Suffire.com | Geek Stuffs, Technology Related

Digital night photography is as challenging as it is rewarding, and OReilly Media is hosting a free web seminar teaching wannabe shutterbugs the secrets behind the art.

On Dec. 2 at 11 a.m., professional photographer Harold Davis, creator of the blog Digital Night, will be demonstrating exposure and post-processing techniques. At the end of the 60-minute seminar, he’ll hold a question-and-answer session with attendees.

Definitely sounds like a worthwhile webcast, and if you’re just learning how to use a DSLR, this could teach plenty of digital photography basics as well. Sign up at O’Reilly to reserve a spot.

Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Flickr

Next time you’re down at the diner you might try out the CupSpeakers from Dmitry Zagga. His minimalist speaker design consists four paper cups, a couple of toothpicks and an iPod.

It is, as he puts it, an iPod Ghetto Accessory. There’s something very right about these cheap horn speakers — the clean white lines perfectly match the 2003 2G iPod. But we very much doubt the sound would be louder than that from the earbuds alone. On the other hand, they’re likely to be a lot better than some passive speaker systems you can buy.

Product page [Zagga via Yanko via Cult of Mac]

At long last, I have finally found a third-party iPhone app that I will use every day. It’s a free app called Last Call, and it calculates your blood alcohol content based on how much you drink, what kind of booze you’re chugging and how much you weigh. And here’s the best part: If you surpass the legal BAC limit (e.g., 0.08 percent in the United States), there’s a button to find a taxi or look up a directory of nearby DUI lawyers.

I love it. I finally have a tool to help me measure — and test — my drinking limits. Off to the pub I go!

Download Link [iTunes]

Image: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com

Here’s an interesting factoid you probably didn’t know about our tech-savvy president-elect: He’s a Mac user, according to Telegraph, who compiled a list of 50 facts you might not know about Barack Obama.

He’s not an iPhone user, though. "He says his worst habit is constantly checking his BlackBerry," Telegraph writes. That’s kind of a relief, because in terms of security, the iPhone has as many holes as a worn-out pair of Vans slip-ons. 

Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know [Telegraph via BBG]

Photo: 24gotham/Flickr

   
   
   
A web site claims hearing from an unnamed, "reliable source" that the next major iPhone firmware update is just 10 days away.

The source told iPhone Hellas that iPhone 2.2 will be available for download Nov. 21. Earlier, iPhone Hellas published images purporting to be leaked screenshots
revealing new features, including direct podcast downloading, Google
Street view, a redesigned Safari browser interface and others.

As
always, rumors from an unnamed source should be taken with a grain of
salt. But Nov. 21 would be a realistic release date for iPhone 2.2.
Apple released iPhone 2.1
on Sept. 12 — two months and one day after the release if iPhone 2.0.
Therefore, it’s reasonable to expect a major upgrade very soon.

iPhone OS v2.2 to be released on 21 November! [iPhone Hellas via Gizmodo]

The eye-opener in this 19th century instructional poster isn’t that people didn’t now how to use the new-fangled electric light, but that the paranoia-dispelling warnings seem not to have changed in the intervening years:

The use of Electricity for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep.

Remember this next time your tinfoil hat-wearing friends start complaining about cellphone radiation.

Your grand-grand-parents new media [Next Nature via Retro Thing]

In the West, we make a big deal about recycling, but what we really mean by “recycling” is melting down old crap to build yet more new crap. This is not the same everywhere. In some places, to recycle means to reuse, foregoing the energy-wasting reprocessing for a simple re-purposing of an old object. And if you thought I used the prefix “re-” too many times in that last sentence, then you’re just being extravagant. I was recycling it.

Above you see an old, keyless computer keyboard, the kind of bland beige box to be found mouldering on any sidewalk. In Africa, though, it becomes a lap-desk for a shoeshiner, the rough surface of the stripped keyboard offering a platform which grips both shoes and polish while protecting the shoeshiner’s clothes.

It’s a question of cultural attitude, and it’s not confined to Africa. In Barcelona, Spain, where I live, each barrio has a set day for the collection of big trash — furniture, clothing and the like. The collection happens late at night, so there is plenty of time for trawling the trash for treasure. It’s not unusual to see a well dressed businessman, complete with laptop bag, rifling the refuse alongside the students, the homeless, the poor or the tech blogger. And that’s great. Dumpster divers should be proud: We’re saving the planet and saving cash.

