the personal blog of John BouAntoun
Cool post from Shanemo formerly of Microsoft DPE fame:
Some experts say that rectangles with rounded corners are easier on the eyes than a rectangle with sharp edges because they take less cognitive effort to visually process. The fovea is fastest at processing circles. Processing edges involve more “neuronal image tools” in the brain [1]. Thus, rectangles with rounded corners are easier process because they look closer to a circle than a regular rectangle.
I secretly wanted to do this myself when I had the expendable income and time to buy and assemble a quadcopter and a kinect, especially since seeing the quadruino thing the other day. But now looks like I’ve been beaten to the punch
Disclaimer: I helped put together this facebook site of awesome WWI photo’s, The Lost Diggers.
It’s an incredible cache of some awesome photography, preserved on glass negatives in a chest in a French attic for nearly a century. A treat for historians and photography geeks alike.
Update: Facebook admins have been kind enough to finally let us use the nice human readable url: http://www.facebook.com/lostdiggers
Courtesy of boing boing, pretty awesome supershero short produced for around $300.
This has been doing the rounds on the inter-webs today. It’s an interesting take, and a cool campaign, but I think I agree with the guys over at mobilecrunch. While I’m guilty of having my face down far more than I should, especially around my kids, I think it’s actually because I enjoy it, not because the present phone UI metaphore is too clunky (not that it isn’t clunky though).
Many a Sci-Fi writer has a decent take on this phenomenon in the future with their stories of massively wireless interconnected minds and the way people stare off into nowhere with absent eyes when they are busy communicating.
From over on boing boing, I saw this interesting post about the fact that LED traffic lights can’t melt the snow that collects in their shade covers.
An interesting calculation would be to see if the energy discipated by the waste heat of the old bulbs year round equals the energy required to keep the lights usable in the winter, in countries that have snow.
We’ve had LED lights here in the greater Sydney region for a while now, and I don’t think anyone has come across this issue here (it doesn’t snow in Sydney).
So Havoc Pennington of former red hat and freedesktop.org glory has posted about his company litl’s latest product.
It’s an interesting concept, and could well take off, though the starting price of 700 USD seems a little steep to me. As Havoc mentions it’s all about build quality and attention to purpose when designing the thing and he does seem to have a point. I know I use several different PC’s and laptops around the house to do all the things the litl webbook is trying to wrap in one user friendly device.
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