Tech Today w/ Ken May

The high-definition pride of your living room may not want to hear it, but it looks like ultra high-definition TV (or UHDTV) has now taken another step towards reality. While shop-floor products remain years away, experts in the ITU Study Group on Broadcasting Service have made several agreements on technical standards for your (next?) next TV purchase. Increasing pixel count in future sets is also expected to improve viewing angles on glasses-free 3D, which needs more dots to work its lenticular magic. 33 megapixels sounds like it should be enough to work with.

Ultra HDTV technical standards agreed on, more pixels is a good thing originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to best view the Google Books collections? Why, a digital bookcase, of course. But this isn’t just any bookcase, it’s a giant spinning 3D helix of a bookcase, collecting more than 10,000 titles in 28 subjects. Users can navigate the WebGL Bookcase by spinning it around or swiping it up and down. Sure, it’s not the quickest way to locate a title amongst tens of thousands of books, but perhaps it’ll offer up some small consolation for those who miss browsing real-life bookstores. You can check out the experiment in the source link below — be forewarned, however, that it’s a bit of a resource hog.

Continue reading Google thinks your digital books belong on a digital bookcase, digitally (video)

Google thinks your digital books belong on a digital bookcase, digitally (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over a hundred years before the Channel Tunnel opened, providing an undersea railway link between France and the UK, a Victorian engineer dreamed up a daring plan to build a tunnel linking Scotland and Ireland. Those plans were forgotten…until now. More

Research In Motion today said it is fusing the best parts of the BlackBerry OS used on smartphones and the QNX operating system used on the PlayBook tablet to create BBX, a new mobile operating system that will eventually power all BlackBerry mobile devices. RIM also announced a developer beta of the next version of the PlayBook operating system “with support for running Android applications.”

“The Developer Beta includes the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and the BlackBerry Plug-In for Android Development Tools (ADT), allowing developers to quickly and easily bring Android applications to BlackBerry PlayBook tablets,” RIM said in a statement.

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RIM unveils its new OS, brings Android apps to PlayBook

Google Docs has rolled out a new version of its presentations tool with over 50 new features, including, simultaneous editing, a series of new slide animations, themes, tables and more. More

Dubai shrouded in fog. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal puts it perfectly: “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a city look more like ‘the future’ than this one at this moment.” All that’s missing is Lando Calrissian. More

Ford is installing a feature in its new vehicles — and many of its older ones — that can read text messages out loud.

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Ford cars will read txt msgs to you

Richard Branson has officially declared that the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space (previously known as the Spaceport America) is open for business in the New Mexico desert. Spacemen, rev your engines. More

Mention music apps and our minds immediately conjure up images of a certain Icelandic songstress’ interactive iPad album. Well, folks the high-art bleeps and bloops don’t have to belong to the aurally experimental, as you, too, can make synthy music to doze off to. Fans of Moog’s synthesizers looking to mobilize the analog noise art now have a 99¢ iOS option for the iPad. Dubbed Animoog, this virtual instrument shrinks the keyboard synth experience down to 10-inches, running on the company's Anisotropic Synth Engine and bringing with it polyphonic modulation and pitch shifting, various modules for effects, a timbre page and MIDI in / out. Fancy yourself a folktronic tablet technician? Then hit up the source to download the bargain-priced goods.

Animoog takes the synth keyboard stylings to the iPad, DIY electronica lives to see another day originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 07:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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