The Internet is Running Out of Airwaves!

 
Although it seems infinite, the wireless Internet used by smartphones does have its limitations and it may reach these in the near future! This is because of the spike in data consumed by smartphones in the past few years and the large number of smartphones now being used globally.  What does this mean for smartphone users? Well, according to CNN Money, the spectrum crunch could raise the prices on data packages, increase the number of dropped calls, and slow down messaging speeds and Internet speeds on smartphones and tablets. When this happens, which could be in the next year or so, it will be interesting to see how wireless carriers such as Verizon and AT&T will react. Will phone companies merge? Who will be the top carrier? Will the world have to convert back to flip phones? As we sit back and wait to see what happens, these carriers are frantically trying find answers to the problem!

Buoyant Beats!!

New Eco Terra Waterproof Boombox helps you to bring your music where water wouldn't normally allow, let's just hope the Sharks don't like your taste in music.

http://www.gizmag.com/grace-digital-eco-terra-waterproof-boombox/21632/

ClassPager Allows Teachers to Quiz Students Via Text Messaging! Really!?

Being from a generation where technology wasn't the prominent force in our lives, it can be daunting to realize the influence that technology has on us! If you have ever taken a Chemistry class here at UD you've experienced using the i>clickr.

If you have not used an i>clickr yet please let me explain briefly. A i>clickr is a devise that allows the teacher to ask questions and then records your answer. This is done by you, the student, selecting labeled tabs that say A,B,C, D, and E. The response is then transmitted to the teachers computer and the program relays the answer for all to see, as well as records your answer. Nice way to quiz students, or at least that is what my professors believe!

So why am I mentioning this invasion of technology? Because this extension is now being transferred from using devices such as the i>clickr to using your own cell phone! By the use of an app called teachers can now quiz students and send reminders via text messages! The only cost to this, are the standard rates for text messaging!

I am not complaining about instant gratification by the use of technology, but rather questioning the limits of usage! Where do we draw the line?

Happy Anniversary!

The Review today published an article (click on title above) noting our five-year anniversary. Many of us staff were here for that. If you'd like to go back in time, read this UDaily article from 2007! You can see in the second photo with the ribbon five of our student employees at the time (Gifford, James, Justin, Kyle and Autumn), and in the bottom photo another student, Jared, is demonstrating equipment. The third photo shows some of the audience and our desk all decked out (or is that "desked out"?) with ribbons. Also going back in time is this Review article from 2007, which quotes Shelly, myself and Steve Hill, another student employee at the time. So Happy Anniversary and thanks to all student employees, past and present, who are a vital part of the Student Multimedia Design Center!

Rich

Wearable electronics?

If you thought your clothes were pretty cool, you may soon be humbled by the new wave of futuristic fashion: wearable electronics. LED lighted clothing is already appearing on the shelves, but fiber optic technology is continuing to develop at a rapid pace. For example, the company Adafruit has come up with a platform called "Flora", a tiny microprocessor that can easily be attached to clothing. These processors are being designed for all different purposes, from lighting up different colored LED lights to full-on GPS capabilities.

Coming soon: a GPS handbag from Adafruit. I personally would feel a little silly asking a handbag for directions...

New Lytro 3d camera.

Hey guys!

Here is a pretty neat invention that I stumbled upon the other day. This new camera invented by Lytro has never before seen abilities that can blow your mind. "In short, Lytro is developing a new type of camera that dramatically changes photography for the first time since the 1800s. Rather than just capturing one plane of light, it captures the entire light field around a picture, all in one shot taken on a single device. A light field includes every beam of light in every direction at every point in time." This new camera has the ability to refocus an image, even after the image has been shot and saved, Pretty cool, i want one.

Angry Birds: In Space

"One small fling for a bird. One quantum leap for birdkind."

That's the tagline for Rovio's latest installment in the Angry Bird franchise. If "Seasons" and "Rio" aren't enough to satisfy your bird-flinging fix, fear not, for "Space" is on its way. The game will launch on March 22, according in Rovio's blog, along with the usual product tie-ins we've come to expect from the brand. News of the latest installment comes less than a week after the company made Angry Birds available on Facebook.

Where will Angry Birds go next?

Behold the future

Saw this video and I had to share. The company Corning is currently researching to bring their vision of a world in which ordinary surfaces transform into sophisticated electronic devices to a reality. The CEO of Corning Wendell Weeks believes glass is the "essential enabling material of this new world." Check out the video, very cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38&vq=medium

Create Custom Fonts with Inkscape

If you're like me, there's been a time when a custom font would have been just the ticket for a design project. Font-creation software usually costs a pretty penny. But what if there were a familiarly free piece of vector-software that could do the job?

