Just add talent: iPhone app makes you a rock star

Utter a few melodic syllables into your iPhone, and eight tracks later, you have a real-sounding rock and roll song. That's the promise of Voice Band, a $3 iPhone app that bridges the gap between the pathetic pantomime of Guitar Hero/Rock Band and actually playing a real instrument.

In the video above, the guy makes it seem easy, but you might notice that he does have a modicum of musical talent. We like that, because no matter what the instrument, talent is still necessary to make music.

The neat thing here: Pure talent shines through — no pesky practicing, preparation or dues-paying required.

-- from DVICE

What would it look like if Earth had rings?

Animator Ray Prol came up with a great idea: What if the earth had rings like Saturn's? Suppose those rings were aligned with the equator. They'd be visible from east to west, all over the world. He then shows us exactly what the sky would look like from various locations on the planet. The result? What a wonderful world this would be!

-- from DVICE

The best unboxing video ever

Ninjas unbox the Nexus One phone

Today was a quiet, dull news day, until I found this little screen of goodness. Stop-motion animator Patrick Boivin has come up with the best unboxing video I think I've ever seen — and he's showing us Google's Nexus One, courtesy of a trio of ninjas.

Using katana swords and nunchuks (but none of those scary star thingies), the Red, the White and the Black rip open the packaging and then have some fun with the phone and all its accoutrements, such as the USB cable and charger. Now all they need to do is get medieval on Google's phone supportpeople.

-- from DVICE

This Geek Clock can only be read by rocket scientists

Well, time to turn in my geek card. I can't make heads or tails of this Geek Clock, which has a crazy equation for every hour of the day. Lucky for us (you're with me on this, right?), the product listing says each clock comes with a cheat sheet.
A Geek Clock can be yours for only $25. Bonus points if you decipher any of the glyphs above (working them out, I mean — obviously all the answers are right there).
UncommonGoods, via GeekSugar

-- from DVICE
Cheat Sheet (included with each clock):
1 - Legendre's constant is a mathematical constant occurring in a formula conjectured by Adrien-Marie Legendre to capture the asymptotic behavior of the prime-counting function. Its value is now known to be exactly 1.
2 - A joke in the math world: An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says, "You're all idiots," and pours two beers.
3 - A unicode character XML "numeric character reference."
4 - Modular arithmetic, also known as clock arithmetic, is a system of arithmetic for integers, where numbers "wrap around" after they reach a certain value. The modular multiplicative inverse of 2 (mod 7) is the integer /a/ such that 2*/a/ is congruent to 1 modulo 7.
5 - The Golden Mean...reworked a little.
6 - Three factorial (3*2*1=6)
7 - A repeating decimal that is proven to be exactly equal to 7 with Cauchy's Convergence Test.
8 - Graphical representation of binary code.
9 - An example of a base-4 number, which uses the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3 to represent any real number.
10 - A Binomial Coefficient, also known as the choose function. 5 choose 2 is equal to 5! divided by (2!*(5-2)!)
11 A hexadecimal, or base-16, number.
12 - a radical

'Miracle on the Hudson' jet for sale

Get yourself a piece of history with that US Airways Airbus A320-214 that Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger ditched in the Hudson a year ago. The remains of Flight 1549 are up for auction at Chartis Aviation Salvage. Once you've reattached the wings and cleaned it up a bit, it looks like it's in pretty good shape, albeit with "severe water damage throughout airframe," and "impact damage to the underside of aircraft."

You'd have trouble flying this crate (especially since they've stripped out the avionics and removed the engines), but it sure would make a spectacular museum piece, another airplane hotel, clubhouse, or writer's lair. We're thinking US Airways should just give this to Sully, setting it up in his backyard as a trophy of his extreme pilotude. Or maybe a zoo would buy it, filling it with Canada geese for a unique aviary exhibit.

Chartis, via CrunchGear

-- Story from and more pictures at DVICE

How to Replace a Lost Cellphone Charger (For Free)

From an AskReddit member: "Go to a hotel and say you think you lost it there. It's the #1 most left behind item at hotels, so most places have a big bin filled with every phone charger imaginable. [Reddit]

UPDATE:

I just received this note from a reader on the subject:

"I work for the second largest conference hotel in my city. You have no idea the size box we have of chargers left behind. 90 percent are idiot blackberry chargers. This works 100% of the time, we never verify that anyone stays here we just let them go shopping for there charger. Hell we even will give people a charger if they call down to the front desk and say they forgot theirs!"

