This Tweak Puts CarPlay On Your iPhone Without An External Screen

The CarPlay interface is undoubtedly better for using while driving than the regular ‘ole screen. But unless you’ve got a shiny new car (or one of the expensive aftermarket dashes), chances are you don’t have anything to pair your iPhone with. But this tweak gives you an idea of what CarPlay would look like running on just your handset. Read more…

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This Tweak Puts CarPlay On Your iPhone Without An External Screen

Top 10 Backups Everyone Should Have (Not Just Computer Backups)

You’ve heard it a lot, but it bears repeating: you need to back up your computer , because your hard drive will fail one day. Beyond those file backups, though, are many other things we need to have a backup for—ranging from work and finances to personal needs. Read more…

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Top 10 Backups Everyone Should Have (Not Just Computer Backups)

New Technique Allows Researchers To Extract Audio From Silent Video

 By looking at the minute vibrations in high speed video, researchers at the Department of Engineering of the Catholic University of America have created a method for extracting sound data from high-speed silent video footage. From the release: The authors used a subset-based image-correlation approach to detect the motions of points on the surface of an object, capturing target images with… Read More

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New Technique Allows Researchers To Extract Audio From Silent Video

There’s an Entire House Crammed Into This Tiny 98-Year-Old Boiler Room

There’s residential design, and then there’s jigsaw puzzle design. This elegant project by the San Francisco architect Christi Azevedo , who wedged a full guest house into a laundry and boiler room from 1916, f alls somewhere in between the two. Read more…

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There’s an Entire House Crammed Into This Tiny 98-Year-Old Boiler Room

Could You Launch Someone Into the Sun With a Big Enough Cannon?

In the spirit of making problems go away, sometimes you want to just launch a particular person/problem into the sun. So—could you? And just how big would the canon need to be? Read more…

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Could You Launch Someone Into the Sun With a Big Enough Cannon?

New Star Wars trailer perfectly remade with original Star Wars footage

When I saw the first trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens , it felt instantly familiar. That’s very probably because anything Star Wars feels nostalgic but also because, well, we’ve seen all those scenes from the trailer before! Here is the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens remade shot-by-shot with original footage. Read more…

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New Star Wars trailer perfectly remade with original Star Wars footage

Disney’s Super-Realistic CG Eyeballs Are an Uncanny Valley Airlift

What most often gives away a CG character as fake is their dead, lifeless eyes. It’s a common contributing factor to the uncanny valley effect, but now researchers at Disney have developed a system to perfectly capture a performer’s eyes that promises to make CG characters finally appear more lifelike and convincing. Read more…

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Disney’s Super-Realistic CG Eyeballs Are an Uncanny Valley Airlift

Disney Research makes HDR videos work better on regular TVs

Disney Research has found a way to preserve the awesome quality of high-dynamic range or HDR videos when they’re shown on consumer-level TVs and displays. See, HDR videos can show shadows and light better than footage taken by conventional equipment can — in fact, the setting’s purpose is to record what we see rather than what the camera sees. Problem is, typical consumer TVs and screens these days aren’t capable of displaying them, unless they go through a process called tone mapping . Unfortunately, existing tonal mapping techniques downgrade HDR videos’ quality, so that most of their details get “lost in translation, ” so to speak, or introduce unwanted effects like flickering and ghosting or after-image. Disney’s new tonal mapping technique, however, prevents these things from happening. If you’d like to know the science behind the technique, make sure to pore over the team’s research paper for more info. Or, you know, you can just watch the video below for a demonstration of what the technology can do. Comments Source: Disney Research

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Disney Research makes HDR videos work better on regular TVs

Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades

Rovio has confirmed that 110 people will lose their jobs as the Angry Birds maker also shuts down its game-development studio in Tampere, Finland. The layoffs, first announced in October, amount to about 14 percent of the company’s workforce. It had been expected that Rovio would make 130 people redundant but after a round of consultations this number has now been reduced. Rovio said that as a result of the redundancies “several positions” have been opened for internal applications. The actual number of employees out of work will depend on how many new internal positions are filled. The closing of its Tampere development studio means that Rovio will move all of its Finnish operation to its Espoo headquarters. The company shot to fame in 2009 when it released Angry Birds , its 52nd game . The title went on to become the most downloaded mobile game of all time. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades