iPhone turned into interactive children's book – Apple / Mac Software Updates, News, Apps | Geek.com

iPhone turned into interactive children's book – Apple / Mac Software Updates, News, Apps | Geek.com

Video to Panorama

Panoramas are neat.

Taking lots of stills and stitching them together is tedious.

But in one continuous pirouette, you can make a video that contains a panorama.

So I want a tool that will take a short video taken while turning in a circle and convert it into a panoramic photo.

The preceding links may be the ingredients (for a python programmer like me).

Stitch Panorama

Stitch Panorama: a GIMP Plug-in

Stich Panorama is a plug-in for the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) which takes digital images and overlays one atop the other to make a panorama. With multiple applications of Stitch Panorama, any number of images can be combined into a large panorama. Features include image blending, color balance, and distortion matching. The above image was stitched together from four separate images. Try it yourself, the images are in the example directory.

The Stich Panorama plug-in gives give you a lot of control over how the final panorama is stitched together. You select the features to correlate in the images, how the blending is to be done, and how the colors are to be matched. Extensive control over the final panorama was a major design goal. There are other, more automated, tools available (see below), but I prefer to have as much control as possible over the stitching process. The final panorama uses a rectilinear projection, well suited to panoramas that do not cover an excessive field-of-view. However, the rectilinear projection will not work well for panoramas that cover a full 360 degrees.

Stich Panorama is written in the Python language and requires that your GIMP has python support compiled in.

Extract Still Image Sequences from Video Clips with AVCutty - Digital Inspiration

Extract Still Image Sequences from Video Clips with AVCutty - Digital Inspiration: "� AVCutty can export the entire movie or a part of the video to a series of bitmaps or picture frames which can later be printed as creating Flipbooks - a book of still images where you just flip the pages quickly and some animation appears to play."

PyMedia - Python module for avi, mp3, dvd, wma, ogg processing - pymedia

PyMedia - Python module for avi, mp3, dvd, wma, ogg processing - pymedia

	PyMedia is a Python module available on Linux, Windows and cygwin and features the following: Encode/decode audio compressed streams. The following formats are available: MP3,MP2 WMA( v1 and v2 ) AC3 OGG( optional with vorbis library ) AAC( optional with faad library ) Encode/decode video compressed streams. The following formats supported: AVI( divx, xvid ), generic file format, carrying many possible streams ASF( wmv1/2 ), generic file format, carrying many possible streams MPEG1,2( VCD, SVCD, DVD compatible ) Sound output through the OSS / Waveout. Mutlichannel for digital output. Sound input through the OSS / Wavein. Sound mixer manipulation, list all lines, set/get values of every line. Sound manipulation classes such as SpectrAnalyzer, Resampler. Video manipulation to convert video frames between YUV and RGB formats Direct CD/DVD ROM access to read audio/video tracks in a raw format. This way you can play Audio, DVD and Video CDs using the same interface. Visit the documentation section to find out more on interface. You may also take a look at examples directory in tarball distribution or just browse the tutorial to have more confidence on what you can do with PyMedia. Download the recent tarball from here.

Center for Student Innovation Debut

YNN Coverage of GreenRide / BikeSummit

GreenRide BikeSummit preview on Channel 8

Fwd: Greenride Organizing Committee

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <bradfreeman@frontiernet.net>
Date: Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 5:33 PM
Subject: Re: Greenride Organizing Committee
To: Jon Schull <jschull@gmail.com>
Cc: Ricardo Louis <rlouis.engineer@gmail.com>

Jon and Ricardo-

What a lovely afternoon for a ride on the Greenway!

If the purpose of this whole event is to raise awareness of the trail,
you've caused at least one new person to ride it. I'd ridden many times before from Genesee Valley Park to downtown, but had never ridden out to RIT before on the Lehigh Valley Trail. It makes RIT seem a whole lot closer to downtown then I'd ever thought before. It's a nice ride even with road tires!

There are a dozen flyers in page protectors along the trail now. They are mostly attached to Genesee River Trail signs and the gates at road intersections on the Lehigh Valley Trail. Some pictures are attached.

Please let me know if there's anything else that I can help you with in getting ready for Saturday. I plan to drive out to RIT on Saturday morning and ride the round trip, set up a table for R Community Bikes, and hang out at the event until it's over.