Nice!

(from Gizmodo)

Bizarro

The Daily What

-- An inspiring story of a great guy from The Inquirer! :)

One man writes Linux drivers for 235 USB webcams

Face to Face Michel, the pipe-smoking French Linux guru

By Fernando Cassia

Monday, 30 April 2007, 16:40

A LONE HOBBYIST programmer sitting at his home in France is responsible for adding 235 USB webcams to the list of those supported by Linux. He tells the INQUIRER about this often unknown and unrecognised achievement.

Near three years ago, I purchased the cheapest USB webcams - actually, pair - I could find at the time, without taking into consideration whether those webcams worked with Linux or not. I ran one desktop PC with Win2K and one of the webcams was plugged to that box. I quickly found out several things: first, "Made in China" webcams surely are cheap, but that comes at a price of often having no support web site, no physical address of the manufacturer, and no updates to its drivers. The Win2K drivers for the "DigiGR8" 301P had apparently a memory leak under Win2k, forcing me to reboot the win2k box on a daily basis. Basically it just stopped working after a dozen hours of continuous use, and rebooting was the only solution.

I then concluded I had enough with Win2K and decided to install my Linux distro of choice - back then Sun Microsystem's ill-fated Java Desktop System for Linux R2. It soon became evident that the device was a power-sucking brick as far as Linux compatibility was concerned. After finding the chipset used by the webcam and writing to both the chipset manufacturer and the webcam builder and receiving no reply whatsoever, I was on my own. I asked on the newsgroups, and was told that the ZC0301 chipset, manufactured by "Z-Star Corp" -a firm now apparently going by the name Vimicro Corp- was on the "Linux (in)compatibility list".

All 235 low-cost webcams supported in Linux thanks to... this man

Imagine my surprise when, by pure chance, I found out last week that there are now Linux drivers for hundreds of those cheap "Made in China" webcams with strange brand names and a Vimicro chipset inside. The surprise was more shocking when I realized that drivers for 235 webcams - at the time of this writing - are the work of a single unknown hero who works from his home in France, does so with no corporate sponsorship, and what's even more outrageous, very few people know about the existence of those drivers and about the person behind them.

Project web page showing some of the supported USB Webcam chipsets

More webcams supported

...near the end of the list.

FC: Who are you and what do you do?
MX: My name is Michel Xhaard, I am a Physician and work in Doppler and Ultrasound imaging for years. I am now near 60 years old.

FC: Interesting, as it kind of breaks the "young school kit" stereotype of the Linux advocates. When did you start in this project and why?.
MX: I started working on the "spca50x" project in 2003, when I bought two webcams for my daughters for Christmas but there was no support under Linux for those.

FC: So you decided to take matters in your own hands. How did you know where to start?
MX: After asking the gPhoto team, Till Adam (http://hubbahubba.de/) and Thomas G. (http://home.tiscali.dk/tomasgc/labtec/) provided me with some useful help to start. Few weeks later we had full support of the Sunplus spca504b chipset in Gphoto -userspace picture support- and Spca50x for video streaming.

FC: Why "GSPCA"? What does it stand for?
MX: "Generic Software Package for Camera Adapters" :)

FC: So how did the ice ball grow to reach today's 253+ webcams supported with several different chipsets?
MX: Starting with the Sunplus chipset support, I realised that most code in the core driver could be "shareable" to support several webcam chipset(s). That is why the "GSPCA" drivers now support over 250 webcams from different chipset vendors.

Linux application GnomeMeeting (Netmeeting clone, now renamed Ekiga)
detecting USB webcam

FC: May I ask you why you decided to host your project web site on Free.FR? Don't you think Sourceforge.Net or other such OSS project repository would be more appropriate? What if Free.FR disappears?. In a sense, don't you think it's as risky as hosting an OSS project on Geocities or Tripod?
MX: I like "free.fr" because it is, well, free :) Have you seen the same content in Geocities.com or tripod.com ??. Check out ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/
Also, you can be sure that "free.fr" will not disappear. I personally don't like Sourceforge.net because it can be at times too slow, and there's a lot of dead projects ...

