Tokyo Night Photo in High Dynamic Range: Please Build HDR into Cams!

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You might have already seen this HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photo of the Tokyo skyline at night from Boing Boing or JeanSnow’s blog. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, so here’s a post. It was taken by an unspecified Pentax DSLR, according to flickr’s metadata. Of course, the magic to HDR is done post shot, in photoshop, where a filter can comb through three photos of the same scene bracketed -/+2 stops to capture the best possible fidelity in different brightness ranges for hyper cool looking photos like this.

What I’d like to know is, cameras can autobracket exposure as it is. Why can’t we build this into cameras as a feature? And then, my eyes.

Tokyo HDR Shots on Flickr [via Boingboing, Jean Snow, Gridskipper]

Original Post [Gizmodo]

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Minority Report Touch Interface for Real

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The iPhone’s new touch interface might be nice, but it’s nowhere near as involved as the future UI envisioned in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise could drag objects across the screen and manipulate them in all kinds of ways, or “push” them aside to bring up something new. Jeff Han, a research scientist at NYU’s Courant Institute, has come up with such an interface, which responds not only to touch and gestures, but to varying degrees of pressure. He flips photos across the screen, zooms in, throws them away, and calls up new ones, among a variety of other cool uses of the interface. It looks startlingly responsive and natural, far more so than a standard PC setup. It’s hard to describe here how intense and possibly revolutionary the setup is, so you really need to check out the video and article for yourself. With any luck, his new company Perceptive Pixel will be bringing it to our eager fingertips before too long

Video [Fast Company’s FastTV]
Can’t Touch This[Fast Company]

Original Post [Gizmodo]

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Dilbert – January 17, 2007

dilbert-20070117

From GeeK.nL (Dilbert Archive)

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New Study: Men Wish Staring at Women's Breasts Made Them Healthier

Crazy Germans…

I got very interesting email in my in-box today. It was about a German study released in The New England Journal of Medicine about the physical benefits of men staring at women breasts.

Article

I say with the utmost conviction that this article is, erm, unsupported.
This was kind of expected as I got to the, “Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well endowed female is roughly the equivalent to a thirty-minute aerobics workout.” If this fact were true, our nation would be simply crawling with Adonises instead of Homers. Furthermore, nowhere in The New England Journal of Medicine does a German study appear by author Karen Weatherby.

If only… Eh, fellas?

Thanks, Nathan!

Healthbolt » New Study: Men Wish Staring at Women’s Breasts Made Them Healthier

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Mythbusters Info

 Drivl.com | Every Mythbusters Myth ON ONE PAGE

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USB PC Repair System

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Windows only: The Daily Cup of Tech computer help site put together a USB-drive based collection of software that’ll help you resuscitate any ailing PC.

All wrapped up into one convenient, 14.2MB zip file, the USB PC Repair System contains 37 fix-it proggies, many of which we’ve recommended here on Lifehacker before, including: CCleaner, Eraser, ProcessExplorer and TweakUI. The PC Repair System is a free download, Windows only. — Gina Trapani

PC Repair System [Daily Cup of Tech]

From Lifehacker

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Build your own t-shirt rack

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The latest instructable at DIY site Instructables shows you how to build a t-shirt rack that, unlike regular closet hangers, won’t stretch out the necks.

Head to the hardware store: You’re going to need a mess o’ PVC pipe and elbow fittings, plus a way to cut the pipes to the various required lengths (unless you’re able to buy them pre-cut). The author says time and materials will run you 26 minutes and $26, but it’ll take you a lot longer if you have to cut the PVC yourself. In the end you’ll have a rack that holds a dozen large or XL t-shirts (like, ahem, our dazzling Lifehacker tees), and keeps them wrinkle-free. Nice! Here’s a craft-fair business waiting to be born. — Rick Broida

From Lifehacker

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Random Tom Stoppard Quote

“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. “

Tom Stoppard, “Artist Descending a Staircase”, British dramatist & screenwriter (1937 – )

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Can't Pump Gas

I always thought the stereotype was women can’t drive.

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VIDEO: Your car won't fit, lady

No smartass comments about women drivers, capisce? It could just as easily have been a man at the wheel trying to squeeze 12 feet of car into 10 feet of parking space. While we do admire her determination, we question her depth perception, and her social graces. Perhaps it was a mild case of road rage that apparently leads her to take a swig of amaretto after several passes. We’ll probably never know. She still seems to do a better job than the Lexus self-parking system as tested by the guys at Automobile. All we can say is, poor Panda. The YouTube video is after the jump.

Thanks for tip, Adrian!

Original post [autoblog]

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