See you then!

Brad

Rochester GreenRide Oct 24 Downtown Library to RIT and the Rochester Bicycle Summit

Greetings,

I'm writing to alert you to an event that should be of interest to bicyclists and environmentalists throughout the Greater Rochester area.

Saturday, October 24th will mark 350.org's International Day of Climate Action and the end of a week of climate action teach-ins at RIT. The culminating event in Rochester will be a mass bike ride along the proposed Rochester Greenway. The Rochester Greenway goes south from Downtown along the river, past the University of Rochester, through the Genessee Valley Park, and on down the Lehigh Valley North Trail to RIT. The draft GreenRide poster sketches the route.

Once at RIT, the Rochester Bike Summit will be held in the new Center for Student Innovation. Its goal: to discuss a number of exciting bicycle and alternative transportation initiatives, and to make connections between the bicycle community, city planners, and environmentalists. We might also consider the need for a "common cause" organization that could help these initiatives become realities. For more information, see the draft Rochester Bicycle Ecology Poster (attached), and look for details coming soon to RochesterGreenway.org. Your input and projects would be most welcome additions!

Among the attractions planned for the Rochester Cycle Summit

• volunteer-manned stations for free bicycle maintenance
• exhibits on pedal power and bicycles as energy-conservation solutions
• posters and exhibits describing numerous bike initiatives
• an ultra-wide screen short describing the potential for making Rochester a world class center for recreational and functional transport
• free rides on electric bikes and recumbents
• · your bike shop, project, or proposal!

We'd like your help shaping the event and recruiting participants. The attached materials are still evolving, but time is short. Please pass this message on to others who would be interested, and let me know, how you or your organization would like to be involved.

Jon Schull schull@digitalgoods.com cell: 585-738-6696
Associate Professor Rochester Institute of Technology
http://innovation.rit.edu

epost

This is emailed from gmail 

Shared from jon schull: ask jonschull.----@blogger.com This is typed from reqa

it would seem that ANYONE can email to my blog?

jon schull created this reQall reminder for you: ask jonschull.-----@blogger.com This is typed from reqall on the web, aimed at jonschull.blogspot So, what can you do now? You can select "reply" and write a response to the sender if they've included their address in the reply-to line (reQall ignores your reply). You can learn more about reQall and see why jon schull is using reQall to remember all the important things in life. You can manually add this task to your calendar or to-do list. If you were a reQall Pro user this reminder could be added automatically to your reQall To-Do list and your Outlook or Google Calendar. What's reQall? reQall is a voice-enabled productivity application that is a: task manager reminder service memory aid reQall is easy to use and you don't need to download any software to use it—although we do offer downloadable versions for the iPhone and BlackBerry. We hope you'll learn more about reQall and sign up today. Transcribed by: If this reminder includes a specific time, it is based on the sender's time zone. (We'd love to send you reminders based on your time zone - just sign up to be a reQall user and tell us your time zone.) If this reminder includes a specific due date/time, you may receive another reminder just prior to that due date/time, depending on the preferences of the sender. If you don't know this sender or do not want to receive reQall emails from them, please report it. ©2009 reQall Inc. reQall is patent pending technology and is a trademark of reQall Inc. www.reqall.com

Voice Memo from Jon Schull, 6:54 PM

Audio File attached
Sat Oct 3 18:54:45 EDT 2009
Just 'Say it & Mail it'

Google Map Location
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=+43.1487,-77.5723

ultralight documentation

I'm looking for the most lightweight system for documenting what's going on the Innovation Center.

I'd like to be able to take a picture or video, add a voice annotation and/or text, send it to the web and see the post with the voice annotation transcribed. (Is that asking so much?)

I can't figure out how to mash that up (see below), but what I can do with my iphone easily is upload video to youtube (with narration say) and later do easy "captions" in the form of annotations and even swap in a sound track...all from within youtube on the web.

like this:

Below are the approaches I explored before deciding the above is as good as it's likely to get.

For example there's a neat $1.99 iphone app called "Say It and Mail It" that makes it easy to attach a voice recording and a photo (and a map) to a single email message.

