Archive for the ‘Technology’ category

Finally, the perfect game for my Phone.

March 3rd, 2010

Everybody seems to be getting a touch-screen phone these days.  They are generally able to make calls, browse the web, play games and more.  In my case, I have an iPhone, and I primarily use it to read my email, check my calendar, read facebook or browse the web.  I have lots of free games, but hadn’t found any games that really engaged me.

Rush Hour is a simple puzzle game that I have seen for years in toy stores and game shops.  It has a simple premise, you need to solve challenges where you arrange the plastic cars on a grid as indicated on the challenge card.  Then, by only moving the cars forward and back, you need to free a path for the red car to slide out of the traffic jam.  It’s basically a 2d mashup of  a Rubik’s cube and Tangrams.  It’s deceptively simple to learn, but the trickiest challenges take some time.

I realized this would be a great iPhone game right when I got the phone and tried an assortment of free games.  Many were fun, but very few kept me engaged for more than a few minutes.  Rush Hour seemed an obvious game for the touchscreen device, but when I looked, it wasn’t available.

Thankfully, they have realized the opportunity and made this time killer available for the Phone.  A free version offers a couple hours of enjoyment, and the pay version promises many more challenges.  I like how the game tracks your movements and you can try to solve the puzzle with the fewest movements if you like.  

Phone adaptations of more complicated games I enjoy such as Settlers of Catan enver made any sense to me, I don’t play board games to have a private experience on a small screen, I play to have a fun time with friends.  Games for the phone should be easy to pick up, easy to stop anytime and fun.  Rush Hour has met all of these goals.   It makes bathroom time and time spent waiting around much more fun!

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Posted in Board Games, Technology

Low-cost, highly personal iPhone Case.

October 29th, 2009

I got a used iPhone from Lisa, (Thank you!) and I have been enjoying the device quite a lot.   In short, it’s a great “lifestyle” device but a so-so phone.  That is a reasonable tradeoff for me, since i make relatively few calls.

This phone is the first generation iPhone, so I don’t get a GPS, or fast 3g data. It also has a crack in the digitizer, but it is in the lower-left corner and not very distracting.  (The digitizer is the glass pane above the screen itself which receives the touch inputs.  On the new iPhone, this is  separate 15$ part that you can replace with some saavy, on this generation, it is glued to the screen itself, so a replacement would cost 100+ dollars, which I am not convinced is worth it.)

I ordered a charging cable online, since I wasn’t that concerned about how the charger looks and feels in everyday use, but I wasn’t really interested in buying a 30$ case for the phone, and the 5$ cases look pretty lousy.  That said, I didn’t want to break the device before buying a case.

I gave myself 10 minutes the other day after lunch, to fashion a makeshift case out of the cardboard backing to an empty legal notepad. I placed the phone face-down in the middle of the cardboard, and traced the outline of the phone.  I drew a circle roughly where the home button is, a big square for the screen and a slit for the speaker, and cut them out with an x-acto.  I made slits at the corners with a pair of scissors, scored the four edges and folded it around the phone.  A couple pieces of scotch tape finished the task in a total of 7 minutes.  The holes for the volume, docking port and camera came later, as did the personalized front plate which was implemented with ink and sharpie.

This was easy and fun, and the case is extremely replaceable.  It has even proven itself already in a 2 foot fall (Sean!) onto a hard table.

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Free upgrade to your Canon Point-and-shoot Camera

October 14th, 2009

A quick primer on Digital Cameras:
Most folks who get seriously interested in Photography eventually upgrade to a Digital SLR Camera.  These bulky cameras have a number of features that a cheap point-and-shoot lack:

  • The most obvious difference is the ability to change the lens based on what you are trying to photograph. 
    Some folks make do with a single lens which will be good at everything, but great at nothing.  We carry three lenses at the moment; each is great at something different. (The 10-22 is very wide, the 30mm is fast and sharp, and the 70-200 can zoom and is also very sharp.)
  • One of the other important features of a Digital SLR is that the sensor which gathers light and creates the digital image is comparably large. 
    The sensor of a point-and-shoot is about the size of a tic-tac, whereas the sensor on a SLR is about the size of a postage stamp.  This gathers much more light, and leads to a sharper image with less noise.
  • The last big difference is the ability to shoot in RAW format. 
    Cameras record anywhere from 10-16 bits of information for each pixel in the photo, but when you convert the image to the standard JPEG format, you are limited to 8 bits of information for each color/pixel.  If this conversion occurs in the camera, you get easy to use JPEG files on your memory card, but you cannot go back to the original data if you want to make changes to the brightness or the color balance.  There is no technical reason preventing a cheap camera from saving photos in RAW format, but rather they do not offer this option as it drives sales of higher-end cameras.

So, how do I upgrade my Canon point-and shoot camera?
This is where the hard work of a community of hackers comes in with a program called Canon Hack Development Kit, or CHDC.  They have put together a hack which allows a inexpensive Canon Point-and-Shoot camera to do many things that Canon did not intend.  The most significant new feature is the ability to save yoru photos in RAW format.

I installed their software on my camera and fought through their poorly-designed menus to set it up, but it really works.  I shouldn’t overstate the value of saving RAW images from a low quality camera. There is only a little extra data to work with in these RAW images, and the resulting files are significantly larger than their JPEG counterparts.  The excitement is further weakened by the fact that you have to run a crappy utility (DNG4PS2) on your PC to convert these RAW files into .dng files which are compatible with popular software such as Lightroom.

Update (8:29pm)
I wanted to see if the RAW files from my camera actually contained extended dynamic range compared to the camera JPEG, so I did a quick test.

The images below are crops from an overexposed portion of a photo taken on my Canon SD630.

Image 1. This is a crop from the unmodified in-camera JPEG.
Image 2. I took the in-camera JPEG and decreased the exposure in Lightroom, -4.00
Image 3. This time I applied the same -4.00 exposure to the RAW image.
As you can see, there is definitely additional information in the RAW image which was lost as pure white in the JPEG.

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Posted in Photography, Technology

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Netflix’s Secret Weapon: The Schindler’s List Effect

September 24th, 2009
This summer, we found an unusual occurence: all of our friends had a copy of Schindler’s list on loan from Netflix at the same time. We all had received the film some time ago and refused to watch it,but we also refused to return it.

The secret behind this film’s importance to the Netflix company is complex:
  1. It is undeniably a fantastic movie, so it is a common movie to add to your queue, since the Netflix algorithms are pretty sure you will give it 4 or 5 stars too.
  2. It is a gut wrenchingly sad movie that nobody actually wants to see.    (It’s different to want to have watched something than to roll into the house after a long day and want to watch this film.)  Remember, it’s also two DVD’s long. This isn’t even an efficient mechanism to cause self-inflicted depression.
  3. The subject matter (holocaust) is so emotionally loaded, that we feel guilt about the fact that we don’t want to watch the film.  This may play into why we refuse to return it unwatched.

Net Result: We refused to watch or return it.  It clogs up everyone’s queue at a cost to Netflix of $14.99.  This treacherous film clogged our low-cost 1-at-a-time netflix queue completely for four months.  At the end of the day, we paid (4 x $4.99 = $19.96) to neither watch nor own this movie, and feel guilty about it too.

I wonder what other movies in the Netflix Catalgoue exhibit the Schindler’s List Effect.

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