FC: Are you aware that your site is not very well indexed?. I came across not one but three pages claiming that the ZC0301 was not supported, or that there was a Linux driver project, which got abandoned (true, but outdated). Don't you think that having a domain name would help?
MX: Yes.

FC: How do you feel knowing that there are a few really big corporations with million dollar budgets all peddling Linux, and you do all this critical work of helping Linux gain webcams support -by the hundreds!-, yet not a single one of those big firms has decided to formally sponsor your work?
MX: my work is not "Linux Kernel centred" my goal is to provided video input support for Linux users, and I am not sure that these big companies are interested in the end user :).

FC: well, I think they should. Google does, for instance, since they bought this Nordic firm days ago which does cross-platform video conferencing software in Java. So if they want everyone to do video conferencing regardless of OS, drivers suddenly is an issue. OK, you won't say it but I will: shame on RedHat, Novell, Linspire, and IBM, to name just a few, for not caring about this. Is there anything you want to add?.
MX: Yes, that despite the old picture you are going to use on the article, notice that I stopped smoking in June 2006. :) [I'm sure Mr. Ballmer will be sending you tons of tobacco after reading this article]. :)

FC: Thanks very much Michel for your time, and for the drivers as well. I see that the ZC0301P chipset used in my "DigiGR8" webcam is listed, but I haven't been able to make my webcam work yet, so let's cut the chat and start the (virtual) hair-pulling exercise.
MX: You're welcome. µ

L'INQs
Webcam chipsets supported by Michel's drivers
Download GSPCA (click on the logo of your Linux distro)
$25 DigiGR8 laptop webcam (vendor confirmed ZC0301P chipset)
Donate a webcam to Michel if you want to have a particular model or new chipset supported

See also
Open Source, the only weapon against "planned obsolescence"
Nokia's inexpensive UMPC alternative is "future-proof"

Connections of Strangers Returns Camera to Owner

An interesting article about social networks, connections, and goodwill. 

The original location is here.


The following is part of our series on different ways Facebook is used across the world. You can read previous posts in this series here. If you have a story you'd like to share with us, please submit it here.


Nobody likes to lose a valuable item—be it a wedding ring down the disposal or a pair of shoes forgotten under a hotel bed. Even more frustrating, though, is the loss of a camera: Not only is the object itself gone, but so too are the irreplaceable memories captured on it.

Knowing that frustration, Danny Cameron set out on a quest through Facebook to find the owner of a lost camera he found along the side of the road while vacationing on the Greek island of Mykonos last summer.

"In theory, with six degrees of separation, the whole world can be reached," said Danny, of Sydney, Australia. "I decided to see whether the world of online resources could track down the owner."

With that goal in mind, Danny started the Facebook group "Needle in a haystack". He uploaded photos from the camera to the group, with the hope that members would recognize someone they know among the strangers.

The group, which started on Oct. 17, grew virally as members faithfully invited others and posted notes of encouragement and thanks to one another for their attempted good deed. Within two weeks, the group ballooned to 235,000 people strong.

On the morning of Nov. 3, Danny received a Facebook message with astonishing news—his social experiment had worked. Some of the people in the photos recognized themselves, explaining that they were tourists who had been in Mykonos the day before Danny. The camera's owner, they revealed, was a woman living on the coast of France. Amazed at the human chain that had been created to find her, the woman was ecstatic to retrieve her missing item.

As for Danny, the success of his campaign led to a newfound respect for the power of social connections and human kindness.

"My simple act found that it is possible to be a noncommercial, nondenominational person just performing a random act of kindness, and I was happy to find (nearly) 250,000 other people who shared that philosophy," he remarked. "If the whole online community could be optimistic, full of hope and good will, then the possibilities for our capabilities would know no bounds."

A Fresh Start

I decided to revive this experimental tech blog of mine. I opened it as a collecting place of my Internet digs, automated sharing, etc. The intention didn't change, and recently I have more time as I don't blog much to our travel blog: since we settled down not much worth to mention happening to us. But since I read dozens of mostly tech related articles every week, I think there are a few you'd be interested.

Enjoy! :)