Online Home of Derek Meister
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With the summer winding down and school on everyone’s minds, we’re getting more and more questions on whether those tiny (and cheap) netbooks make for a good back-to-school purchase.
I had an opportunity to speak with Fox 8 News about the pros and cons of both netbooks and notebooks for students.
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The most surprising thing for me when it comes to stats about social media is just how quickly it’s becoming popular with the traditionally non-tech orientated non-teen population.
I found a great little app called AutoStitch for the iPhone that came in very handy this week when I wanted to create panoramic views of the displays at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.
Click for full size:
The program works by allowing you to take a series of overlapping photos using the iPhone camera and “stitching” them together in one long, panoramic image. While you can find software to accomplish the same effect with more features for your desktop or laptop, I love the fact that you can create and save the panorama directly on the phone.
The only thing holding this $1.99 program back is the limited image quality available to my iPhone 3G camera. However, as you can see from the above examples, impressive results are still available despite the hardware issue.
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This video, showing the use of the new Nearest Tube app for the Apple iPhone 3GS, really brings home the point that augmented reality applications are starting to make their way into every day life.
“Augmented reality” is a term you’ll hear for technology that adds extra information into your view of an area around you. In the example above, the app uses the GPS and magnetic compass in the iPhone 3GS to determine where you’re at and what you’re looking at to lookup useful information about the London subway system, then takes the current image from the camera and adds the relevant information on top of it.
Yet again, a little bit of “science fiction” that has become “science now”.
It looks like the cell phone companies will be answering questions today in a US Senate committee hearing on the rapid rise of text messaging costs to consumers.
The true answer, of course, is that vowels are so expensive to buy. At least that’s what I learned from Wheel of Fortune.