GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

How do you tell if a shoe is a good fit? Take a short walk? Squeeze the front-end with your fingers to make sure there is space for your toes? What about a dangerous, 20-second blast of unshielded x-rays? If you were buying shoes in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, it’s likely that you regularly inserted a tootsie into one of these death-rays.

The wooden cabinets, possibly first built by a Clarence Karrer in Milwaukee in 1924, had the x-ray source in the base, and it would fire upwards through your foot and shoe. Due to a lack of any kind of shielding, it wouldn’t stop there: the radiation would shoot right up into your baby-maker, clearly a perilous occurrence.

The machine, called a “Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope” put out 50 kv from its x-ray tube, which – according to Wikipedia’s figures for today’s machines, isn’t too bad:

In medical radiography voltage from 20 kV in mammography up to 150 kV for chest radiography are used for diagnostic. Energy can go up to 250 kV for radiotherapy applications.

The problem was repeat exposure. While it was recommended that children not be subjected to more than 12 doses a year, there was no such luck for shoe-store employees. According to the article Shoe-fitting with x-ray in National Safety News 62 by H. Bavley (1950), store clerks would put their hands into the beam to squeeze shoes during fitting. Worse still was the fate of a poor shoe model, “who received such a serious radiation burn that her leg had to be amputated.”

Thank God there’s nothing this dangerous around today. Like, you know, full-body backscatter x-ray machines in airports.

Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope [ORAU.org via Kyle "Mr. Fixit" Wiens]

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Filmmaker George Clarke recently discovered a clip that some people believe is evidence of time travel.

It appears in the DVD extras from Chaplin’s The Circus, and shows a woman in the background using what appears to be a cellphone. Since the footage was shot in 1928, that’s an anachronism to say the least.

The discovery excited not just the blogosphere, who are ready to gawk at and dismiss anything the least bit interesting, but news-hungry cable TV, which presented it as news with about as much journalistic scrutiny as Ron Burgundy gave the water-skiing squirrel in Anchorman.

If it were a one-time thing, we’d chalk it up to a fluke. But we’ve seen this before. “Time Traveler Captured on Film” has graduated from meme to trope.

There’s something about the juncture of photography, consumer tech, history (near and far) and our readiness to believe in conspiracies, science fiction and the occult that leads us to fall for this shtick over and over again.

In this gallery, we’re going to examine purported physical evidence of time travel, or our belief in time travel. And our point of departure is the actor and filmmaker shown above in his classic Modern Times whose films are still tramping their way through our modern times.

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Matt Richardson’s friend Lauren wanted a device to hold down the down arrow and physically scroll through Google Reader, like a sustain pedal on a piano. Matt built it for her using an old USB keyboard, wire, solder and a little DIY invention.

It’s surprising we don’t see foot pedals more often in mainstream desktop computing. They’re a natural, well-established interface: besides analog tech like pianos, drums, bikes or a spinning wheel, think of cars, table saws and electric guitars.

If you’re curious, there are plenty of commercial USB foot pedals available, mostly targeted for disabled users or industry-specific uses. For example, they’re extremely popular in professional digital voice transcription, often coming bundled with transcription or dictation software. These usually have three controls: play/pause (center), rewind (left) and fast-forward (right).

Musicians, too, continue to experiment with foot pedals: we’ve written about AirTurn’s Bluetooth sheet-music turner for iPad, with a special eye towards its potential for disabled users.

Other USB foot pedals are extraordinarily versatile and programmable. But because they aren’t a universal accessory marketed to mainstream users like a mouse or keyboard, all foot pedals tend to be expensive and often highly tailored to individual users’ needs.

Building a foot pedal yourself using a keyboard’s guts is one way to solve this problem. But I can’t help but wonder what a determined hacker could put together with an Arduino board, a weekend and a little imagination.

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In yesterday’s roundup of the good, bad and ugly in new remote controls, we included one photo of a vintage remote: the Zenith Space Command. We identified it as the first TV remote, gave some details on its ultrasound-frequency tech and included a CC-licensed photo of an early model.

However, the Zenith Space Command we included was not, in fact, the first version of the device. The post prompted this friendly email from Wired.com reader Dan Turkewitz:

You’re right that the Zenith Space Command is the first commercially available remote. But the model you have pictured is one of those fancy “new” models! This is the original.

Sadly it doesn’t work very well on my 46″ plasma. But it has a place in my home theater setup anyway.

