Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

MIT Researcher Develops iPhone App to Easily Control Swarms of Aerial Drones

Source: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/video-using-smartphones-control-aerial-drones

Flying UAVs might someday become as easy as fiddling with your phone

Fleets of unmanned drones have become a common weapon in the U.S. military's arsenal, but clunky controls and interfaces that distract human operators can lead to costly mistakes and crashes. Such problems prompted a former U.S. Navy pilot to develop an iPhone app that allows any smartphone user to learn how to fly an unmanned aerial system in just three minutes.

Easier control interfaces could drastically cut down on training time and costs, not to mention mistakes. Consider that current military pilots undergo thousands of hours of training to learn how to fly drones.

"This is all about the mission -- you just need more information from an image, and you shouldn't have to spend $1 million to train someone to get that picture," said Mary "Missy" Cummings, an MIT aerospace and systems engineer.

Cummings once flew F-18 Hornets for the U.S. Navy, and saw fellow fighter pilots die in aircraft carrier landing mishaps. Since then, she has devoted her research at MIT's Humans and Automation Laboratory (HAL) toward making it easier to fly drones and interact with technology.

That means less time spent fiddling with menus or trying to zoom a camera, and more time focused on the task at hand -- whether that involves trying to I.D. a sniper or search for victims after a natural disaster.

The HAL group recently ran experiments where participants controlled a drone via smartphone so that they could read an eye chart and find a photo within a building. Cummings and her students hope to eventually test the app in the real world and fly the drone up to 500 feet.

[MIT]

File Blender Converts Files with Drag and Drop Ease [Downloads]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5509681/file-blender-converts-files-with-drag-and-drop-ease

File Blender Converts Files with Drag and Drop Ease Windows: File Blender is a free and portable interface for more than a half-dozen tools. Drag and drop everything from pictures to music to File Blender and convert it to something new.

File Blender is a simple GUI for the command line conversion tools included in popular applications like IrfanView and Lame MP3. Drag files into the File Blender button and convert all kinds of files including MP3s, WAVs, JPGs, and other audio and image formats.

You can download File Blender by itself or with all the support apps included. If you download the full package (4.5MB) you won't have to do any configuration at all. If you download the stand-alone interface you'll need to configure File Blender to run with your favorite command line friendly applications. Check out the site below to grab a copy or to read up on how to make your own configuration files.

File Blender is free, portable, and Windows only. Have a favorite conversion tool or trick to share? Let's here about it in the comments.

File Blender [via Addictive Tips]

Stain Solutions Finds the Cure for Removing Any Stain [Cleaning]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5509890/stain-solutions-finds-the-cure-for-removing-any-stain

Stain Solutions Finds the Cure for Removing Any Stain The University of Illinois' Stain Solution web site gathers exhaustive remedies for hundreds of common, hard-to-remove stains in one easy-to-search resource—with surprising specificity. Did that coffee stain come with cream or no cream?

Photo by GrungeTextures.

The site offers a variety of stain solutions, including for difficult ones like blood and ink (including fountain, red, and India ink). It'll tell you exactly what kind of tools you'll need to arm yourself with, and the procedure for removing it. Best of all, the explanations highlight how to remove the stain from different places, like from your carpet or your clothes, along with alternate methods.

The stain removal methods themselves are extremely thorough. If you had an unfortunate morning mishap with your coffee, just search the site for "coffee." The results suggest using liquid dishwashing detergent, white vinegar, rubbing alcohol, an enzyme pre-soak product, and chlorine bleach or oxygen bleach. Soak it for 15 minutes in a mixture of water, dishwashing detergent, and white vinegar. Rinse, and then sponge it with rubbing alcohol. Soak it again for 30 minutes in warm water with a bit of the enzyme pre-soak product and your stain shouldn't stand a chance.

If you've got any tips for lifting stains out of those hard-to-get places, we'd love to hear your tips in the comments. Thanks, Charles!

Stain Removal Solutions [via #tips]

HP Slate to cost $549, have 1.6GHz Atom Z530, 5 hour battery?

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/05/hp-slate-to-cost-549-have-1-6ghz-atom-z530-5-hour-battery/

Well, well -- what's this? We just got our hands on what looks like an internal HP Slate presentation given to cool down some of the iPad hype amongst HP employees, and it just happens to have specs and pricing details on the elusive Windows 7 tablet. As we'd heard, the Slate will run $549 in its base configuration, which has a 8.9-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive multitouch display, a 1.6GHz Atom Z530 processor with UMA graphics and an accelerator for 1080p video playback (we're assuming it's a Broadcom Crystal HD chip), 32GB of flash storage and 1GB of non-upgradeable RAM. There's also a $599 version with 64GB of storage, and both models will have a five-hour battery, an SDHC slot, two camera, a USB port, a SIM card slot for the optional 3G modem, and a dock connector for power, audio, and HDMI out. Of course, what this spec list doesn't cover is software, and we still haven't seen much of how HP plans to make Windows 7 on a full slate device with netbook-class internals perform as smoothly or as intuitively as its demo videos. That's not a small challenge, especially since the iPad is out now and setting some pretty high expectations for how this new breed of tablets should work. We've got our fingers crossed -- show us something good, HP.

HP Slate to cost $549, have 1.6GHz Atom Z530, 5 hour battery? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fusion Garage JooJoo review

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/05/fusion-garage-joojoo-review/

We're not sure what's harder to believe: the fact that after months and months of the soap-opera-like drama that the JooJoo (formerly known as the CrunchPad) has finally landed in our hands, or that within just a few days there are now two capacitive touchscreen, browsing-heavy slate tablets on the market. Sure, it's probably not the best timing for a tablet start-up, but that doesn't diminish our interest in the 12-inch, Flash-playing JooJoo. The JooJoo is meant to be a browser-based tablet for surfing the web on your couch or while traveling, but with little previous hands-on time, we're still wondering how well it'll really work. And, obviously, whether or not it's a $499 experience on par or superior to Apple's iPad. Fear not, we'll tell you all you want to know in our magical review after the break.

Gallery: Fusion Garage JooJoo review