The Super Falcon is a fast personal submarine. Mark Schrope described his test drive of the Super Falcon in Popular Mechanics.
The submarine can dive down to 1000 feet. It has a 29 mile range and a top speed of 12 mph. But what makes it really interesting is the design of the submarine. It has inverted wings which allows it to dive without the use of ballast.
While searching for a free solution for stitching some panoramic photos, I came across Microsoft Image Composite Editor. It is a free Microsoft Research project. Its user interface is simple and very easy to use, and the results are really good. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available.
Here is small version of a late afternoon panorama of Jacobs Bay, stitched with Microsoft Image Composite Editor.
Jacobs Bay panorama
It was inevitable really ;) Google has showed off the details of its upcoming OS, and it is ENTIRELY cloud-centric. A radical move and one that with lots of potential in the future. More details to be found here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
An in-depth look at the implications of Google Chrome OS has been written up by Ars Technica and can be found here: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/07/googles-chrome-os-coming-to-netbooks-in-late-2010.ars
Dia is an open source tool for drawing structured diagrams. I used it quite extensively recently, and I discovered a very useful feature. How selection of multiple objects take place depends on where you start to draw the selection box (the dotted line in the screenshot below).
Dia screenshot showing the selection area
If you start the selection at the bottom right corner such as in the screenshot above, the selection will include any object touched by the area. So the result of this operation would be as shown below.
Dia selection - area selected from bottom right to top left
However, if you start the selection by starting at the top left corner and dragging towards the bottom right… only the objects enclosed completely by the chosen area will be selected (as shown below).
Dia selection - area selected from top left to bottom right
If this description does not quite make sense… go ahead, try it out. :)
Acer has introduced its first multitouch laptop. The Aspire 5738PG is a high-end laptop with a multitouch display. But that is not the only new feature of the Aspire 5738 family. The Aspire 5738DG has a TriDef 3D screen!
We have started a list of the free and/or open source software tools that we have found useful. It can be found on our Software Tools page.
While wandering around the endlessly entertaining world that is the Internet, I came across Datamancer’s stunning Steampunk Laptop.
Datamancer's Steampunk Laptop
The other items on his website are equally spectacular. For example, have a look at the Brass and Marble LCD mod and the Opti-Transcripticon.
Microsoft announced Project Natal at E3 2009 (see also the Wikipedia article on Project Natal, as well as TIME Magazine’s article). It enables interaction with the Xbox 360 without a controller. It uses a monochrome video camera for movement tracking and a microphone for voice commands.
After seeing it on TIME’s list of the 50 best inventions of 2009, I decided to read a bit more about this project. And I soon found out that, according to MCV and PC World, the release date for Project Natal has been leaked a few days ago. According to these sources, the release date is set for November 2010.
TIME magazine has published a list containing the 50 best inventions of 2009. The top listed invention is NASA’s Ares Rockets. At number 48 on the list is the Fujifilm 3D camera mentioned that I wrote about last month. :)
Neural networks are notoriously difficult to actually get working properly. If you are now thinking “that is not true!”, you are either a sad, lonely individual, or you have read Herman Tulleken’s tutorial on implementing neural nets. :) In his blog post 15 Steps to Implement a Neural Net, he provides a lot of very useful information about actually getting your neural network to work.