Being an Inkscape-dabbler for a couple of years now, I had yet to come across this neat feature tucked away until I found this video tutorial by the blogger of Clever Someday. Using only Inkscape and a free font converter, you can now create your own typeface. As much as I appreciate the classic, literary flavor of Times New Roman, Georgia, and other serif-fonts, maybe it's time I try my hand at making my own. This is my type of fun!

1940 Census video by the National Archives

This video explains how digitized enumeration rolls from the 1940 Census will be made available online on April 2, 2012. Census rolls are sealed for 72 years to protect the privacy of respondents. These lists of residents are a gold mine to genealogists and other researchers, many of whom have used earlier Census rolls on microfilm.

John

Taxes on iPads and Smartphones?

It's that time of year, tax time. This USA Today article explores apps and options for doing taxes via a smartphone. The IRS has new apps as well as tax preparers.

But should you? Depends on how secure you keep your phone, and how simple your taxes are. I prefer the old-fashioned pen and paper form method, or the less old-fashioned online version!

Rich

Microsoft Office for iPad Spotted; Should be hitting App Store Soon

A screenshot has appeared showing what looks to be Microsoft Office for the iPad. Sporting a Windows 8 design, it appears to have the capacity for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Microsoft is looking to submit the app for approval in the near future and will be competing against the likes of Documents to Go, QuickOffice, and Apple's own Pages, Keynote, and Numbers apps.

Mojam Game Development

Right now and for the next 30 hours, internet users worldwide can experience a rare opportunity: the chance to watch a video game be developed from start to finish. Mojang, the creator of the popular game Minecraft has teamed up with the Humble Indie Bundle to create a game in 60 hours, streaming every minute of it live on the internet. The team is accepting donations, which will not only land you a copy of the game, but also all proceeds will go directly to one of four charities. Say what you will about gamers and the game industry, but there's a lot of good out there, and with the rise of programs like this, there is even more to come.


Watch live video from mojang on www.twitch.tv

Quick Tüts: Do it yourself video tutorials

I came across this Vimeo Group called Quick Tüts, (pronounced toots), which touts itself as "a group dedicated to short, instructional videos showing how to use everyday, readily-available items to aid in your filmmaking adventures." There are short instructional videos for how to use an old rollerskate to create a dolly, or how to use a towel to get a tracking shot, or even how to use your camera's neck straps to help stabilize your shots if you don't have a tripod at hand. Photography and filmmaking are pretty expensive hobbies to get into (which is why it's so great that we have the resources at the Student Multimedia Design Center)-- but with a little creative thinking, you can come up with surprising ways to use everyday things to help with your next multimedia project.

A useful app for drivers and cities alike

The new Android app "Street Bump," piloted by the City of Boston, uses smartphones' built-in accelerometer to gather data about the size of a pothole and its GPS location which is then sent on to a city database. The app, which should be available to the public this summer, makes the smartphone's accelerometer do the job of sensing potholes. If you're driving and you hit a pothole while the app is loaded, it sends the data onto the city, which can take the necessary steps to resolve the issue.

I'd love to see this used around the city of Newark for all the potholes I encounter on a daily basis!

Apple's New OS

Apple's next Mac operating system, OS X Mountain Lion, will bring far more integration to iOS found on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch when it arrives this summer.

Want to learn how to code?

Code Academy is a website that makes it fun to learn how to code. To begin, the user learns Javascript, but they should open up Python and Ruby lessons soon. There's a section that tells you what to do in each less, a section to type in your code, and a section to see it execute. If you sign up for an account, you can track your progress (you can also sign in with Facebook to share badges and your progress). Code Academy also has a thing called "Code Year" that sends you emails each week with a new lesson. After one year, you'll be a pretty good programmer.

http://www.codecademy.com

Thinking about the other side of digital media creation: preservation and access

Here at the Student Multimedia Design Center, we're all about multimedia creation. We're here to provide the equipment, software and hardware, and space to help students create multimedia projects. However, there's another side to the picture that's near and dear to people in the library world, and it all comes down to digital preservation and access. We're moving into a digital world-- and people will have to make choices about what they're going to do with all of the analog stuff that's sitting on shelves and in basements, waiting to be discovered. The ironic thing is that digital media is notoriously bad as a preservation medium. Hard drives will last 5-10 years, if that. DVDs and CDs have a similar shelf life. These are all things people-- especially librarians and archivists-- will have to think about if they want to make sure that all of the digital stuff that we're creating now will be around 20, 30, 50 years from now. 

