Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Shooting Challenge: Freelensing [Photography]

It sounds so badass, doesn't it? Freelensing. Like Tom Petty is microwaving your $3,000 DSLR just to get high off the fumes or something. Well, truth be told, freelensing is a little badass, as far as photography techniques go.

The Challenge

Take a photo using the technique of freelensing, like our lead shot by jrdn7730. What the heck is freelensing? Read on.

The Method

Freelensing is when you take a photo with your lens detached from your camera body. You unlock the lens and CAREFULLY pivot it anywhere from a few millimeters to several inches. Depending, the results will look like tilt shift or macro photography. And that makes sense, because a tilt shift lens works a lot like the technique described...though instead of laying down the cash for the traditionally expensive glass, you can capture the effect this way for free. Just keep in mind that light leaks come with the territory.

Now, a word of warning: Man wasn't meant to take photos like this. Beyond the obvious possibility of dropping your lens, you're also exposing your camera's internals to moisture and dust. Done properly, freelensing isn't much more risky than swapping out your lens. But I wouldn't recommend keeping that lens detached for very long. Plan your shot. Detach. Snag the shot. Seal the lens back on the camera.

For more on the technique, LukeRoberts has a nice visual explanation and PhotoJojo has a fantastic general tutorial (via SwissMiss). Read it and then show us what you've got.

The Rules - READ THESE

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken AFTER the challenge was announced.
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings, technique and story behind shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com, not me.
5. Include 800px wide image (200KB or less) AND a 2560x1600 sized in email. (The 800px image is the one judged, so feel free to crop/alter the larger image for wallpaper-sized dimensions.)
6. One submission per person.
7. Use the proper SUBJECT line in your email (more info on that below)

Send your best photo by Monday, November 1st at 8AM Eastern to contests@gizmodo.com with "Freelensing" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs, and use a FirstnameLastnameFreelensing.jpg (800px wide) and FirstnameLastnameFreelensingWallpaper.jpg (2560px wide) naming conventions. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email along with a story of the shot in a few sentences. And don't skip this story part because it's often the most enjoyable part for us all beyond the shot itself!

When I'm not running Shooting Challenges, I'm managing my new site: Life, Panoramic. Submit* your photos today!

*There's a Brett Favre joke here somewhere, I can just feel it..

A Robot With Coffee-Filled Balloons For Hands Is The Best Grabber Yet

The most dextrous, most careful and most useful robotic gripper is not a claw or a hand with several fingers — it's a sack of coffee grounds.

Working with funds from DARPA, researchers at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and iRobot came up with an ideal robotic gripping device, simply a latex party balloon filled with ground coffee. We'll call it the Kinetic Object grippiNg Arm. Cornell would rather call it a "universal gripper," but we think KONA has a nice DARPA-y ring to it.

It takes advantage of a physical phenomenon called jamming transition. When particles (like coffee grounds) are so densely packed that they can no longer slide past each other, they behave like a solid. When they're loosely packed, they behave like a liquid. Coffee is actually a pretty good analogue for this phenomenon — when you buy those mini vacuum-packed bags of ground coffee, they're hard as rocks; all the air has been sucked out, and the coffee grounds can't move past each other. Open the bag and introduce some air, and they behave like loose particles again.

This is exactly how KONA works. From Cornell's news service: An everyday party balloon is filled with ground coffee and attached to a robotic arm. The balloon presses down and deforms around an object, and then a vacuum sucks the air out of the balloon, solidifying its grip with just the right shape and pressure. When you want to let go, release the vacuum, and the balloon becomes soft again.

Designing hands is one of the biggest challenges in robotics. Like your own hand, robotic hands need to be dextrous yet solid, sensitive yet tough; they must be capable of plucking a raw egg from a basket, picking up a coin and hoisting a heavy object across a room. This is why scientists in Slovenia are letting robots punch them in the arm, and why Israeli researchers this summer offered a cash reward for the best robotic handshake: To truly make robots ubiquitous and helpful, someone needs to figure out the hands.

In this case, the researchers threw out hands altogether and opted for a mushy suction-ball instead.

Hod Lipson, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science at Cornell, said the gripper is so simple, it could go on the market tomorrow. And its universality makes it useful for a wide range of applications, from improving prosthetic limbs to dismantling explosives. A paper describing the work was published online Oct. 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In theory, any type of jammable particulate matter will work — the researchers tried sand, rice, couscous and ground-up old tires — but the researchers settled on coffee because it jams well and is lightweight. Any variety will do, the Cornell Chronicle explains. But we favor a certain blend of flavorful Hawaiian beans.

My iPad Finally Let Me Down [Shenzhennotes]

It wasn't that long ago I was praising the iPad for being a wonderful travel computer. It still is—until it isn't.

The qualities that make the iPad so great on the road still apply: long-winded battery life; lightweight form factor that doesn't have to be removed for security scans at American airports; a very capable web browser, especially when complemented by selections from the App Store.

But when unexpected problems arise, the iPad doesn't give many ways to route around them toward a solution.

I don't know if it's God's way of telling me I need to buy a MacBook Air, but I've gotten myself into a bind here in China.

