The Technological Adventures of a Geek Gone Mad

Star Trails 1 - Photoshopped

2008-02-23T22:51:00.003-06:00

Star Trails 1 - Photoshopped
Originally uploaded by D. Shankar

Pictures from Wednesday, February 20, 2008 - my first try with astrophotography.

See the Flickr page for camera & picture details.

Shot with a Canon EOS 40D with a 15mm Fisheye/Wideangle lens.

Lunar Eclipse with a Starry Night - Photoshopped

2008-02-23T22:51:00.001-06:00

Lunar Eclipse with a Starry Night - Photoshopped
Originally uploaded by D. Shankar

Pictures from Wednesday, February 20, 2008 - my first try with astrophotography.

See the Flickr page for camera & picture details.

Shot with a Canon EOS 40D with a 15mm Fisheye/Wideangle lens.

Star Trails 2 - Photoshopped version

2008-02-23T22:50:00.003-06:00

Star Trails 2 - Photoshopped version
Originally uploaded by D. Shankar

Pictures from Wednesday, February 20, 2008 - my first try with astrophotography.

See the Flickr page for camera & picture details.

Shot with a Canon EOS 40D with a 15mm Fisheye/Wideangle lens.

Star Trails 2 - Photoshopped version

2008-02-23T22:50:00.001-06:00

Star Trails 2 - Photoshopped version
Originally uploaded by D. Shankar

Pictures from Wednesday, February 20, 2008 - my first try with astrophotography.

See the Flickr page for camera & picture details.

Shot with a Canon EOS 40D with a 15mm Fisheye/Wideangle lens.

A brief view of things to come ...

2007-09-21T21:00:00.000-05:00

The following pictures will be explained in a later post but I'll leave you with three hints:

Multi-touch
Webcam
Infrared (IR)

This is step 1.

More to come later!

Multi-touch Systems

2007-07-13T13:31:00.000-05:00

The multi-touch rave has begun with many companies jumping on-board. For example, Microsoft demoed their Microsoft Surface computer, targeted as a family computer in coffee table form factor. Apple has used multi-touch in their recently released iPhone.

Jeff Han is a pioneer in the multi-touch field; his multi-touch display, demoed in TED 2006, touched off (pun intended) a DIY revolution in multi-touch. Many sites now show how to build a cheap multi-touch display using Han's method for multi-touch.

Han's method uses FTIR, or fragmented total internal reflection, along with IR (Infrared) rays.

An image demonstrating the concept of FTIR in touch sensing. Copyright credited to Jeff Han.

Using a projector and a computer, one could build a multi-touch display out of common tools, acryllic, wood, tracing paper (or better), along with IR LEDs and a basic webcam converted to receive only IR rays. Many DIY tutorials for this project exist on the net - Googling "diy multi-touch" produces many results.

Why am I posting this? Well I plan on building one of this displays for my upcoming computer (oh boy...) and experimenting with the software. What's the software? How do we play games like Warcraft with this? Well I've found many frameworks, but building the apps are left up to me. The software framework used to interact with the machines is available for Windows, Linux, OS X and more. One of the more common frameworks is touchlib, where one creates the front end (in C++) for touch sensing, not graphics. Therefore, multi-touch functionality could be added to many of our everyday applications.

I'm currently experimenting with touchlib. More to come ;).

AMD 2900 XT beats the 8800 GTX in Vista when in CF

2007-07-12T23:46:00.000-05:00

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7864

Basically, the 2900 XT with 1GB of GDDR4 memory on a 512-bit bus, placed in Cross-Fire, will beat the 8800 GTX with 768MB of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit bus. Why the better performance? ATI's drivers! It's common knowledge that nVidia's driver support for the Vista platform has been anything but stellar, leading to diminished performance on the DX10 operating system. Although nVidia is "working" on the drivers for Vista (for the past few months), ATI still holds a solid lead as the above benchmarks indicate. Games like Crysis can only be better when they have 2GB of total video memory and 2x512-bit buses to saturate.

My upcoming computer build will (hopefully) feature 2 2900 XTs, rather than my previous choice of 2 8800 GTXs. Besides, the 1GB GDDR4 2900 XT model is a good $25-100 cheaper than the cheapest 8800 GTX.

Technorati

2007-07-10T13:17:00.001-05:00

Technorati Profile

The time has arrived!

2007-07-10T08:13:00.001-05:00

Once again, the need for a blog has arisen. Seeing that I will be building a computer (and various other technology-related products), this blog will serve as a good base for posting day-to-day work log, reviews of items I purchase and so on.

Upcoming posts: Dell 30" Monitor with WQXGA 2560x1600 resolution.