News | Robin Ferianto blog

Archive for the 'News' category

Coffee table is universal remote control

Aug 28 2009 Published by robin under News

We all have a little bit of sci-fi dream inside. Can’t deny that. We’ve all seen how Hollywood pictured a single device control every tiny bit inside the house. Now here’s something that might just be it. Except that it is only a coffee table, and it controls only the living room.

Introducing CRYSTAL (Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces), a recent research project that tries to create a unique bonding between devices in a room.

The main idea is having a single device to control everything in a room from lights, fans, TV, sound system, to digital frame, while you’re comfortably sitting in your couch.

3 responses so far

Basic photography: understanding ISO

Aug 24 2009 Published by robin under News

Here goes the third post of my basic photography series. This is ISO setting, so here goes the basic definition.

In traditional (film) photography ISO (or ASA) was the indication of how sensitive a film was to light. It was measured in numbers (you’ve probably seen them on films – 100, 200, 400, 800 etc). The lower the number the lower the sensitivity of the film and the finer the grain in the shots you’re taking.

In Digital Photography ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The same principles apply as in film photography – the lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain. Higher ISO settings are generally used in darker situations to get faster shutter speeds (for example an indoor sports event when you want to freeze the action in lower light) – however the cost is noisier shots. I’ll illustrate this below with two elargements of shots that I just took – the one on the left is taken at 100 ISO and the one of the right at 3200 ISO (click to enlarge to see the full effect).

Image credit of DPS. Click to see larger image.

2 responses so far

Twitter: 40 percent of pointless post

Aug 18 2009 Published by robin under News

Surprise! A full 40.5 percent of posts on Twitter–or tweets, as they’re called–can be classified as “pointless post,” according to a new study from Pear Analytics. Coming in second was “conversational,” which the company says makes up 37.55 of all tweets.

Pear Analytics published its investigation, which was conducted through a series of random samplings from the Twitter public time line, into the different species of tweets on Wednesday. That means that only public tweets were indexed; the numbers could be different if friends-only accounts were taken into consideration as well. (Obviously, that would be much tougher to analyze.)

There’s some interesting stuff in there. Despite some Twitter critics’ insistence that the microblogging service is loaded with self-promoters, Pear Analytics only classified 5.85 percent of tweets as “self promotion.”

One response so far

New features of Google Reader

Aug 16 2009 Published by robin under News

I am a big fan of Google Reader since the very first time I used it. It made reading feeds easier than before. Now I want to share its latest update which will improve user experience.

Send to

sendto