First off, I'm sick. I've clearly picked up some traveler's cruft somewhere. I'm weak. My stomach is upset. Leaving the hotel room—even just to try to eat some breakfast in the hotel restaurant—is taxing.

Plus I've got about 40 images from my DSLR that I need to get formatted into something to post on Gizmodo. A simple gallery would do. It's pretty much Computerizing 101 sort of stuff.

But an unfortunate confluence of problems has made the iPad the wrong appliance for the job.

I can't simply upload the images from the iPad to Gawker's content management system—no filesystem on the iPad for a web page to plug into. I can't email the images from the Photos app to myself, as for some reason it wants to attach the RAW files to the email instead of a converted JPG file; the subsequent 25MB+ email crashes the Photo app before they're sent through if I wanted to send them to someone else.

In fairness, I am running iOS 4.2 Beta 3, which could account for the bug in Photos. A couple of the images have converted as expected, which makes my thwarted success all that more tantalizing.

Dropbox doesn't work for some reason. It could be the Chinese firewall, although I've had issues with the data-side of other apps with web sites that aren't restricted. Hard to say.

Worst of all, I can't try to use any other apps to get the photos online because the App Store refuses to accept any of my account verification, despite entering in every credit card I've got. I can understand not letting me download apps that are restricted in China—I'm on Chinese internet, after all—but for some reason the App Store won't let me download anything at all, not even free apps.

Right now the only option I can see is to view each photo in the Photo app, then take a screenshot of it, then crop and rotate each one, then upload those. It would probably work, although the images would only be as high-resolution as the iPad's screen. Failing all else, that's what I'll do, but I'm not really looking forward to it.

Maybe all the errors—even the App Store failure— can be attributed to the beta version of iOS I'm running. I guess some other foreigner in China can test it next month when the final version of 4.2 is out.

But it's a pretty frustrating feeling to know that your data is inside the device you're using but because of its closed system troubleshooting options are limited. It's a little like being sick at Disneyland and getting stuck at the top of Space Mountain. Suddenly the veneer of blinking lights stops looking like the future and starts feeling like being trapped in a tiny car in the dark inside a warehouse.

I still really like the iPad for travel. I suspect even if I buy an Air—even the tiny version—I'll still bring the iPad along for books, video, etc. I mean, hell, I already own it. Might as well.

But the gild is ever so slightly off the lily. And instead of being impressed with how capable the iPad can be compared to a traditional computer, today I'm missing traveling with a machine that gives me more flexibility when my expected path dead ends.

Water plus graphene will soon equal computers [Madscience]

Graphene was hailed as a miracle substance. Easy to make and cheap to acquire, it could help with anything from DNA sequencing to power production. Now, thanks to water and physics, it could soon be turned into a computer.

Graphene has a lot of incredibly useful properties. It's just carbon, meaning you can get it anywhere, and although it's arranged in sheets an atom thick, it is relatively easy to make. It was applicable to a huge number of technologies, but it resisted the most common component of the most common technology — it couldn't become a transistor in a computer.

Transistors, at their most basic, are on-off switches. Anything that has two different positions can be used to make a computer. Only certain things, however, could make a useful computer. Semiconductors were among those things. They had an 'off' position, which with the use of electrical field could be turned into an 'on' position. Electricity being fast and malleable, the combination made for good computers.

Graphene is just a good conductor of electricity. It doesn't have a readily available on-off switch, both because of its substance and its symmetrical structure. But now, a recent test has shown how you could go about creating one.

Water is one of the most common and responsive substances in the world. Doctor Nikhil Karatkar conducted a test which shows how its properties can be used to help graphene become a part of the tech market. A layer of graphene is placed on a layer of silicon and silicon dioxide. Water is released into the chamber, and shuns the silicon, glomming on to the graphene. This breaks the graphene's symmetry, and makes it into a poor conductor. So the graphene now has an off switch.

Water plus graphene will soon equal computers

Although this has been done before with other substances, doing it with water is a huge breakthrough. Water isn't a dangerous material, or an expensive material. Moreover, water is relatively easy to control. Through temperature or pressure, scientists can control humidity. Make things wet - or cool enough, or pressured enough - and the water will descend on the graphene, turning the transistor off. Dry it out a bit, and the water lifts off the graphene, allowing it to conduct electricity again.

So water and carbon could be the bones of the next generation of computers.

Via Online Library and RPI.

MacBook Air review (late 2010)

The MacBook Air has never exactly been a simple product to review. Since the laptop's launch back in the heady days of 2008, we've always considered it a niche, high-end product and much less a mainstream system. Originally, the wafer-thin (and somewhat underpowered) laptop sold for a painful starting price of $1,799, and had its fair share of problems. Well, we've come a long way from Apple's original play, with two all-new models of the Air. The first is an update to the standard 13.3-inch model priced at a significantly cheaper $1,299, while the newest entrant to the MacBook family is a tiny 11.6-inch model that's nearly the size of an iPad -- and not wildly more expensive, starting at $999. Of course, over time the market for laptops of this type has gotten quite crowded, with a slew of ULV-based thin-and-lights that offer lots of options for lots of budgets. Do the new MacBook Airs have enough to take on a crowded market, or have they been bumped out of the game altogether? Read on for the full Engadget review to find out!

Gallery: MacBook Air (13-inch) hands-on