C i b o M a h t o . c o m

Has someone been looking for me?

Here are some photos from my trip eastwards to visit friends and family. This should be everything except the wedding (coming soon!)

(click the image to view the gallery)

This is rather late notice, but Ignite Phoenix looks to be a cool event. Twelve speakers (schedule) will each be given 5 minutes to present a lightning talk on a topic of their choosing. Check out the event site for more information and to RSVP!

(via James Britt)

The simplest things you can control on a camera are aperture, shutter speed and ISO (film) speed. Unless you are really trying to create a special look, you probably want to keep the ISO setting as low as possible to cut down on noise, so that leaves shutter speed and aperture. If you have a zoom lens (or two), you also get another lever to control: the focal length of the image. Here are two photo sets I built to help me visualize how the different settings will contribute to the final image. Use the prev and next controls to jump to the next setting, or press play to see a slideshow of the entire range of settings for the control.
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I don’t usually like to re-post things from other sites, but this one is too pretty to pass up. A group of researchers from the University of Toronto and INRIA in France have developed a nonlinear video interface tool that allows you to manipulate video in the context of object motion rather than through the standard, static time dimension. It looks really cool, and seems like a very natural way to scan through film. Here is a demo video:

Get the whole scoop here.
(via Hackzine)

Update: I tried out their demo program with my own video (source). The first few seconds of the video are navigable, but it cuts off rather quickly. I think that this might be because the kitty crosses her own path so many times. Even so, it is pretty impressive that the program pulled that much data out of such poor quality video. Their demo videos worked much better, as would be expected :-). Note: I used CamStudio to grab the screen. Heres how it went:

+ = ?

The Idea
Being a console junky, I am always looking for ways to improve my experience at the terminal. One thing that is is dire need of improvement is the console bell. You know, the really annoying beeping sound that occurs when you pressed the wrong key, that you immediately disable when setting up a new computer. Unfortunately, the bell really does provide a useful service: that of allowing the system to notify you when you need to fix your input. It is possible to turn on a ‘visible bell,’ which inverts the foreground and background colors of the console. In practice, though, I find this almost as annoying as the bell, and disable it as well.

So what else can we try? It occurred to me that there is an obvious solution: haptic feedback! The only trouble is, I don’t know of many keyboards that have a vibrating motor built in. Of course, this is an easy thing for a DIYer to fix. It turns out that is is quite straightforward to add the vibrator motor to the keyboard, however patching a terminal program to activate the buzzer took a bit more head scratching. Instructions after the break…
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