Archive for the 'Tech' category

Usually, robots you see in real life are hardly able to move around or to behave… like a robot. This one is all the more impressive. It moves, it walks, it runs on four legs adapting itself to nearly any kind of rough terrain as well as a mule, a dog, or a man (on all fours, I told you!).

BigDog from Boston Dynamics is all that, it has been paid by the US Army Pentagon (through DARPA) and despite its name (Big Dog) it makes me irresistibly think about a big fly (nice buzzing quadruped) or an AT-AT robot out of the Star Wars movies.

Thanks Roland for showing me this weird electronic animal.

The newest fad about search engines is Cuil (say “cool”). It’s been created by people from Google and is set to replace Google (or is it?)

I tried it and I could not think of a reason to use it. The biggest problem is that it does not find anything useful. I may be a little egocentric, but I tried my name and I could not even find the roumazeilles.net web site in the first results. I know that a search engine is not supposed to replace typing correctly addresses, but I did not expect to find page after page of results pointing to ***old*** pages relating to my software development of 5 years ago. All these pages where not updated in the last half-decade… They are pretty much redundant and contain a lot of crap around download links.

The most regular web sites I work for, the papers I signed where really difficult to find in the stack of results while they are supposed to be the most pertinent information concerning my (not-so) important little person.

Furthermore, I learned that the servers crashed several times during the first day of operation.

I’d say: wait for the next implementation and stick to Google.

Several times, I talked about the limitation to photo image quality by light diffraction but I failed to go into the details. To the general request of one reader who asked, I will try to give some explanations to better understand why the digital photographer must absolutely take that into account to make better pictures and to choose its camera.

The first thing to know is that light diffraction is a very general phenomenon and quite natural. It’s been a long time already that scientists and engineers noticed that -on the one hand- light rays are slightly deflected while running through a very small orifice and -on the other hand- two light rays can interact with each other on the condition that they are have very paths nearly perfectly parallel. This is even one of the most significant and founding elements of quantum physics. When you combine both those phenomenons, you will notice that light going through a very small opening like camera lens diaphragm will produce not exactly the expected neat circle but a more irregular and circular shape that you can see in the illustrative figure that goes along this paragraph: Usually named an Airy disk or Airy disc.

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Somewhere in Malaysia, there is this astonishing bridge.

I guess that most people would be a little unsure walking onto it, not really knowing how it holds in place.

All details at Deputy Dog.

Even better than going to Africa, you can have your own lion pet, cute lion cub at home.

Furry and reacting to its environment, this is really a cool robot toy.

http://www.gizoo.co.uk/Products/ToysGames/RadioControl/WowweeAliveLion.htm

£49.95 (about $100 USD or 75€) in pre-order.

I don’t intend to go too deep into this kind of extreme photography right now, but I wanted to indicate two news items that could be reflecting on the continuous trend toward larger sensors and additional pixels:

• 50 Megapixel Hasselblad H3DII-50: 36×48mm CCD sensor.
• Kodak Unveils 50-Megapixel CCD

Again, those people are keeping pixel size around 6µm (a good target to keep diffraction low and manageable).

With the arrival of several Full Frame SLRs on the market, people start wondering what they should buy or what they should wait. Actually, we can expect to see very real price differences, so I thought it would be good to make a summary for us:

As you can notice, it is expected that the Sony Alpha 900 will be targetting low prices despite it’s 24MP sensor (or it will have a little Alpha 800 brother, while the Alpha 900 would shoot for a higher price point). But the current Canon EOS 5D seems to be an astonishingly good bargain (while stocks last).

This is the question asked by ArsTechnica in a confrontation between the latest of the fast-running graphics cards from nVidia and a few older cards. The conclusion is hard on them: The price is not right. It’s better to purchase a Palit 9800 GX2 for 150 dollars less. They even insist that all is in the price. You’d have to admit that 500+€ or $600+ cards could difficultly attract more than the most manic gamers.

• AceBackup: Free Windows backup
• Ad-Aware 2008: Free anti-spyware
• StarBurn: Free disc burning, audio ripping utility (download Nero for free)
• LogoEase: Create your own logo for free
• AutoGK: Rip your DVDs to DivX and Xvid formats
• Opera 9.5: an excellent replacement for Internet Explorer
• Comodo Friewall Pro Free: Free Windows firewall for Windows XP
• Antivir: Free anti-virus for Windows
• Avast: Free anti-virus for Windows
• AVG 8.0 free: Free anti-virus and anti-spyware for Windows
• Replace data backup with data sync, thanks to these articles from Tom’s Hardware: [1] and [2]

Have a good Summer working on installing and testing all these.

With all this talk about existing Full-Frame photo cameras (Canon EOS 5D, Nikon D3) and about possibly upcoming new ones (Sony Alpha 900, Canon EOS 5D Mk II or some other similar name, etc.) many photographers happy with their existing digital equipment are wondering: “What’s all the fuss about?”

And it’s a good question to ask, but the answer goes with some of the comments about sensor resolution. About the same people who noticed that resolution is not all that counts (despite what is said or implied by some of the major brands on this market) also understand that going Full Frame is a possibly very important decision for the attentive digital photographer.

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While it is difficult to find any ground for these speculations, people keep repeating that Nikon is about to announce simultaneously a Nikon D700 high-end DSLR camera and a lower-end Nikon D90 to provide an able DSLR for most photographers.

It seems that most of the original information comes from Thom Hogan’s web site and is fed by countless comments on web forums. However, we saw recently Chasseur d’Image supporting this rumour within its own Nikon D700 rants.

The most common set of characteristics and features seems to be:

• 12 MP sensor in APS-C size (x1.5 crop factor)
• 14-bit A/D conversion and image management
• dust-cleaning sensor
• 3″ LCD with LiveView
• 5 fps shutter bursts

But it looks a lot like a mere marketing evaluation of what Nikon needs to put in its SLR camera range to fight on the current market and to make it fully able to cover all kinds of photo customers. Everybody seems to expect this to be the feature list of a $1300 camera to reach under the current D300 (or the upcoming D700).

Will this be part of an launch event that Nikon seems readying for the very first days of July (maybe 1st of July)?