Optimus Quest 2 Reminder

Don’t forget my Optimus Quest competition. The Hull student with the most Windows Phone Marketplace downloads up to the end of July 2011 will win a shiny new Optimus 7 device. Then we do it all again in August.

Full details here.

Things that go Beep in the Night

Think I might have overdone the perspective correction on this picture….

The burglar alarm went off at 5:00 am this morning. And I don’t mean went off in a “I’ve seen a burglar” kind of way. I mean went off in a “bottle of milk” kind of way. It started emitting clicks and beeps that indicated that all was not well inside. Since I knew that opening the box would probably set it off properly we just endured the unhappy beeps for a few hours.

When I took a look I discovered that the system seemed to have forgotten all its settings and was having difficultly remembering new ones. I think one of the memory chips has gone a bit soft. Since I hate being without intruder detection it was therefore time to fit another.

Turns out that I happened to have a replacement device lying around. I bought it a while back when I needed to find out about burglar alarms for a .NET Micro Framework project I was involved with. It has been sitting, unfitted, in the bedroom because the old alarm was working fine. Until now.

So it was out with the new kit and off I went. The new device actually has an alarm in the keyboard unit. I didn’t know this until I set the thing off by mistake. The resulting 100db of noise made me levitate from my chair around 2 feet and I spent 30 seconds or so trying to find out in the manual how to turn the darned thing off and cover my ears at the same time.

Anyhoo, I’ve configured and tested everything and it seems to work fine. I’ve had to say goodbye to the old one, which is a bit sad, it had served us well for a very long time.

Synchronicity

Ian came over today. He is the kind of chap who will turn up and help you carry a sofa upstairs. Which is just as well, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyhoo, we got to talking and he told me that earlier that day the mirror in his lounge had fallen off the wall, all by itself. This happened at pretty much the same time that a noticeboard fell off the wall in our house. Scary.

Light Field Photography with Lytro

I’ve always been interested in photography. When I was young I used to read books full of theory about ASA film speeds, f-stops and depth of field calculations. One book said that there was no chance that a camera would ever be able to focus itself. I really wish I’d kept that one.

Anyhoo, I’ve just found out about Lytro. This is a new way of taking pictures they are calling “Light Field Photography”. Rather than using a lens to capture a single, hopefully well focused, image on a sensor, what Lytro are doing is capturing the entire “Light Field” from a scene. The blurb (and this highly detailed thesis) say that the camera captures not just the light, but the direction it is coming from. This means that by using cunning computation they can then built up an image which is focused after it has been taken. The photographer can make decisions about which parts of the picture they want to have sharp after the shot has been taken. They have some astonishing demos on their web site where you can click on different parts of the picture to focus at that point.

I’ve had a read of the thesis and I think what they are doing is putting a bunch of tiny “micro-lenses” in front of the sensor so that different parts of the sensor are focused at different distances. This means that you lose resolution (since the same spot in the image is being focused at different points) but by selecting the output from particular sensors you can build an image focused at any point, or indeed build up an picture that is sharp at all points. This requires a fairly ferocious amount of processing power, but does give you a lot of flexibility after the picture is taken.

I’m not completely convinced by their pitch. Modern cameras with small sensors have a large depth of field (most of the image tends to be in focus anyway) and they also have very efficient auto-focusing software. However,  I’ve clicked the box that says “Let me know when the cameras are for sale” and we will just have to see how it all turns out.

Not Welcome at Ikea

Not sure how it happened, but Ikea managed to both lose my password and then ban me for entering the wrong one. Not impressed. I guess I’ll just have to buy my compressed sawdust from somewhere else.