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I was thinking about this yesterday: using a cameraphone as a scanner:
NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have devloped technology which uses movie recordings to produce high quality images, on par with those of a scanner. This technology will be aimed at cellular phones and video cameras.My guess is this is a little way off, but that will be seriously useful. Even if it could just do business cards (with some OCR) it would rule.
The technique involves recording a part of the subject to a movie, while moving the camera; the "Mosaicing Technology" analyzes the moving image and estimates the three-dimensional position of the subject, and under the supervision of the "Ultra Resolution Technology," the joining points of the image are deleted, thereby optimizing it so that even low resolution cameras can produce scanner like output. In other words, even cellular phones and video cameras can produce high quality images.
If you have a TiVo, you probably want to take this survey. And even if you don't, you might want to check it out to get some ideas about what new features TiVo might be working on. Wow. Seems like it might become a first class citizen on your home network. (You've got a home network, right? Well, soon...)
(via PVRblog)
Clever ATM scam.
Personally, I'd like to get a text message any time a financial transaction supposedly involving myself takes place. Is there anything like that (with bank cards and/or credit cards?)
Day two of jury duty. I was selected for a civiil case yesterday, and we heard opening arguments in the late afternoon. Doesn't seem like it will be a real long one. But I doubt it will finish today.
I had my treo in the morning yesterday, which was nice because we were just sitting around. Surfing the web sure beats reading the paper which is what everyone else was doing. Pretty hard to read the paper for four hours. But when I came back from lunch they confiscated it at security because of the camera! I felt like they were taking away my super powers. I guess it doesn't matter so much today since we should be busy for most of it.
Just doing my part.
The SD card in my Treo popped out last week. I'm pretty sure it happened in my apartment (obviously the party had nothing to do with this.) So I figured it would turn up eventually, but now I'm starting to think that won't happen. Bummer. Those things are not cheap.
The result, not counting me losing my mobile mp3 playing ability that I really didn't use too much, is that I can't email my photos to the server. I need the expansion card for that. So the photolog is not getting any love these days.
Excellent. This is what we need. Matsushita is developing a hybrid image sensor chip that combines the best qualities of CCD image sensors (good quality, good low light abilities) with the best qualities of CMOS image sensors (low cost, low power consumption.)
For high-end digital camera and camcorder users, 1.3 and 2MP is a little bit of a disappointment since it will have no immediate impact here. What it does mean is that a whole new wave of higher image quality camera phones, X10 wireless cameras, and other low-power devices should start appearing on the market soon.Woot! 2MP camera phones with reasonable battery life. I. Cannot. Wait.
More technical details are here at EE Times.
Cool concept sketches of a hypothetical PDA / notebook combo with a folding screen. I've thought about something similar before. The tradeoff might be worth it: a much smaller folded size unit in exchange for a very thin seam down the middle of your display.
Texas Instruments is about to make wireless capabilities much easier for manufacturers to add to their products:
This will allow TI to add a cellular radio right into its DSP processors which are used by companies like Nokia and Palm. (Well digital CMOS radios have been around for a while, but it has been very hard to make them commercially thus far.)
This digital CMOS radio would cost an additional 35 cents and will basically do three major things: cut the cost of handsets drastically, reduce the power consumption hugely, and if all goes well basically make bluetooth, Wi-Fi and all future wireless PAN and LAN technologies fairly easy to incorporate into the handsets.
Apparently Nokia is adding Python support to series 60 mobile phones. Being able to script a mobile phone is one of my dreams (yeah, I know, but you take what you can get.) It's something I didn't expect any of these companies to make possible. Is this really going to be open to everybody, or will you have to be some sort of registered developer?
Yet another reason to learn Python.