The next model up from this had a huge advance–four buttons: on/off, channel and volume up and down. That one sits on my brother’s desk.

As to its “Tired” features: the channels on the TV could also be changed by jangling a hand full of quarters, which made the same frequency sound as the metal bars in the remote. A trick my brothers and I all used when we weren’t happy with the channel choice of whoever had the remote. Which usually resulted in some fights.

I don’t know; given the current Apple-driven minimalist drive to pare down device controls to the smallest size and fewest number of buttons possible, you could easily argue that this first model of the Zenith Space Command was ahead of its time in more ways than one.

All images and email via Dan Turkewitz.

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In 1956, IBM’s Ramac computer storage system squeezed 20MB of data into a large office room. Big Blue’s new mid-size storage rack packs over a million times more data (up to 24TB) and fits on a desktop.

Size and storage aren’t the Storwize v7000’s only selling points; IBM also touts its performance, particularly for high-volume cloud computing or transactions over the web. It uses a mix of efficiency software that IBM either developed through its own R&D or recently acquired.

For example, Storwize’s UI, storage architecture and virtualization technologies are modeled on those of Israeli storage startup XIV. In 2008, IBM purchased XIV, founded by the highly-regarded Moshe Yanai, former head engineer for IBM’s storage rival EMC, for $300 million; an analyst called Yanai’s move to IBM akin to a Boston Red Sox star joining the New York Yankees. No pressure there. Yanai left IBM in August; the Storwize’s success or failure will test whether the high-profile acquisition has paid off.

Storwize’s Easy Tier software, developed by IBM Research, automatically scans files for high I/O usage and moves them to higher-performing SSD drives for quick access. ProtecTIER, technology IBM also bought in 2008, eliminates duplicate files; real-time compression software (also the result of an IBM acquisition) further reduces the storage footprint. IBM also promises non-disruptive migrations, meaning you can move data around, but you and your customers can still access it, reducing one of the main causes of planned downtime.

I wonder what storage downtime in 1956 looked like — probably just someone turning off the lights and going home.

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Timur Civan is a director of photography for movies, and a photographer. He’s also a tinkerer, and he got his hands on an old Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat, a hand cranked movie-camera lens from 1908. You see it above, wedded to his Canon 5D MkII. But where did it come from?

Civan got a call from his friend, known mysteriously only as “a Russian lens technician”:

He found in a box of random parts, hidden inside anther lens this gem. A circa 1908 (possibly earlier) 35mm lens. Still functioning, mostly brass, and not nearly as much dust or fungus as one would think after sitting in a box for over a hundred years. This lens is a piece of motion picture history, and at this point rare beyond words. So I say to him, “Wow… what do you have in mind?” he smiles, and says, (in the thickest Russian accent you can imagine) “I can make this fit EF you know…”

The results are astonishing. This century-old hunk of glass and brass makes a great picture. There’s vignetting at the edges, a softness and a lack of biting contrast. There’s also a color-shift in the non-black-and-white images. In short, the lens adds all the tweaks you might do in post-processing to Holga-fy your pictures. Civan is planning on shooting some footage with the lens, too, which is its purpose after all, and promises to share the results on the Cinema 5D forums, where he posted his photographs.

But aside from the great pictures, and the wonderful story of the mysterious Russian, we can learn something from this tale. Camera-tech comes and goes, but photography is really just about light. That’s why you should buy the best lenses you can afford. They will probably last longer than you.

102 year old lens on a 5DmkII [Cinema 5D forums]

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My childhood was remarkably low-tech for an American kid growing up in the 1980s. I didn’t have cable TV or a computer until I went to college (1997), and didn’t play video games outside of an arcade until we got a NES in 1990. So I always thought microwave ovens came into existence in 1988, when my family got one. In fact, they’d already been in commercial production for more than 40 years.

Stacy Conradt at Mental Floss gives an appropriately accelerated history of what she calls “the Not-so-microwave“:

The first oven intended for commercial sale in 1947 was almost six feet tall, tipped the scale at 750 pounds and cost $5,000 in 1947 dollars. The second version, produced in 1954, was better but still needed work: it gobbled electricity and cost $2,000 $3,000, at a time when the average cost of a new car was about $1,700… Regular households didnt care much about microwaves until 1967, when a relatively low-energy model costing just $500 came out.

