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Are you real crafty? Make this Arduino-controlled bee-detecting macro photo rig

Posted: 06 Feb 2010 05:02 PM PST


There are a billion ways to get the right shot. Most of them, pros will tell you, involve taking a huge amount of pictures. Macro shots of in-flight insects are no exception — I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to take a picture of a bug flying around but it’s hard. However, what if your shot was pretty much guaranteed to be perfect exposure technically? You could take shot after shot of bees zooming around and they’d all come out perfectly-focused and framed just right. All you’d have to do is pick out the best ones.

Well, Belgian photographer Fotoopa (not his real name) has put together a seriously cool rig that does this. It’s not easy to make, but if you’re dedicated, it looks like this might be the best way on earth to capture bugs in flight.

As far as I can tell, it has a second lens that is constantly checking the in-focus spot of the actual lens, using infrared LEDs and an IR rangefinder. Just get a bug in the general area of the sweet spot and as soon as it flies into the zone, the camera will snap a picture. Because it uses IR LEDs, it even works in total darkness. He’s put together the instructions here, including the board layout and other components. Some of the results, including the above shot, are linked from his Flickr stream.

I’m not going to lie: using this rig, you can get a better shot in 10 seconds than I did after an hour and a couple hundred exposures. Still a nice shot, but if I were a robot camera whose only purpose in life was to get bees exactly in focus mere inches from my lens, I probably would have had a higher success rate.

[via Lifehacker and Make]

Google Street View camera car tagged with GPS sensor, stalked around Berlin

Posted: 06 Feb 2010 01:27 PM PST

The story here is that someone secretly affixed a GPS tracker on a Google Street View camera car and you can follow the car’s progress using Google Maps while it’s photographing the streets of Berlin. Sort of ironic, isn’t? But either the car seems to be stopped or Google caught wind of the stalkers because I haven’t seen any progress the last few minutes. Or maybe they’re eating. Either way, click through for the live Google Map.

[ffff.at via reddit]

Your Comments Are Safe With Us

Posted: 06 Feb 2010 01:01 PM PST

About half an hour ago, a post that was published on the Digital Inspiration blog hit Techmeme. The title of that post left little to the imagination: it read "TechCrunch Removes Reader Comments From All Older Blog Posts". That allegation in itself is inaccurate, as is most of the rest of the article, so I felt compelled to respond quickly and offer our side of the story. Which, on a sidenote, we weren't asked for by the person or people behind the blog (at least not to my knowledge).


Maybe Hulu is right to block Boxee?

Posted: 06 Feb 2010 11:00 AM PST

If I may, I’d like to play devil’s advocate to something I wrote a few days ago. To quickly summarize, Boxee took issue with NBCU’s Jeff Zucker’s characterization that Boxee was some sort of rogue piece of software, and that Hulu is in the right whenever it blocks access to the XBMC-derived media player. How about this: maybe Hulu is right to block Boxee? Let’s see where this takes us.

Boxee’s main contention is that, in watching Hulu, it’s no different than typing www.hulu.com into your Firefox or Internet Explorer address bar. To be slightly more accurate, it’d be like clicking on a bookmark: you don’t type in www.hulu.com when you load up Boxee, but click a UI element. So right there things are a little different.

Then there’s the interface. Compare Hulu in a "normal" Web browser with Hulu as seen through Boxee:


Normal


Boxee

That’s patently not the same interface (with a hat tip to Digital Society for doing the legwork and taking the screenshots). In Boxee, you’re whisked right away to a video without having to see the rest of the Hulu site. That doesn’t make the branding guys too happy (and throws dirt in the face of the guys who developed Hulu’s UI.)

Then there’s what I’m going to call the experience, for lack of a better term. TV studios may be happy to provide content to Hulu, but they know that the idea of sitting in front of a smallish laptop isn’t an ideal way to watch TV. It’s almost like they’re fine with providing content to a service that can never really replicate the "experience" of watching TV: sitting on a big, comfy couch in front of a 50-inch HDTV. With Boxee, you’re circumventing the inconvenience, so to speak, of watching on a clunky laptop by outputting the image, thanks to your Boxee box (in the future, of course; I know the box isn’t available now), onto your big TV, complete with Bluetooth remote control. You’ve essentially replicated the "normal" TV watching "experience," which may not be what the studios signed up for in the first place. The ol’ switcheroo.

That said, yes, I know you can connect your laptop to your TV, and your audio output to a proper sound system—I did the very same thing for about a year, and it was great—but Hulu’s puppet-masters must know that the number of people who even know how to do that, and then who have the patience to string wires from here to there, are so small that it’s not worth complaining about.

But I can still see Boxee’s point-of-view. After all, when you watch Hulu videos in Boxee you’re still subjected to the very same ads as the Firefox people are; you’re not watching anything "for free," as it were. The presentation may be different, but you’re still sitting through 30-second Ford commercials.

And to be even more fair to Boxee, they’ve essentially offered to diffuse the entire situation by coming to some sort of monetary agreement with Hulu that would make its users paying customers. (Boxee isn’t "above" making deals with content providers, nor should it be if it wants to be taken seriously as a "real" company, which is clearly its goal.) Let’s pick a number out of thin air: $5 per month to watch Hulu content via Boxee. Is that fair? I don’t know, it seems eminently reasonable, putting aside the fact that you’d partially be paying for over-the-air television, which is free, cable-based content notwithstanding. But then I’m sure Boxee users would complain that since they’re paying customers, why should they have to sit through advertisements anymore? But that’s an argument for another day.

All I’m trying to say is, I’m pretty sure I understand where Hulu and its backers are coming from vis-à-vis Boxee (and Plex, to be sure), but Boxee seems more than willing to find some sort of solution to this mess, if you can even call it that.

Thoughts? (I’ve already spent entirely too long thinking about this issue!)

Congratulations to the winner of the Tokyoflash watch

Posted: 06 Feb 2010 10:00 AM PST

Just a wanted to post a quick note here, congrats to @DStoneburner, the winner of the Tokyoflash wristwatch contest. So good for you, @DStoneburner. Don’t say we never gave you anything.

Weekend Giveaway: Baby it’s cold out there

Posted: 06 Feb 2010 07:30 AM PST

Hey, friend. Want a soft shell jacket from the inimitable ScottEVest? These guys are really and truly our favorite outerwear makers – I wear my SeVs every day – and they want to give you one jacket, whether you deserve it or not.

The jacket (this link might not work as they were just hit by a phishing attack but they’re totally legit) has 19 pockets and is made of 3 layer fabric. It is even compatible with the iPad, if you can believe it. How do you win? I’ll tell you.

That’s actually Scott himself who, at his age, probably shouldn’t be drinking full sugar Coke but whatevs. To win just comment on how ruddy and handsome he looks in his jacket and I’ll pick one winner on Monday.

Update: Comments appear to be broken right now, so let’s make it easy – just send an email to contest@crunchgear.com with the subject line “SEV”. That’ll get you entered to win. Sorry for any inconvenience.
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