• I can email to blogger, or to reqall, but the voice recording is lost:
• I can email to evernote, the voice recording is included.

Now what about transcripts?

• I can call reqall and get a transcript back by email
• but I can't send the voice recording to reqall
• --I might be able to finesse that by playing the voice recording through skype, but I can't get reqall to accept the skype call (though this reportedly can be done).

Music Apps Blur the Gap Between You and Clapton - NYTimes.com

Music Apps Blur the Gap Between You and Clapton - NYTimes.com:

There’s something about an iPhone music app. For musicians, it’s like having an instrument in your pocket. For nonmusicians, it’s a way to coax sounds -- often programmed to stay on key no matter what note one actually plays -- out of what may be the only instrumentlike device they ever pick up.

Jennifer Daniel

A main goal for many of these apps’ developers is to introduce nonmusical people to music, and musical people to different kinds of music. And when taken less as a serious instrument and more as a sampler for the wide world of music, these devices are wildly successful.

...

Many musical apps offer the ability to record a track, then add layers on top of it. Doing this between disparate apps is impossible without external recording software, but a multi-instrumental app like Moocow’s Band gives novices the opportunity to record and edit tracks with drums, bass and guitar, and make sure it all sounds pretty good (even if one doesn’t know how to play a lick of music). It’s as much a game as Guitar Hero, only instead of trying to keep up with prerecorded music, the goal is to make music of one’s own.

ETH - Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation - Videos & Simulations

ETH - Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation - Videos & Simulations

The outbreak of cooperation among success-driven individuals under noisy conditions

This is the supplementary webpage to the publication on The Outbreak of Cooperation in PNAS.

Description of cover figure: Illustration of self-organized pattern formation in migration games. The snapshot, taken after 200 time steps, shows the outcome of the spatial interaction of mobile individuals, who strategically interact with their four nearest neighbors and copy the strategy of their most successful neighbor. The simulation assumes that individuals earn no payoff, if they meet individuals who use the same strategy, while their outcome is positive, if interacting with individuals using another strategy. Strategy 1 is represented by blue disks, strategy 2 by red disks. A change to strategy 2 in the last time step is indicated in green, a change to strategy 2 by yellow. White spaces are empty. Individuals perform success-driven migration, i.e. they move to empty locations with a higher expected payoff. The maximum migration distance in one time step was assumed to be 5. Starting with uniformly distributed strategies, one observes an agglomeration of individuals, and individuals with different strategies mix. This is to be distinguished from the migratory dynamics in other spatial games, which lead to segregation patterns, for example, as studied by Nobel prize winner Thomas Schelling. For animated videos see http://www.soms.ethz.ch/migrationgames.

Your mind is a great place to have ideas, but a terrible place to manage them.

--David Allen (Getting Things Done)

Vimeo - Video Embed Loop

Product Planner Vimeo - Video Embed Loop

This looks like a very useful product for interaction designers.

Video Embed Loop

View more Vimeo user flows.

Almost Lawnmower Man:

Almost Lawnmower Man: Introducing the Vuzix iWear VR920

Details:http://www.vuzix.com/iwear/products_vr920.html

INTRODUCTION

I was quite excited a few months ago when I stumbled across the Vuzix VR920, a lightweight set of virtual reality eye glasses with dual hi-res displays. The amount of features packed into the three ounce package is really impressive:

• dual 640 x 480 VGA progressive scan LCDs with a 32 degree field (scales to 1024×768)
• head tracking
• built in microphone
• dual speakers
• USB powered
• nVidia stereo driver support

Most importantly for us, it supports Second Life, as well as World of Warcraft, and a suite of games. The Second Life support is currently not native, but works well with mouselook mode, as I demonstrate in the video below. Vuzix was kind enough to loan me one to test out with Second Life and is actively seeking enterprising developers who may be interested in helping develop native Second Life support for the device. The VR920 is the first device that supports immersive three dimensional graphics, head tracking, as well as microphone and audio all in one device.

VIDEO DEMONSTRATION

In the video below, you can look over my shoulder and see what I am seeing.

...

Room reservations using Google Calendar

Here's a good cheat sheet...

Room reservations using Google Calendar

View more presentations from Osu Materials.