video

357 Articles

Exposing Poorly Redacted PDFs

August 1, 2008 by 19 Comments


Privacy watchdog group, National Legal and Policy Center has released a PDF detailing Google founder Larry Page’s home (dowload PDF here). They used Google’s Maps and Street View to assemble all of the information. Google is currently involved in a lawsuit resulting from a Street View vehicle traveling and documenting a private road. This PDF was released in response to Google stating that “complete privacy does not exist”.

For some reason the PDF is redacted with black boxes. We threw together a simple screencast (click through for HiDef) to show how to easily bypass the boxes using free tools. You can simply cut and paste the hidden text and images can be copied as well-no need to break out Illustrator. This sort of redaction may seem trivial, but the US military has fallen victim to it in the past.

HOPE 2008: YouTomb, A Free Culture Hack

July 25, 2008 by 9 Comments


YouTomb is a research project designed by the MIT Free Culture group to track video take downs on YouTube. To succeed, the team needed to track every single video on YouTube… which is close to impossible. Instead, they built several “explorer” scripts to track what videos were interesting. One explorer tracks all of YouTube’s lists: recommended, featured, most active, and more. Another explorer picks up every video submitted to YouTube, and a third crawls Technorati.

The explorers just find the videos; a separate group of scanner scripts checks the current status of videos. It checks both the new videos and ones that have been killed to see if they return. YouTomb archives every video it finds. They display the thumbnail of the video under fair use, but they’re still determining whether they can display each video in full.

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Drill Powered Mini Bike

July 24, 2008 by 25 Comments


DPX Systems seems to deal exclusively in devices powered by handheld drills. In addition to the mini bike in the video above, they’ve made systems for wheelchairs, toolboxes, and hoists. The device costs $630, but we know most of you just need prompting that something is possible to be well on your way to building your own version. We’re still more fond of weed whacker machines.

[via Toolmonger]

Build A ROBONOVA-I

July 23, 2008 by 14 Comments


On the latest episode of Systm, they talk to [David Calkins], founder of the RoboGames competition, about humanoid robotics. The robots featured in the episode are Hitec’s ROBONOVA-I. The ROBONOVA is about a foot high and has 16 servos with support for up to 24, all connected to an Atmel controller. The episode is quite long: At around 15 minutes, they demonstrate the programming enviroment. You can program it traditionally or pose the bot to work out the motions. At 30 minutes, [David] mentions that next year’s competition will allow airsoft weapons to be attached, but bots have to be controlled from a first person perspective. If you’re interested in one of these kits, they have a ROBONOVA special of $900 or as low as $500 for educational institutions (that’s us, right?). Now is the perfect time to get one since you’ll have nearly a full year to prepare for RoboGames.

Related: You’ll hear builder [Matt Bauer]’s name mentioned several times.

[via BotJunkie]

Fun With Radiohead’s Data From ‘House Of Cards’

July 21, 2008 by No comments

Radiohead recently released the 3D data that was used to create the video for their song ‘House of Cards‘. [Micheal_z] sent in some of the results of his groups playtime with the data. The first effort involved some data translation. Then they created an atomizer of the head and put it up on their ungodly huge 8160×4000 pixel multi-touch display.

The video below was created by tracking the background image to orient and overlay the projection.

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Machine Embroidered LED Matrix

July 16, 2008 by 4 Comments


Our favorite electric textiles expert, [Leah Buechley], put together this machine embroidered LED matrix proof of concept. For the vertical rows, the top thread is conductive, while the thread on the underside (the bobbin) is not. For the horizontal rows, the the thread is swapped and the fabric acts as an insulator between the two layers of wiring. You can see a small brown bunch of thread next to each LED: this is the via to wiring on the backside of the fabric. The matrix is being controlled by a LilyPad Arduino. This is an interesting idea and has the potential to make prototyping wearable projects much faster. Here are two more pictures of the project.

Radiohead Releases Laser Music Video With Data

July 14, 2008 by 8 Comments


Radiohead has released their music video for “House Of Cards.” We’ve already covered some of the tech involved. If making an entire video without cameras wasn’t edgy enough, they’ve released all the point data for people to play with and remix. The band is encouraging people to post their creations to their YouTube group.

Head over to their Google Code page to watch a making of video as well as view some of the datasets in 3D. There is a link to the entire dataset for download as well.