. All of this is to promote awareness of the environment and renewable power sources. Sounds like a good idea to me except that the drag crated by the turbine might negate the power crated by it, but then again the taxis themselves are equipped with an engine “idle stop” features, which temporarily shuts off the engine when idling to reduce the amount of exhaust and gas consumed.
And they have bike racks too, now that is a good idea. Perhaps in the future more cab companies will offer things like this.

[via Unplugged Living]

Taxi’s Rooftop Wind Energy Charges Cell Phones

Blogging Doesn’t Pay For Most

Eh, what do you know, its hard to make money at blogging. Well duh. Blogging with an eye on breaking even is more than a lot of long hours searching for new info and then coming up with clever things to say about them. It’s about sorting through all the dreck out there on how to make money at this and discovering what works for you is. That’s hard. I’d like to know what it is, I can tell you that this site hardly makes anything at all. Far under what this study shows. Oh well, I enjoy it for the most part – its better than watching TV.

On a per month basis, 69% of our bloggers (those who previously indicated they participate in advertising programs) earn less than $20 per month from all income sources: advertising & sponsorship. It’s rather a pity that so many bloggers, of whom we have identified as being experienced, are not seeing any return for their efforts.

You can see from the graph that there is a real hurdle between $50 a month and anything above. From general experience, I know that blogs tend to go through several earnings ranges. You can be stuck on one range for a long time then jump up to the next without really experiencing a gradual incline in that direction.

We can see, for example, that there is a big barrier between earning $50 per month an anything greater than that – it would appear the next gap starts at $200.

Blog Advertising Earnings – Qumana Survey

Blogging Predicted by 19th Century Russian Prince

Could the entire blogging phenominom have been predicted as far back as 1837?

“Houses are connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to communicate,” Odoevsky wrote.

Even more interestingly, Odoevsky suggested every household would publish a kind of daily journal or newsletter and distribute it among selected acquaintances, a habit which Russian bloggers immediately recognized as blogging.

“We received a household journal from the local prime minister, which among other things invited us to his place for a reception,” one of Odoevsky’s characters tells a friend.

“The thing is that many households here publish such journals that replace common correspondence. Such journals usually provide information about the hosts’ good or bad health, family news, different thoughts and comments, small inventions, invitations to receptions.”

Maybe, but then again many people think that Nostradamus predicted modren day current events back in the 1500’s.

[via the Blog Herald ]
Blogging Predicted by 19th Century Russian Prince

Chinese Cellular Companies go ga-ga over Porn

Sino cell porn

Porn, the destroyer of Communism. 🙂

“However the Chinese government has some pretty strong controls over internet so the recent turmoil is quite understandable. Due to the excellent growth of high end cell phones in China, a lot of subscribers have signed in for getting internet access on their phones. They are now however being bombarded by sex sites which send them teasers in the form of Multimedia messages. These include some kind of sexy chat message along with a vulgar picture”.

Chinese Cellular Companies go ga-ga over Porn

I/O Brush

I/O Brush

I saw this tacked on the end of a Rocketboom episode a while back and thought it was a clever project. Students at MIT have built a paint brush that uses sampled video as its paint bucket.

I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by “picking up” and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special “ink” they just picked up from their immediate environment.

Dow does it work?

In our current prototype, the brush houses a small CCD video camera in its tip with a ring of white LEDs around it. Force sensors are also embedded inside of the brush, measuring the pressure that is getting applied to the bristles. When the brush touches a surface, the lights around the camera briefly turn on to provide supplemental light for the camera. During that time, the system grabs the frames from the camera and stores them in the program.

I like it and so did the judges at the competition. It won a gold award.

I/O Brush: The World as the Palette