This post is a bit off track from the types of things we normally post on this blog, but this article from the Vancouver Sun made me stop and think for a bit, and I thought it was worth sharing: "CBC music library could be lost."

Student Video Contest

Herman Miller (furniture) has a student video contest to answer the question "What Makes Your Campus Green." I'd sure love one of our student assistants to win one of the cash prizes --$2,500 for first prize! You have till April 6.

Technology in the Classroom

Do you remember studying Shakespeare in school? I do. Tons of reading and tons and tons of papers! Classrooms today are taking a very different approach. In Arizona one seventh grade teacher is making her students use A LOT of technology to learn. They work on laptops in the classroom making blogs and even facebook pages from the perspective of one of the characters. They also picked a Kanye West song to express the emotions of one of the characters. The teacher affirms that this type of learning will be very productive and successful. The school district support technology in the class room has spent $33 MILLION dollars on these new technologies and as a result reading and math scores have improved since 2005, when they started using technology in classrooms.

2012 World Press Photo

Here's the winners of the 2012 World Press Photo competition. The organization holds a yearly juried contest for photographs taken by press photographers, such as photographers working for AP or Getty images. A lot of the photos really express the humanity behind the news stories we've all heard about in the past year. For example, there's a mother holding her wounded son in a mosque during the protests in Yemen. But this photo is my favorite for aesthetic reasons is this one, shot underwater.

Impressive Halloween Costume

I know that Halloween is still 8+ months away, but it's never too early to start thinking about your costume and I came across this gem and couldn't help but share it.

Tyler Card of Grand Rapids, Michigan made this fully functional Nikon D3 DSRL Camera costume from cardboard, a paint bucket, plexiglass, a laptop screen, strobe light, and an actual camera (along with I'm sure some more advanced technological savvy). Here's a video of its basic functionality, and he also features a "making of" video on Vimeo.

Fully Functional Camera Costume from Tyler Card on Vimeo.

So who's making the T2i Rebel for Halloween this year?

Robert Adams' Photographty Exhibit

Hello, all photographers and web designers! It's always a treat to find a web portfolio that really "works."

So, if you're not familiar with Robert Adams' work, I highly recommend a visit to his exhibition page at the Yale University Website.

Robert Adams (http://artgallery.yale.edu/adams/)

What we encounter is a very skillful combination of minimalist design and just enough coding tricks to draw us into Adams' photography and the accompanying stories. Notice how all but one thumbnail fades on a "mouseover"? Personally, these details do much to draw me into Adams' world, but they don't do so much that they distract from his actual photography. How else does this site's design and usability "succeed" in this way?

Google's Privacy Changes

Google announced mid-January that it is going to start combing nearly all of the information it has on its users, under a new privacy policy. The new policy will become effective March 1.

 Under the new policy if you use services such as Gmail, Google Plus, and Yahoo, Google will be able to take your information from one and combine it with information from another. This could mean that you'll search for something on Google and see ads for a subject you've just been discussing with a friend over email. It could also allow Google to notify you that you are late for a meeting, because it is able to get your location from your phone and can see an appointment scheduled on your calendar.

Google has depicted the switch as an improvement that will make its privacy policies easier to understand and help deliver more helpful information to users. However the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) contends that Google's new policies will violate restrictions imposed in an agreement reached with the FTC last year. The EPIC filed a lawsuit Wednesday stating that the agreement gives the FTC the power to stop Google from implementing the planned privacy change.

This article discusses the lawsuit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/epic-ftc-google-privacy_n_1263844.html?ref=technology

 This article discusses what the privacy policy changes mean for users: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/01/25/what-do-googles-privacy-changes-mean-for-you/

"Why Your MP3s Sound Bad: High-Resolution Audio Explained"

PC Magazine recently came out with an article titled "Why Your MP3s Sound Bad: High-Resolution Audio Explained." It's an informative read on digital audio, file formats, and what you can do to get a better audio experience. 

RollTop

RollTop is a multitouchscreen laptop that can roll up and bend. It can also transform into a graphics tablet or act as a monitor. It is so portable because it is lightweight and very thin, and especially because it simply rolls up and can hang on your shoulder.
RollTop has been a concept for about 4 years, but it is getting closer to becoming a reality.
Watch the video by clicking the link at the bottom of its homepage!