Fotografieren ohne bzw. mit wenig Licht stellt sich anhand des Prinzips des Mediums als sehr schwierig heraus. Ähnlich als würde man Musik ohne Klang aufnehmen wollen. Man konnte entweder die Nightshot-Option wählen, was die Darsteller jedoch immer wie alienated Zombies ausschauen ließ oder man hat die Qualität der Bilder leiden lassen, um überhaupt etwas auf Film zu bekommen. Nun kommt aus Südkorea der 1-Lux-Chip. Dies entspricht in etwa dem Licht einer Kerze aus einem Meter Entfernung. Dies scheint ein neuer Geniestreich zu sein, wenn es denn auf den Markt kommt.
Paris Hilton-Schäferstündchen würden sichtbarer und auch Darkroomparties wären nicht mehr das, was sie einst waren.

Via Engadget:

South Korean image-sensing chip enables 1-lux photography - Engadget

Janus Friis und Niklas Zennström haben bereits einiges im Internet bewegt. Gutes Geld verdient haben die dabei auch noch. Zuerst entwickelten sie Kazaa, was Anfang dieses Jahrzehnts die Popularität von Filesharing noch größer werden ließ und erst im letzten Jahr wurde das zweite große Ding von ihnen für 2,6 Milliarden Dollar an ebay verkauft: das weltweite Voice-Over-IP-Telefonsystem Skype. Da lacht man fast über den YouTube-Deal, wo es doch fast eine Milliarde weniger gewesen ist, die da über den Tisch flutschte. Nun stehen Friis und Zennström an, das TV im Netz zu revolutionieren. Joost heißt die ganze Sache, spuckt große Töne und ist -wie so vieles im Web 2.0- noch beta. Über hybrides P2P soll jedoch ein ganz individuelles TV-Erlebnis für den User zustande kommen. Und die ersten Projekte der smarten Skandinavier zeigen, dass auf jeden Fall mit einigem zu rechnen sein kann. Mehr dazu im Link unten via Wired:

Wired News: Why Joost Is Good for TV

Kirk Cameron extrapolates a recent Dilbert cartoon:

Since starting to work on the Identity Metasystem I’ve learned more and more about the hoists being pulled off in the context of virtual reality.  Over time, we have seen the attacks become more professionalized, and ultimately linked to well organized international syndicates.  Part of the basic equation is that the international nature of virtual reality makes it especially hard to deal with the type of organization that is emerging at the boundary of its interface with the brick and mortar world.

Link: Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog — The virtualization of crime

Prompted by the recent Facebook uproar, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 believes most users of social networking applications have yet to realize what kind of new world they’re entering:

It’s one thing for people to share their personal information in public when it’s only their friends stopping by to see what’s up, but when they wake up to the fact that technology can enable this information to be tracked and syndicated across the network — suddenly everyone starts to feel pretty naked. And granted this is just a matter of perceptions — information on Facebook is no more publicly accessible than it was before, but suddenly everyone is casting around for a fig leaf.

Link: Publishing 2.0 — This Is What the Social Networking Privacy Backlash Looks Like

Yesterday on Ask Slashdot:

“For a while now my neighborhood has had to deal with an elderly neighbor who has displayed a slightly paranoid attitude towards myself and the fellow younger-adults of the neighborhood, believing us to be attempting to harass him in our day-to-day activities. Recently, he installed a Mosquito ultrasonic noise device as an apparent attempt to ‘get back at us’ for our harassment.

As the Mosquito emits a sound that’s well out of his hearing range, he can’t hear it, while most of the rest of the neighborhood is under 40 and can; at which point it’s causing everyone a great deal of discomfort. Unfortunately, because the police also can’t hear it, we can’t get the authorities to do anything about it, leaving us empty-handed in our attempts at getting some peace and quiet back.

What can we do to either help the police realize how disturbing this device is, or counteract it so that it’s no longer disturbing us? And is this the first of what may be a growing trend of civilians using high-tech discomfort weapons as a method of neighborhood warfare?”

Link: Slashdot | Combating Harassing Use of Mosquito Noise Device?

Die Aufschreibung von Geschichte, insbesondere der Popgeschichte bedingt sich durch die Medien der Zeit. In diesem Falle über die Tonträger. Über boingboing stieß man auf diese Seite, die 20 populäre Musikstücke aus den USA als mp3 aus den ersten beiden Dekaden des letzten Jahrhunderts auflistet. Nicht nur aus exotistischen Gründen interessant, sondern auch historisch wertvoll. Wo doch eigentlich die hundert Jahre alten Tonträger sich längst aufgelöst haben sollten.

Link: foldedspace.org: Twenty mp3s of Great Songs from 1901-1920

Apparently my recent remarks regarding homebrew mobile phone communities were right on the money:

I’m announcing the formation of the “Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club.” Our purpose is to provide support and guidance for individuals building their own “convergence devices.” We’re going to have monthly meetings where we discuss designs and applications with the idea that two heads is frequently better than one. Don’t toil in solitude, trying to get your latest wireless hardware hack to work.

Links: Announcement, The Open Phone Proposal
Preliminary site: telefono.revejo.org

And Stacking Fault points to a number of people already active in the field in the insightful overview Build your own mobile phone.

Photo by AMagill

Via Engadget: Samsung just presented a laptop that uses flash memory instead of the conventional hard disk.

While this may sound like another impenetratable tech buzzword that geeks invent to irritate the rest of the non-geek world it’s actually a big deal.

There are a number of attractive advantages of flash drives over conventional mechanical hard drives: because they have no moving parts data access on flash drives is faster and the drive is completely silent. Flash drives are shock resistant. Dropped your computer? Not that big a deal. Flash drives use less energy than a conventional hard drive — expect battery performance to sky rocket with future generations of laptops.

And computers with flash drives can potentially be much smaller than current models. Most people already use this memory-on-a-chip on a daily basis in the form of USB flash drives — and a USB stick with 1 GB of storage is no larger than a small lighter.

Think of it as the difference between the clunky and heavy first-generation iPod (5 GB hard drive) and the current generation iPod nano (5 GB flash drive).

There are still technical quirks to overcome, and the current price of flash memory is breathtaking (PCWorld cites $960 for a 32 GB disk). But it’s only a matter of time that affordable models are available for the mass market, and the effect on consumer products will be huge. Your watch could become a 100 GB flash drive.

See also: Ubiquitous Computing

Image by Ralf Schmerberg/Dropping Knowledge

On the Iced Coffee blog: “I think New Orleans is now one of the most technologically advanced cities in the U.S…”

Says the author, Aaron:

There is literally NO ONE I know in this city who does not have a cell phone, and I’m talking 8 year olds to 80 year olds. […]

Half of the city still doesn’t have land telephone lines and even more don’t have cable, so we have cell phones and we have to hop in the car to drive to a coffee shop (where I am now) if you need to check your email. And you do need to check your email, because many of your previously neighborhood friends are still spread out about the country, once because of evacuating, now because that’s where the new job is, and email might be the only way to stay in touch if you don’t want to talk to them late at night because of time zones and work. […]

The end product is a modern, shiny, 21st century New Orleanian, pretty much across the board. Even grandma learned how to answer the cell phone instead of looking at it like it’s something that might bite her. Crazy flip phones.

Read the full article for some other details, e.g. about how people started buying satellite radio because FM radio stations were scarce.

The screenshot above is from a short documentary by Ralf Schmerberg called “Chocolate City - We are here to stay”, shot on January 12th 2006. You can download this Copyleft-licensed movie at the Dropping Knowledge film gallery.