Musician T.J. Hill hooked a saw up to his amp and now rocks out on the tool. Check out his rendition of Amazing Grace.

Hit play or watch T.J’s Electrical Music Saw at Youtube.

Currently if you have a large image that you need to make smaller for the web you can either scale it or crop it. Scaling makes everything smaller and cropping can cut out important content. This incredible video demonstrates an image re-sizing algorithm that is content-aware. It’s pretty cool and I figure it’s something that is going to make someone a lot of money.

Hit play or watch The Amazing Intelligent Resize at YouTube.

What you are about to watch is truly remarkable, and it just gets better as it goes.

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from [Flickr], Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo.

Hit the black triangle for play embedded in this window or the full screen button on the right.

See more on Seadragon and Photosynth. (Please note that these links go to Microsoft sites which are notorious for destroying old links—chances are if you’ve come here through the archives, these links no longer work).

Last year at the TED conference, Jeff Han demonstrated his uber cool new technology, high resolution multi-touch interface.

Wired News has a great piece, including video footage of the technology in action: “TED: Jeff Han, A Year Later“.

Also for your viewing pleasure, here’s another clip:

Check out the Graffiti Research Lab’s amazing video of a laser guided graffiti projection system. The artist merely draws his design on a nearby building with a laser pointer and a high powered projector “paints” the image for all to see.

Hit play or check out this video of a crazy folding chair at YouTube. (via)

The Interactive Institute in Sweden has created an in-car, virtual reality gaming system called Backseat Playground that uses GPS to integrate the actual location of your vehicle into a game. It’s currently a prototype designed for kids stuck in the car on long rides. Players can, for example, solve murder mysteries and search for clues in meatspace as they drive around. It has some great interactive features such as characters in the game will actually call the player’s cell phone (hand held receiver) to give him or her clues.

Details from New Scientist:

The Backseat Playground consists of a GPS receiver, a handheld computer and headphones, all connected to a laptop in the trunk of the car.

The laptop uses the GPS data to maintain a three-dimensional model that keeps the car correctly positioned within the virtual world. A database of geographical information is used to match events in the game to suitable locations. Players interact using the handheld computer.

The game begins with a radio newsflash, relayed by the handheld computer, which places a passenger at the start of a murder mystery or a werewolf thriller. As the car travels along its route, the player receives further phone calls and walkie-talkie messages from characters in the game.

For now, the game only works over an area of 35 square kilometres in Stockholm, but you can check out the video of a couple of kids giving it a test run.

Check out the future of digital drawing in this video of an M.I.T. researcher showing off some of the features in their new digital drawing board.

Click play or view here.

Over a six year period with a production budget of nearly $ 23 Million US dollars, the company XYZRGB has been developing a new kind of holographic technology that allows for full-motion 3D posters.

For those so inclined, you can order a holographic poster based on your own 3D image—of course it’s not going to be cheap. Prices range from $321 for 170×250mm to $3305 for a 1200×1000mm poster.

I imagine it won’t be long until we see movie posters printed using this technology—especially within the sci-fi/action genres.

Be sure not to miss the 3D motion of this soccer player.

For more info and examples, see gamesetwatch.com’s posting on full motion 3D posters.

It looks like XYZRGB is now known as Rabbitholes. See the Wired article on this company.

There are very few things in this world that I would go so far as to say that I hate. Having said that, I HATE Yellow Jackets. I haven’t been stung for a long time (I was stung by a wasp within the first couple weeks of moving to Lethbridge over 3 years ago) but my hatred for this pest runs deep.

Here is a brilliant, cheap, and non-toxic way to deal with wasps and their cousin the yellow-jacket from the AOJ Outdoors Tip Site: Grandpa Kipp’s Sure-Fire Yellow Jacket Trap.


How It Works:

The yellow jackets love fish and will begin to cut off small pieces to take back to the nest. In their “excitement” of buzzing around the bait a few will occasionally hit the water. The soap in the water breaks the surface tension of the waterproof coating on the yellow jacket and it instantly sinks in the water and drowns in a few seconds. Some yellow jackets will successfully haul a piece of meat back to the nest and tell all the other gatherers in the nest where this great food source is. Soon all the wasps from the nest will be working on this fish and over a period of time, all will eventually make mistakes and either fall off the fish and into the water or bump other wasps flying around and knock themselves in the drink, then its curtains for them too. It only takes a day or two to wipe out nearly every yellow jacket in your area.

I’m going camping for the long weekend, and I’ll keep this little contraption in mind should any wasps try and disturb our Victoria Day celebrations.

Some inventors have developed a motor built completely into the wheel of a bike, so that you don’t have to pedal, and don’t have to muck around with the drive train etc.

They say it’s easy to install and you can even use the bike you have now. The Wheel runs on gasoline and gets more than 200 miles per gallon. Watch The Wheel promotional video (10 mb mov).

Yeah it’s pretty geeky, but nevertheless The Slanket caught my interest.

The Slanket is a HUGE 100% polyester polar fleece blanket with oversized sleeves. They are made and tested in Maine. The Slanket is approximately 60 inches wide by 102 inches in length, with 13 inch wide sleeves, that are so large and loose that you never feel constricted and you have total control in how you use them. The Slanket is great on a couch, a chair, in a hammock, on your bed or anywhere else you care to take it.

I love fleece as a material and as long as I could get over how silly I’d feel wearing this thing, I think it might be pretty comfortable. After all, I like to wrap up in a blanket when I’m on the computer or reading a book but I often find my upper body gets a little chilly.

An inventor by the name of Howard Stapleton has developed a high pitched audio device called The Mosquito designed to deter teens from loitering outside shops.

From the Times Online article, “Can a shriek in a box see off troublesome teenagers?”:

It emits a piercing, high frequency sound that is audible only, in 90 per cent of cases, to people under the age of 20. While teenagers are forced to run for cover, most adults remain oblivious.

Stapleton said he came up with the idea after reading how hearing levels changed with age.

I wonder if the device will have the unintended consequence of making the stores that use it a target for vandalism or theft. Whereas before the stores only had trouble with loitering teens but after installing these devices, it seems to me anyway, they are only asking for real trouble.

Update: The New York Times has an article about The Mosquito.

A research project at the MIT Media Lab has a plan for getting $100 laptops in the hands of millions of people around the world.

The laptops will have a 500 Mhz CPU, 1 gig of RAM, run on Linux, and will be optionally powered by a hand-crank or traditional power sources.

The goal of the project is to make the low-cost PC idea a grassroots movement that will spread in popularity. Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at MIT, said the idea is that governments will pay roughly $100 for the laptops and will distribute them for free to students.

“This is the most important thing I have ever done in my life,” Negroponte said on Wednesday during a presentation at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. “Reception has been incredible. The idea is simple. It’s an education project, not a laptop project. If we can make education better–particularly primary and secondary schools–it will be a better world.”

(via News.com article)