You ever wonder how microwave ovens work? It’s just slightly more complicated than this, but basically microwaves (which are like radio waves, but with a frequency closer to the infrared spectrum) pass over food, creating a weak alternating electromagnetic field. Water molecules — which are basically in everything we eat — also have a weak electromagnetic charge, and they all realign themselves to match the polarity of the microwave radiation — kind of like passing a household magnet over a pile of iron filings. When the water molecules move, the temperature raises (because molecular motion is all temperature is). Get those molecules moving fast enough and long enough, and baby, you’ve got a stew going.*

*I know, it’s the second time I’ve used this Arrested Development reference in as many weeks. It just feels right.

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One of the pleasures of writing in pencil is the friction of two solid materials in contact. One of the delights of writing in pen is that you can write continuously without having to stop to sharpen your stylus. Writing in metal, while expensive, provides some of the benefits of both while exhibiting its own unique beauty.

These two (that’s right, two) different metal pen manufacturers come to us by way of champ design blog Dornob. Both models work on the same principle: a tiny amount of metal alloy transfers from the pen to the page. Unlike pencil, it can’t be smudged with your hand, and unlike ink, it doesn’t need to dry. The amount of alloy for each stroke is so tiny that the pens are expected to last a lifetime without needing to be refilled or replaced. You can sharpen the tips for a finer point with a little sandpaper.

Each company takes a slightly different approach. The Inkless Metal Pen by Vat19 goes with a full stainless-steel barrel. Their marketing department, as you can see from the video above, also has a sharp, playful, dudely sense of humor. (The word “awesome” gets thrown around a lot, and there’s a Scrooge McDuck reference.)

Grand Illusions goes a little more highbrow with their Metal Pens. They have two short versions (including one that can be worn as a keychain) and a Beta Pen which comes with a full-length extension in either black or silver metal or cherry-stained wood.

Grand Illusions also appends a short history on writing in silverpoint: “In the Medieval period, artists and scribes often used a metal stylus in order to draw on a specially prepared paper surface. Generally known as Metalpoint, or Silverpoint when the stylus was made of silver, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Drer and Rembrandt all used this technique.” My friends, this is music to my early-modern-loving ears. (Luckily, you don’t have to rub your paper with pumice to get these 21st-century pens to make an impression.

The alloy in the Vat19 pen (at least) has trace amounts of lead, so it’s not so good for kids. Both are targeted for designers, lefties (who often have to deal with smearing or smudging ink/graphite as they trace their hand across the page), and geeks who like even their handwriting to be all shiny. (Note: the writing isn’t actually very shiny, more kind of a matte titanium, but you can pretend).

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Images via Vat19 and Grand Illusions. Story via Dornob.

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Swiss Army Cybertool Lite, from Victorinox

Today, there are many all-in-one tools, but only one of them is a near-universal metaphor for versatility. And it isn’t Leatherman. In the imagination, Swiss Army Knives and their 126-year history stand alone.

Steven Regengold, who blogs as The Gear Junkie, went to Ibach and Delemont, the two Swiss towns which still manufacture every Swiss Army tool for Victorinox and Wenger S.A., for an historical tour. It’s a great read; here are just a few highlights:

• The first knife was indeed made for Swiss soldiers in 1884, who needed a foldable knife that could both open food cans and disassemble a rifle;
• The descendents of Victorinox’s founder Karl Eisener own both Victorinox and Wenger S.A., which co-own the “Swiss Army Knife” copyright;
• The two-company model might be explained by the fact that Victorinox is German-speaking and Wenger is French-speaking (this goes against all expectations one might have based on the spelling of the two company names, but is very Swiss);
• “In 2006, Wenger introduced the Giant, a gargantuan, nine-inch-wide “pocket knife” with 85 implements that sells as a collector’s item for $1,400″;
• The hidden springs that let each knife/screwdriver/tool gently come forward and snap back were an innovation of the original model over 100 years ago.

Story via Gizmodo.

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Kindle DX Promotional Photo from Amazon.com

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.

Carl Pyrdum, who writes the blog Got Medieval while he finishes his Ph.D. in Literature at Yale, has the skinny on book sizes. You see, before Europeans learned how to make paper from the Arabs (who’d learned it from the Chinese), books were made from parchment, which was usually made from sheepskin. Sometimes, they’d use calfskin, too; if it was really primo stuff, it was called vellum. Like reading a whole book made out of veal.

