Category Technology

Liquid Haptics

One thin container (transparent plastic bag) full of dark coloured liquid, one webcam and a glass table and you get your own multitouch interface. Ingenious and very simple. Tom White seems to have come up with this for his Master's Thesis at MIT in 1998 (check out the comments on the page linked to by the title). Here's a video of someone who --- seems to have independently thought of the same idea and --- actually implemented it on their Mac, using his iSight and writing the necessary control software in Cocoa.

Thirty years of Voyager

The most distant ambassador of human civilisation, the Voyager probes, turn thirty. Wired has an excellent image set covering schematics and planetary imagery. I think we need more programmes like these. More on the Voyagers here.

Phrack Issue 64

In the latest issue of Phrack, you can find, among others, a very interesting 'paper' on shellcode and rootkit authoring for Mac OS X. While some of the techniques presented are not new, there are few --- if any --- publicly available texts that present them in such a concise manner. The paper focuses mostly on the Intel platform although there are descriptions and some code for PowerPC too. Worth a read.

Confirmation? No, thanks.

Ever since Safari 3 β came out, I've been feeling a bit like the archetypal Windows Vista user. You see every time I enter text on a page and proceed to close the tab or window it asks for confirmation. This is a new behaviour in Safari 3 and one that I don't like at all, although I can see why it's there. 'strings' came to the rescue and less than a minute later I got the answer. Open the com.apple.Safari.plist and edit it as follows --- or simply type the following in your terminal (make sure you type the whole thing in one line): 
defaults write com.apple.Safari
DebugConfirmTossingUnsubmittedFormText NO
Safari won't ask you for confirmation again. To re-enable the confirmation, replace the NO with a YES and you're done.

Testing Little Snitch 2 (β)

Little Snitch has been a truly great shareware application and one that I've bought and used for years. It's purpose is to provide a filter/firewall for outgoing connections in Mac OS X, allowing a user to put a check to all those applications that like to phone-home every once in a while to test for newer versions or --- in some cases --- send anonymous or eponymous hardware and software information to their developers without the user's consent.

Σκαι Youtube Debate

Σκάι Youtube DebateΤο ποιοτικότερο, μέχρι στιγμής, ιδιωτικό τηλεοπτικό κανάλι της Ελλάδος φαίνεται πως 'εισάγει' την πρωτοπορία της πρόσφατης τηλεοπτικής 'αψιμαχίας' που οργάνωσε το CNN σε συνεργασία με το Youtube στις ΗΠΑ, αυτή τη φορά φυσικά με πρωταγωνιστές τους έλληνες αρχηγούς κομμάτων. Παρ'ότι δε βλέπω κατα κανόνα τηλεόραση, θεωρώ πως η πρωτοβουλία του Σκάι είναι ιδιαίτερα αξιόλογη και αξίζει να τη παρακολουθήσετε εαν όχι να συμμετάσχετε σε αυτή.

Rapid Fire Exchange

Back in the days of 35mm film, Nikon was the undisputed king of high-end SLR cameras. Yet, this changed with the coming of digital photography. After several years of utter defeat by Canon, Nikon keeps hitting back hard at the No.1 manufacturer of high-end DSLR cameras with increasingly impressive models. Just a few days after the Canon EOS 1Ds MkIII and the EOS 40D were announced, Nikon strikes back with the high-end D3 and the mid-range D300. They look cool, but can they displace Canon's lineup? What will Canon's response be with EOS 5D's successor? The linked NYTimes article seems to gloss over some important details, but is, nevertheless, a decent read.

Αυτόνομα Οχήματα: Urban Challenge 2007

Το 2004 η Υπηρεσία Εξελιγμένης Έρευνας των Ενόπλεων Δυνάμεων των ΗΠΑ (DARPA), ο απόγονος της υπηρεσίας που δημιούργησε σειρά τεχνολογιών μέρος της καθημερινότητος μας (με πιο γνωστό ίσως το διαδίκτυο και τις βάσεις γι’αυτό προ τριαντα πέντε περίπου ετών), ξεκίνησε μια σειρά από ‘αγώνες’ μεταξύ αυτόνομων οχημάτων, οχημάτων δηλαδή που δεν ελέγχονται από ανθρώπους αλλά […]

The Canon EOS 40D is (almost) here.

As it turns out August 21st seems to be the date Canon is expected to announce it. Bestbuy is thought to have the camera for sale in the U.S. some weeks later, most probably by September 2nd, 2007. I've been waiting a long time for this; I hope this camera proves as good as people expect it to be. If Canon's recent performance is any indication and judging by the competition (see Nikon's excellent D80 and D200 cameras) this is probably going to be an impressive DSLR.