Wiggle Your Brain
There’s been quite a lot lately about 3D TV. Sky is busy trialling a service and several manufacturers are coming out with products in the next few months. I have to say I’m experiencing a certain amount of deja vu, having witnessed at least a dozen 3D TV launches in the past 25 years, but maybe this is the one…
Anyway, pretty well all of the technologies on offer require the viewer to wear glasses, usually either polarised, or LCD shuttered, which really isn’t much of an advance from the old green/red tinted glasses or Anaglyph method. There’s also a lot of work being done on lenticular sceens, which displays multiple images through a series of microscopic prisms so that each eye sees a slightly different view, and you don’t need glasses. But here’s another method that doesn’t rely on special screens or glasses. It’s called Wiggle Stereoscopy and it simply displays two images, shot on cameras spaced an eye’s width apart and shown in rapid succession. The 3D effect is quite good but the slow flash rate probably means it’ll never be much more than a curiosity, but make up your own mind. There’s some examples and links at: http://wiggle.sourceforge.net/, plus a facility to create your own wiggle stereographs and you’ll find the first Wiggle 3D music video from Blue Roses on You Tube.
Windows 7 Life Theme
Windows 7 users that have been keeping an eye on Softpedia already know that Microsoft has been releasing a steady flow of personalization content. The latest Windows 7 theme made available by the Redmond company is titled Life, and comes courtesy of the Discovery channel and BBC.
The theme pack in question is available for download, as many others, free of charge via the Windows Personalization Gallery, the company’s central hub for offering themes designed to allow customers to customize their Windows 7 desktops.
“Bizarre, beautiful nature from Discovery Channel,” the short description of the Life theme, which will leave users with a feeling that the images should have been accompanied by more information, reads. Of course, the same is not the case with many themes on the Windows Personalization Gallery, but this specific example feels like it needs the added touch of the Bing wallpaper hotspots.
Read more
The Mesmerising Blob of Infinity
Quite frankly, these days’ screensavers are a waste of time. LCD monitors do not suffer from the ‘screen burn’ effect that affected old style CRT monitors when left to display the same image for hours on end. That said, a blank or simple floating logo screensaver on a black background can provide a small power saving when a PC is left idle (though there are much better ways to achieve it). On the other hand password protecting a screensaver is a handy way of keeping prying eyes off your PC when it is left unattended for any length of time. Well, that’s my excuse for mentioning Zoom Mania. It’s a wacky, trance-inducing fractal blob thingy that floats around the screen giving off streams of smaller blobs that appear to disappear into infinity. You can move it around, zoom in and out and do all kinds of weird and wonderful things to the image. Try it after a couple of pints and I guarantee you won’t get any work done. It’s freeware but when you install it watch out for very kind offers to load browser toolbars and change your home page, unless of course you want it to…
Live Photos of Nokia 6790
The Nokia Mako was spotted into the wild only a week ago, when most of AT&T’s roadmap for 2009 surfaced on Engadget, and the handset already made it into a series of live pictures that BGR has recently published.
Nokia 6790, codenamed Mako, comes to the market with a sliding QWERTY keypad and with 3G capabilities, and it seems that it will be heading towards AT&T’s lineup in a slightly different design than what anyone would expect from a Nokia mobile phone. Even so, there are a lot of features that remind us of any other handset coming from the manufacturer.
Interestingly enough, it seems that the new Nokia Mako will not come to the market as a high-end device, as one would expect, given its looks, but, BGR says, it rather fits in line with mobile phones like the Samsung Propel, LG Xenon and Pantec Matrix. Read more
Nokia E71 smartphone review
Nokia’s E-range is aimed firmly at corporate users, with the E71 offering a full QWERTY keypad to make emailing easier, and loads of features that help to make it a great out of office tool.
Build quality is among the best that we’ve seen to date on a smartphone, with aluminium used on the front and rear to create an incredibly stylish yet robust finish. The most surprising aspect of this handset is just how thin it is, however, making it appear a lot smaller than it actually is.
It’s also narrower than rivals such as RIM’s Blackberry Bold, leading to a keyboard that may be too cramped for some users. Raised centres to the keys make it easy to get up a good typing rhythm, however, striking a good compromise between portability and usability. Read more
NVIDIA GeForce 181.71 Graphics Drivers for Windows 7
NVIDIA has made available for download a new set of graphics drivers designed to make GeForce GPU play nice with the latest public development milestone of the next iteration of the Windows client. The new GeForce graphics drivers tailored to Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 went live on March 2, 2009, and are now up for grabs. NVIDIA explained the need to offer graphics drivers for Windows 7 at this early stage due to the high number of GeForce customers that installed the Beta Build 7000 release of the operating system. Read more
Unforgettable USB Drive
If the media is to be believed Government employees are a forgetful lot, losing laptops and leaving CDs and USB drives containing sensitive data all over the place. It’s easily done; though and short of chaining a USB drive to your wrist sooner or later you are going to inadvertently leave one plugged into a PC. Here’s a simple little freeware program that might help jog your memory. It’s called Flash Drive Reminder and all you have to do is download the zip, extract it and copy a couple of small files to your drive. In fact there are two versions, Standard displays a reminder message when you plug the drive into a PC, and another when you log off or shut down the PC; the Quiet version just displays the logoff and shutdown messages.
40-Hour Laptop in Pipeline
Remember the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project? As you may recall the idea was to develop a laptop, costing less than $100, which would be given away to children in undeveloped countries. One unexpected spin-offs was the creation of a consumer market for compact low-cost mini laptops, or ‘netbooks’ typified by the Asus Eee PC and Acer Aspire One.
One of the brains behind OLPC was Mary Lou Jepsen (pictured right) who is the former head of display technologies at Intel, and she was responsible for the OLPC’s super low power, sunlight readable display. Now she has a new startup company, called Pixel Qi, with plans to start shipping a highly efficient screen, similar to the one in the OLPC, but for more conventional laptops. Read more
NVIDIA GPUs in Toshiba Laptop
Now, wait a minute, and say that again, please. Could it be that three NVIDIA graphics processors are powering one of Toshiba’s portable computer systems? If so, this is happening at a time when most desktop computer systems are basically powered by a single graphics processor, while the majority of portable PCs are featured with integrated graphics. This should be interesting, at least if you are one of those late-night LAN party gamers looking for the very best in terms of computing experience.
Toshiba is known for offering some of the most interesting portable computer systems on the market but, this time, the company appears to have really outdone itself, with a bit of help from the Santa Clara, California-based green team. Read more
Conquer Your Colour Scheme
calibrize
I get a lot of emails and letters asking why the colours in printed photos sometimes don’t match what’s on the screen? Sometimes it’s the printer, but more often than not it’s simply that the monitor hasn’t been properly set up. Monitor calibration is essential if you work with graphics or photo editing software but how many of us ever take the time to adjust our monitors, apart from twiddling the brightness and contrast controls? Not many, I bet, but there’s no excuse any more. A freeware program called Calibrize takes you gently by the hand, and in three simple steps helps you to adjust your display; from start to finish it only takes around 2 minutes and the new settings or colour ‘profile’ is then saved and applied every time you start Windows. It’s also handy for those who, like me, use two monitors, making it easy to accurately match the two displays.
