Your iPhone Camera Needs TiltShift Generator

Go ahead, take out your iPhone. Go try to take a good picture with it. Are you really satisfied with those results? Even if you are, you can get a lot more out of your iPhone's camera by putting the pictures through some simple processes to enhance the picture quality. If you're not a big Photoshop junkie, take a look at TiltShift Generator. It's a great little online application that makes touching up your photos a snap.What's cool about TiltShift Generator is that if you really like the tool for quick touch ups on your picture files, you can download the local application. It runs on Adobe Air, a newer runtime environment that is both lightweight and good with graphical applications, so you'll have to install that first if you haven't already.

Takayuki Fukatsu has whipped up a nifty litte application here and should be proud. Fukatsu also gives visitors a slew of examples of how he used the application to make his iPhone pictures look like professional photography. Even if you don't have an iPhone, though, you can get some good use out of TiltShift Generator. Go give it a try, and show us what you came up with.

Mood Music Hits A New Level With Kokoro

While the cool apps may all be for iPhone users, here's some sweet new hardware for your iPod. Designed by NYU student Anaid Gomez Ortigoza, this device dubbed the Kokoro or "heart of things", allows your iPod to read your mood and tailor your playlist accordingly. The device uses a Polar heart rate monitor to measure your pulse and then selects your songs based on the speed of your heart.The Kokoro would be the perfect companion for exercising because there's nothing worse than being in the middle of a vigorous run or bike ride when Rod Stewart's hideous voice comes crackling through your earbuds and totally kills your mojo. Don't worry yourself about why Rod the Mod is on the iPod in the first place, and instead, rely on your Kokoro to eliminate the need to stop, fumble around and manually fast forward through the garbage to get back to your workout stash. You'll be automatically treated to something upbeat and fast tempo so long as you keep moving. Air Supply need not apply until your cool down lap.

via: Rocketboom and DVICE

Solar Powered Stadium Complete and Ready To Power Itself In Time For World Games

A stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan is the first in the world to completely power itself 100% via solar power. The stadium was built to coincide with the 2009 World Games, which will be held at the stadium in July. When not hosting the World Games the stadium will be used (like most other stadiums) for sporting events and athletics.

The stadium, designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, is spread over 19 hectares (about 47 acres if I calculated correctly) and it can seat 50,000 spectators. It is built on a steel-rod structure and contains 8,844 solar panels (a 14,155 sq meter solar roof).

It costs $150 million to build the stadium, but since the power drawn in from the sun into the stadiums panels is more than enough to power the stadium's 3,300 lights as well as the two giant televisions screens I imagine there will not be any worry about high electric bills. In fact the panels can generate 1.14 million kWh of electricity per year. This will prevent 660 tons of carbon dioxide from being discharged into the atmosphere. In addition, when the stadium is not in use, the Taiwanese government will sell the surplus power. This power can power the surrounding neighborhood with up to 80 per cent of its energy needs.Solar panels are not the only way this stadium is planet-friendly either. Permeable pavement is used throughout the stadium and the materials used to make the stadium are reusable as well as locally made (in Taiwan). In addition there is also a lot of parkland with trails and trees around the stadium.

The stadium is also people friendly. Unlike many stadiums where finding shade can become a competitive sport, this stadium provides shade for spectators through its fanlike structure. This allows people to be in the shade most of the day (protection against skin cancer) making games all the more enjoyable to watch.

For more pictures of the stadium visit the Skyscraper Forum.

Also watch the YouTube video below.

Horror-themed Toilet Paper from Japan Puts You on the Edge of Your Seat

Patterned toilet paper is nothing new, there have been comic toilet tissue rolls, Sudoku puzzle patterns, even Hello Kitty tissue rolls but this may be the first time an entire novel has been given the TP treatment. We can thank Koji Suzuki for agreeing to subject his work to a fate worse than the most savage review and Shizuoka-based Hayashi Paper for convincing Suzuki to go along with their crappy idea.