We eventually mostly gave up on parchment, because it was expensive, and hard to work with. (There’s a reason medieval monks wrote manuscripts; preparing the parchment was penance.) But all of today’s book sizes (and by proxy, most of our gadget sizes) were established in the Middle Ages, and printers and paper makers carried them over. Booksellers and publishers still use these terms today:

• Fold a sheet of parchment once (two leaves/four pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (8pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (16pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (24 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.

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16mo/Paperback/E-Reader

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All images via Got Medieval.

Story continues …

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Five hundred eighty-three calculators, 128 brands and one man who has painstakingly cataloged them all.

Emil Dudek, a technology enthusiast who lives in South Wales, U.K., has spent the last eight years acquiring calculators made in the 1970s, taking them apart, photographing them, analyzing the technology and posting it all to his website along with specs and comments on each machine.

It’s one man’s digital ode to electronic calculators. For Dudek, who got his first electronic calculator at the age of 15,in 1976, the devices represent a snapshot in time — a moment at the cusp of a digital computing revolution.

“Calculators were what we drooled after as kids with our nose stuck to the shop window,” says Dudek who runs the Vintage Technology site. “The calculators gave us the freedom and power to do complex calculations.”

Dudek’s online catalog of calculators is an impressive archive of calculators from one decade. Each of the 583 calculators on the site have size, power, case, display information, year manufactured and name of manufacturer listed. The models also include comments explaining the components used, construction and the logic used.

Ultimately, Dudek hopes to catalog the 3,000 to 5,000 calculators he estimates were made in the 1970s.

“What I thought really interesting is that it not just has calculator information but also chip numbers from some of the old ICs used in the device,” says Matt Stack, a calculator enthusiast who recently created a graphing calculator built on open source hardware. ” I like to consider myself an expert in calculators and I learned something.”

Story continues …

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We’re living in an age of multiple connected screens, where even our media-savvy televisions demand some occasional typing to search for a videogame, TV show or NetFlix rental. Problem is, typing (more like hunting and pecking) with a game controller or remote control is a pain in the butt and that’s the world into which the TiVo Slide is being born.

The TiVo on-screen software keyboard has been semi-affectionately dubbed “the Ouija Board input” from the way users slid and hovered the remote over each letter to search for titles. As TiVo added more and more text-dependent features, Ouija-hovering got more and more obnoxious. With recent software updates, Premiere and Series 3 users can use a USB keyboard or mouse, or a wireless device with a USB Bluetooth dongle. (That’s actually how the Slide connects.) But for one-stop remote/keyboard shopping, the Slide is your guy.

It solves a few technical problems that have haunted keyboard-style remotes for years. The slide interface is one: We’ve gotten so used to handheld devices that almost nobody wants to use a keyboard for everything. The bigger deal may be Bluetooth, which, among other nice things, performs the essential task of letting you use the keyboard sideways. It also lights up in the dark — there are other TiVo remotes that do this, but typing text with your thumbs makes this feature pretty much essential.

Yes — you have to type with your thumbs. If you’ve used a smartphone hardware keyboard like most Blackberries’ (or a slide-out like the Droid’s), this is familiar stuff. If your typing skills are optimized for a keyboard, or you’re not much of a typist to begin with, it’ll take some getting used to.

It’s surprising, actually, that we’re not seeing more innovation and experimentation in alt-keyboard devices. There’s nothing sacrosanct about the QWERTY keyboard layout other than that it’s what most typists in the English-speaking world have come to expect. Most people know that it appeared on early Remington typewriters because it kept the keys from clashing; if a rifle maker knew anything, it was precision-manufacturing a device not to jam.

But whether it’s hardware or software, we don’t have to worry about keys jamming on keyboards now. And yet, even swiping, chording, and hovering software keyboards use the QWERTY layout. Why not try an alphabetic keyboard — something designed for people who don’t do much typing at all? The last time I checked, relatively few people with TVs sit in front of a computer most of the day.

Or, if you’re targeting experts and speed freaks, why not try a version of the Dvorak layout?

Dvorak is an alternative keyboard configuration patented in 1932 and named for its inventor, August Dvorak. If QWERTY is the MS Windows of keyboards, Dvorak is the Mac. What its adherents lack in numbers, they make up in devotion. In “Seven Reasons to Switch to the Dvorak Keyboard layout,” Red Tani of WorkAwesome makes a good case:

In QWERTY, only 32% of keystrokes are on the home row. Which means most of the time, typists fingers are either reaching up for the top row (52%) or down for the bottom row (16%). So not only does QWERTY do nothing for typists, it actually hinders them.

