quinta-feira, 05 de agosto de 2004

Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson dies. Legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson died Monday at the age of 95 in the South of France. Some web resources: his Foundation, Photology, Tete a Tete. Among his great works were portraits of Matisse, Bonnard, Braque, Rouault, Claudel (at the end of the Second World War). (Merci, Jean-Luc, who adds "His foundation website is so slow at the moment because just about everyone online in France is hitting it right now.") [Boing Boing] 10:21:11 AM    comment []

Fulltext of We the Media now online. The fulltext of Dan Gillmor's excellent new book, We the Media, about the way that technology is changing the media, is now online as a series of Creative Commons licensed PDFs. Link (via Dan Gillmor) [Boing Boing] 10:19:11 AM    comment []

Quake II open sourced "soon". John Carmack has quietly announced that he will release the Quake III engine as open source "soon." Link (via Waxy) [Boing Boing] 10:17:19 AM    comment []

Your Neighbor Totoro. Scott sez: "A replica of the Kusakabe residence, the house featured in Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 animated masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro, will be built for EXPO 2005 being held in Aichi, Japan, from 25 March - 25 September, 2005. It will be constructed within the woods of the Expo site using techniques of the early Showa era and will undergo artificial aging. The furnishings will also be made to reflect the movie as faithfully as possible within the woods of the Expo site. Visitors will be able to freely explore the house, looking inside closets and chests and touching things, just like the heroines Satsuki and Mei did in the film when they first arrived at the house. Wow. All we need now is a Cat-bus to get us there." Link Update Jason sez: Re: Totoro House, Scott writes "All we need now is a Cat-bus to get us there," which reminded me of the Studio Ghibli Museum in greater Tokyo that I had the pleasure of visiting 2 years ago. Among the features is a life-size catbus that children can play in. When I was there, the Cat Bus was in a giant ball pit! Visitors were prohibited from taking pictures of it, so maybe this image is dated. The museum itself is a fantastic building with spiral staircases and child size doorways. And the best part was the life size metal statue of a Laputa robot on the roof. [Boing Boing] 10:15:43 AM    comment []

Styrofoam houses coming to Afghanistan. Steve sez, "Just been reading Shadow Of The Mothaship from Cory's book A Place So Foreign, and was struck by the conceptual similarity between his foam houses of the future and the polystyrene houses being planned for Afghanistan." "That is the challenge," he said, "people have to accept it, that it's absolutely safe to live in a Styrofoam house, safer than in an adobe house. "Let them feel it. Let them dance on it. Let them see that it is strong." Link [Boing Boing] 10:09:08 AM    comment []

Body Electric. Skinplex is a new commercial technology that uses the human body as a conductor of data. According to an article in EE Times, the developers, German start-up Ident Technoogy AG, hope to compete with RFID, Bluetooth, and Near Field Communications (NFC) for some applications: Skinplex technology could be used between an identifier worn on the user's body and a receiver integrated into a car, for example. A distinct code is transmitted through touch, the receiver recognizes its dedicated, authorized sender, and the car door is opened, for example. This reminds me of the Personal Area Network research at MIT's Media Lab in the mid-1990s. Neil Gershenfeld and Thomas Zimmerman demonstrated a system where two people could trade electronic business cards by shaking hands. Link (via Carlo Longino at TheFeature) [Boing Boing] 10:06:31 AM    comment []

Defcon Wi-Fi shootout results. Wireless tech guru and pal 'o' BoingBoing Frank Keeney sends word of results from the annual WiFi shootout (an event at Defcon that seeks to determine just how far an 802.11 WLAN range can extend). And here are the winners, according to event organizer Dave: 3 teenagers from Ohio used Orinoco Gold 30 milliwatt USB adapters mounted on the feedpoints of two 10 foot dishes, and shot 55.1 miles. Yes, that's fifty-five point one miles! This is a new world's record for an unamplified shot! Complete details will be in a press release, which should come out in the next few days. Link to Wi-Fi Shootout home page. Update: My Wired News colleague Kim Zetter has more here: Link [Boing Boing] 10:04:50 AM    comment []

Mobile social software privacy. I wrote a piece for TheFeature.com about UC Berkeley Professor John Canny's work on designing privacy systems for mobile social software (MoSoSo) networks. Another method takes advantage of "the natural incentives that occur in peer communities, as manifest in things like Napster and Gnutella," says Canny. "It does seem within a community you have a few altruistic people who will, for whatever reason, help the community by providing the service, and from a privacy perspective you can do a lot if you can identify some users who are willing to leave a machine online that provides some privacy protection. The rest of the people in the community can use that machine. They don't have to trust the owner of the machine because the algorithm is set up so that the owner of that machine can't get access to that machine anyway, but if they provide this service, they can protect their peers' information from the service provider." Link [Boing Boing] 10:02:06 AM    comment []

Group wants to induce downloads. In today's Wired News, a story I filed about P2P Congress -- a coalition of geeks, academics, free-speech advocates, and others who are distributing videos of Senate hearings on the Induce Act to prove two points: that the law would be very damaging to the tech industry, and that peer-to-peer networks can serve the public. Link (Thanks for the screenshot, Gary!) [Boing Boing] 10:00:16 AM    comment []

Diskology for laptops Disk Jockey adds laptop adapters. Diskology Inc.'s Disk Jockey is a hardware device that functions as a disk cloning and diagnostic tool; it works with both Mac and PC-formatted disks. On Tuesday Diskology added adapters that enable the Disk Jockey to transfer and copy data from the 2.5-inch hard drives commonly used in laptops. Diskology offers the adapters in two formats: "Steve," a complete device that lets users plug in a 2.5-inch drive to the Disk Jockey, and "Fred," a more do-it-yourself kit. They're priced at US$35 and $10 respectively; the Disk Jockey costs $329. [MacCentral] 9:58:05 AM  Google It!  comment []

Intego offers WiFi Locator. VirusBarrier maker Intego is the latest company to throw their hat in the ring with a keychain-sized device designed to help road warriors quickly locate Wi-Fi networks. The US$29.95 WiFi Locator lets you know if you're in range of a 802.11b or 802.11g network with the press of a button. A four-position LED gauge will also let you know the relative signal strength of the network. [MacCentral] 9:56:37 AM    comment []

Macworld review: ArtMatic Voyager 1.1. U&I's landscape-generation application, ArtMatic Voyager 1.1.2, nearly caused me to miss my deadline. No, not because the program is difficult to understand or control -- a child could create breathtaking photo-realistic vistas with it. Voyager is just so much fun that hours evaporate as you happily tweak the scenery -- jumping from one location in a preset world to another, raising the altitude here, and making the water a bit more transparent there. [MacCentral] 9:54:57 AM    comment []

YokMap creates and edits image maps. Swedish developer Yok Software announced the release of YokMap 1.0 on Wednesday. You can use the shareware tool to open image maps created with virtually any application and edit them, saving the changes to the existing file. You can also copy and paste HTML code between YokMap and an editor and employ the application to import and export server-side CERN and NCSA image maps, resize multiple areas in an image map simultaneously, zoom in and out of the workspace, automatically load images from a server as needed and instantly convert your work to HTML code. A single YokMap license is US$10 while a site license is $100 -- system requirements call for Mac OS X v10.2 or higher. [MacCentral] 9:53:32 AM    comment []

IBM to Build Supercomputer for U.S. Army (Reuters). Reuters - International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N) said it had been selected to build a supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Defense that help develop advanced weapons for the army. [Yahoo! News - Technology] 9:50:52 AM    comment []

© Creative Commons 2004 Antonio C-Pinto. Last update: 12.09.04; 01:43:21.