For everything from family to computers…
Ask most people what a water ionizer does, and not only will they probably not know, they probably won’t care. But ionizers like Tyent’s new 9000T, complete with a slick touchscreen display, can make your water even more healthy than it already is. More »
from Gizmodo
If you use an RFID card for your transit pass or ID card at work you can embed that card right into your phone so you don’t have to carry it around. Electronics DIY web site Adafruit shows you how to do it. More »
from Lifehacker
There’s a lot of research to help the spinal cord or stroke-injured become more self-sufficient, but it often takes some exotic paraphernalia. To buck that trend, scientists from Imperial College London showed that subjects could perform relatively hard tasks like writing messages and playing Pong using eye movement — with a mere $35-worth of parts. They even showed how well the system worked, with subjects scoring within 20 percent of an able-bodied person after a scant 10 minutes of practice. The tracker works with two video console cameras and a pair of eyeglasses that, after calibration, can precisely track the pupils — allowing them to control a cursor or move a paddle. The researchers also figured out how to “click” the eye-mouse by winking, and can even use more precise adjustments to calculate gaze depth — meaning subjects will be able to perform more complex tasks in the future, like guide a motorized wheelchair. While by no means the first eye-tracking system we’ve seen, it’s by far the most economical. Check the video after the break to see how it works.
from Engadget
If there was doubt as to whether or not Android would soon become the majority smartphone platform in the US, that’s just been erased by Nielsen. Google crossed the tipping point in the second quarter after getting close in the winter, with 51.8 percent of current smartphone users running some variant on the green robot’s OS. As we’ve seen in the past, though, the increase is coming mostly at the expenses of platforms already being squeezed to within an inch of their lives, such as the BlackBerry (8.1 percent) and Windows (4.3 percent combined). Apple still isn’t in a position to fret: it kept climbing to 34.3 percent and swung the attention of recent buyers just slightly back in its direction. The real question for many of us might center on what happens in a summer where Samsung has thrown a Galaxy S III-sized curveball at Americans and any new iPhone is likely still a few months away.
from Engadget
Using both the military and software sides of their education, a team of Polish military students studying computer engineering at Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna (Military University of Technology) presented at the Imagine Cup here in Sydney an app that uses the built-in magnetometer in a Windows phone to detect the magnetic signature of land mines buried in the ground.
SAPER (Sensor Amplified Perception for Explosives Recognition) is Poland’s entry in the software design category of the 2012 Imagine Cup.
It’s like a high-stakes Minesweeper with real-world results. The corresponding web application shows the locations of mines users have already detected, or whose known locations were input by military professionals. Then, if you enter a dangerous area, the app sends you a notification on your phone.
SAPER has 75 percent accuracy in detecting land mines, and works from 30 centimeters away. However, both of these stats can be improved by purchasing their external, more powerful magnetometer/metal detector, for “premium users,” which the team says makes the app comparable in accuracy to current military tools. Being from a military academy, Team ARMED had access to a field test site, where they buried mines in the ground and tested their app on them.
The team hopes to first deploy their app in the most affected areas, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam and Croatia, where, team mentor Mariusz Chmielewski tells me, there are regularly “bombs on the side of the road you are driving on. It is a big, big problem.”
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
If you regularly snap pages of hardcopy text on your smartphone for perusing later, then an Android app being developed by Fujifilm may just tick your literary boxes. Called GT-Layout, it automatically carves up a photo containing text so that each character becomes a separate image. These sub-images can then be reformatted with line breaks to fit your screen area and preferred level of zoom — so you don’t have to pinch and pan so much and there’s no need for OCR. Want to try it? Then you’ll have to wait. GT-Layout is reportedly coming in an update to Fujifilm’s Dropbox client, GT-Document Lite, but there’s no sign of it appearing there just yet.
from Engadget