Dvorak further increases typing speed by placing all vowels on the left side of the home row, and the most commonly used consonants on the right side. This guarantees that most of your strokes alternate between a finger on your right hand (consonant) and a finger on your left (vowel). Alternating between fingers from either hand is faster just imagine texting with one hand or drumming with one stick.

On a tiny mobile device, DVORAK could be comparatively even faster. More comfortable, too.

QWERTY beat out DVORAK because typists who’d learned the first were faster and more accurate using that layout than on the second. It’s a classic example of what economists and other social scientists call path-dependence and increasing returns: an inferior technology can beat a superior one if it’s adopted early and widely enough to lock out the competition.

So maybe somewhere out there is a new kind of phone/remote/controller-sized keyboard that blows the QWERTY keyboard away. The trouble is, most of us would be better off typing with something else, if they were giving superior machines away. The new TiVo remote acknowledges that this is the world we live in.

Photos: TiVo.com, Wikipedia

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Take a lens from a Super 8 camera, a whole stack of ni-cad batteries, a digital to analog converter from a voltmeter, a highly experimental CCD and what have you got? Kodak’s first digital still camera, cobbled together with hand-soldered wires and circuits. And the storage? Amazingly, images were recorded onto the cassette-tape you see on the side of this historical Frankenbox.

This happened way back in 1975, when the inventor of the digital camera, Steve Sasson, and his team of technicians tinkered this machine into existence. Want some specs? The camera captured a 100-line image onto that cassette-tape, yet even that tiny picture took a mind-numbing 23 seconds to write. Playback was possibly clunkier still, using another tape-player hooked up to a frame-storing devices that interpolated those 100 lines to an NTSC-compatible 400-line image and then showed it on a regular TV-screen.

Viewers wondered why anyone would want to look at pictures on a screen. The invention was patented in 1978 and then remained unknown to the public until 2001, although it stayed in Sasson’s possession. After that, we all know what happened: Now, if you show a film camera to somebody young enough they’ll wonder why anyone would want to look at a photo on a piece of paper.

We Had No Idea (2007) [Kodak Pkugged in log via Adafruit and The Boss]

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On Monday we took a look at computational rephotography, a technique for making a new photo exactly match the point-of-view of an old photo. Today we take a look at a gallery of photos showing rephotography in action.

The pictures have been put together by Russian whizz Sergey Larenkov and posted on his Livejournal (yes, Livejournal is still around). Larenkov’s trick is to place old wartime pictures into modern settings, feathering the images to make them sit in the middle of modern life. Thus we see troops moving through a modern Vienna street, past stores and cars an tanks on the streets of Prague.

Some of Larenkov’s works are fascinating. The picture above shows Russian Red Army Marshall Georgy Zhukov on the steps of the Reichstag in Berlin. Zhukov conquered the city in the second World War, and now he stands amongst tourists. It’s pretty spooky.

Go grab a coffee and click the link. Not all of the pictures are as well executed as this one, but they are all interesting, and show that war is something that happens on our own streets, and not just in far-away places.

Sergey Larenkov’s rephotography [Livejournal via the Giz]

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Computational rephotography is a fancy name for photos taken from the exact same viewpoint as an old photograph. Actually, that’s just rephotography. The “computational” part is when software helps out.

I’m a sucker for photos of old street-scenes. Seeing familiar parts of your city as they were many decades ago is fascinating, and if people are good enough to snap a new version, you can enjoy the differences of places you have never seen. At Flickr and now a site called Historypin, you can see the old shots lined up over the new, like a window into the past.

Researchers at MIT have found a way to automate the process. Currently they use a laptop to do the heavy-lifting, but the software could just as easily sit inside a camera. In fact, that’s the plan. The system compares the scene in front of the camera with an historical photograph. It then works out the difference between the two and gives the photographer instructions along the lines of “up a bit, left a bit more.”

According to an abstract on rephotography, it is a lot more complicated than it seems. In lining up the images you must consider “six degrees of freedom of 3D translation and rotation, and the confounding similarity between the effects of camera zoom and dolly.”

Gimmick? Sure, but then so are all manner of the features in the modern digicam, from smile-detection to facial-recognition to fancy sepia modes. Today’s camera is essentially a computer with a sensor and a lens, so why not pack in everything you can? And if it means getting to see more old-time streets scenes, I’m totally in.

Camera app puts you in the footsteps of history [New Scientist via Alex Madrigal]

Computational rephotography [ACM]

Photo: Nomad Tales/Flickr

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