Your Old Keyboard and a Shoeshine Stand [AfriGadget]

Photo: whiteafrican/Flickr

Warning: This is not a joke. If you are one of the lucky few with the Android G1 Googlephone, try typing the word “reboot”.

Sorry. I take it you managed to find your way back here after your phone restarted. This incredible “feature” is not any kind of malware you might have picked up, but a real life bug in the actual shipping version of the Android OS. Anything you type on the keyboard, in any application, is simultaneously sent to a command line shell and executed as the root user.

A rough translation: Imagine you are running a terminal in Linux, the geeky text window into which you type commands for the computer to execute. Imagine, also, that the account in which you are working is that of the super user, or root, a user with permission to do anything it wants, including a simple five character command which will erase the entire contents of the phone, operating system and all.

That is exactly what is happening with the Android OS up to build number RC29 (the version which is hurriedly being pushed over the air as an update to G1 users. We thought that the hackers had scored when we reported that root terminal success had been achieved on the Googlephone, but now the process of downloading the terminal application, PTerminal, seems a little clunky. In fact, you should be able to turn on telnet, the process which enables you to remotely browse to your device over the network, simply by typing telnetd (although you’ll need some jiggery pokery to make sure you’re first in the correct directory).

Here’s what ZDNet’s Ed Burnette has to say:

Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges. Wow!

And from user jdhorvat, who posted this on the Google Code bug report thread:

I was in the middle of a text conversation with my girl when she asked why I hadn’t responded. I had just rebooted my phone and the first thing I typed was a response to her text which simply stated “Reboot” - which, to my surprise, rebooted my phone.

Incredible, and quite ridiculously dangerous. No wonder AT&T CEO Ralph De La Vega said that “The platform is still evolving”. The update should be with you soon. In the meantime, you can temporarily disable the background shell, using Burnette’s instructions.

Open the keyboard and type these 5 keystrokes: <return>-c-a-t-<return>. That will cause the phantom shell to not listen to commands any more, at least until the next reboot.

If that’s too much for you, just be careful what you type.

Worst. Bug. Ever. [ZDNet]
Android appears to be watching text streams and acting upon them [Google Code]

(Photo by Jon Snyder for Wired.com)

A simple and free online application can turn your favorite pictures into printable PDF files that you can cull into a huge wall-sized poster.

All it takes is a few minutes of your time, a few cents worth of paper, and a handy printer (if your unruly friend Charlie hasn’t thrown it out yet). Better yet, you can make the prints at work and the large piece of wall art will be absolutely free.

Here is how you do it: Upload an image from your computer into the Blockposters server, choose the number of sheets wide you want your poster to be and then select the print settings (Portrait, Landscape, A4, and Letter-US). Then, after you save the PDF file, print out the file while making sure no edges are cut off when they’re printed.

Put the pieces together and you’ll have a poster that will be about several feet wide and high (mine is 3 x 3). You could do all this with photoshop help, but the speed is the thing: it took me less than 3 minutes to print out a full sized Dharma Initiative logo.

Blockposter creator Steffan Luczyn told us the laborious process of cutting up images to crate a poster is what made him come up with the idea to automate it: "I decided to make a poster for my girlfriend from a (really) small picture she had of Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters). I manually spliced it up in MS Paint(!), counting pixels and saving each segment to a separate file. It took ages!  I then printed each file as ‘fit to page.’ The resulting poster looked really cool - we really liked the pixelly/blocky look — each pixel printed out around 1cm squared."

This points to a couple of the app caveats: The smaller the original image file is, the more likely it’ll be pixilated when it’s blown up. It results in a cool optical illusion when it is placed on the side of a building — up close, the images are weirdly indistinguishable, but from afar, they look just right.   

Also, the sheets of paper I used (regular Staples inkjet white paper) proved to be far too thin and flimsy, even as the picture came out clear and colorful. I recommend that you either purchase extra-thick paper or use photo prints.

Last year, GeekDad’s Dave Ebanks went to a local printer to similarly blow up an image of his son’s favorite race car but it cost him a bit of a bundle. He also had to get a picture at 150 dpi at full size (you can use pretty much any pic with blockposters) and it cost him about $5 per square foot (not including installation). So this is an alternative that many parents should try.

And if they don’t like it, they’ll have plenty of money left to try buy off Junior’s happiness.

Check out some of the walls users have created using Luczyn’s app: