Blood, Sweat and Photographic Tears

Greg du Toit contracted several diseases and parasites while spending months half-submerged in a Kenyan watering hole. But he also captured a rare and stunning look of the wildlife he encountered nose-to-lens.

“This narration documents my pursuit of that ever illusive frame, which became an obsession that lasted a total of eight months and took me along an eventful journey, during which I contracted numerous parasites (some quite possibly unknown to science), not to mention the thousands upon thousands of insect bites.”

The full story is at Gizmodo

Remote Control DSLR BeetleCam Goes On Ground-Level Photo Safari

Through Gizmodo

Some wildlife photographers spend months immersed in muck to capture the perfect shot. The Burrard-Lucas brothers decided to let an RC car do the dirty work. Their BeetleCam came face-to-face with lions, elephants, and buffalo and captured these stunning shots:

The BeetleCam is the ingenuous creation of Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas, two acclaimed UK wildlife photographers who wanted to get up close and personal with some of Africa's most dangerous animals (with a wide-angle lens, natch).

They strapped a Canon EOS 400D on top of a four-wheel drive buggy and rigged up one controller to operate the entire contraption. The photographs, recovered only after the BeetleCam was "promptly mauled, and carried off into the bush" by a pride of lions, show the animals from a unique, "I'm-a-small-rodent-about-to-get-snacked-on" perspective.

You can see more shots and read further about the BeetleCam's adventures on the brothers' site. [Burrard Lucas via Wired]

Netbook Hack For Smooth HD Videos

One obvious drawback of the Atom based netbooks that they cannot play back HD video smoothly. Actually they cannot play back any higher bitrate video without framedrops/slideshow effect. It is even worse with flash videos which use more resources compared to a normal .avi container ones.

With a small hack the solution is here! You cannot squeeze out any more power from those weak Atom processors, but you can snap in a Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator card (BCM970012) to a PCI Express Mini Card slot.

Unfortunately there are few netbooks out there with an empty PCI-E Mini Card Slot, but you can sacrifice your WLAN card and can replace it for example with an Edimax EW-7711UTn miniature USB stick:

The whole replacement process in an MSI Wind is detailed at tech.icrontic

It seems that at the moment these cards are backordered, and you can find them on the ebay only around $100 - 4 times higher than the usual price.

Edit (10/08/2011)
The card is available again for around $30!

Meeting Wolfram|Alpha

My friend, Maciek brought my attention to this amazing data mining project, the Wolfram|Alpha. I already fiddled with it for a couple of hours and want to know it more- it is really worth it.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/