Suzuki's no hack writer by the way - his previous credits include horror novels Ring and Spiral, both later made into popular Japanese horror films. His latest endeavor, Drop, is a nine-chapter horror story that happens to be set in a public bathroom.

According to Hayashi Paper, reading Suzuki's novel in a similar setting will invest what should be a relaxing experience with "psychological fright". Say Hayashi, isn't that what laxatives are for?
It may seem a contradiction in terms for a novel written on toilet paper to scare readers sh*tless, unless Suzuki subconsciously feels his work is worthy of preservation rather than desecration. On the other hand, if reading horror novels scares the crap out of you, you'll be ideally prepared.

Perhaps it's enough for Suzuki that his words be read upon the seat of learning; then swept away in a flush of success. One thing's for certain: no matter how good "Drop" is, you still might find yourself holding your nose while reading it. (via Bouncing Red Ball, c/o Oricon and Karapaia)

Sandcastles Design Makes Ugly Home Necessities Pretty

Not everything you have in your home is visually attractive. If you live in an older home, necessary objects like radiators may prove to be a bit of an eyesore that does anything but blend with your home décor. Making ugly home necessities pretty is Sandcastles design company, which started by making window displays for retail organizations, and expanded out realizing that even the eyesores in your home or business present a design opportunity. Read on to learn more about Sandcastles custom furniture and retail displays.Sandcastles believes that when designing the look and feel of a home or business; there's no need to settle for furniture pieces and other items that just don't fit in with your aesthetic concept. While older homes and businesses may come with unique characteristics you may not see in newer architectural designs, they also come with some eyesores that just don't go with your décor. As a result, Sandcastles started making custom radiator covers, along with other custom furniture pieces to ensure that even ugly home necessities can be made pretty, too. Not only do these radiator covers make radiators better fit with the décor of a home or business; they also transform the radiators into functional pieces of furniture.

Controlling Wearable Geeky Gadgets With Body Movement

Isn't it annoying when you're out for a jog and need to fiddle around to change the track on your MP3 player to keep you in your exercise groove? Or when you have the desperate urge to channel surf while watching TV, but can't seem to find the remote control that has fallen between the cushions on your couch? Well, it seems that an innovative set of wearable gadgets are in the works by NTT DoCoMo, using a special technology that allows your body movements to control specific functions of the wearable gadgets.While no specific body movement detecting wearable gadgets by NTT DoComo are set to become available in the retail market anytime soon (at least not that they're willing to divulge), the innovative technology will take hands-free electronics to a new level. The leading Japanese wireless company claims, however, that they have managed to develop an MP3 player that fast-forwards when the wearer darts his or her eyes, and a wrist-watch that allows wearers to use their arms as a remote control, so those day-to-day electronic annoyances we all face will be eliminated!

Without knowing the look and feel of the specific products under development, it's hard to say whether these innovative technologies will fall under the fashion-forward electronics or geeky gadget categories; but these developments sound so cool, this might be one case where fashion trends may not apply!

Via: Newser

"Magical" Russian Steel Could Re-define Global Construction Standards

I'll be the first to tell you that I'm not very handy with tools. My friends, family, girlfriend, and ex-wife will confirm this with embarrassing clarity. Building things is not my forum-though I'm really good at destroying things.

So bear with me while I figure this out.

It seems that a Russian company has developed a new type of construction material that is 50% cheaper than steel, weighs significantly less, and won't corrode.It is called a Glass Fiber Reinforced Composite Polymeric Armature. Essentially, this material operates sort of like a cross between concrete and steel. It can be used for multiple purposes, ranging from dry dock moorings to road construction. A spiraled core inside the armature provides certain amount of flexibility that enables it to be used for connection to load bearing areas to brick surface areas.

I suspect that the steel industry should keep it's eyes on this stuff, as it may be the wave of future construction...

SOURCES: Alibaba.com

McAfee Network Access Control Server 3.1.0

McAfee network-access control has a strong foundation in the breadth of security checks it can render, and it’s got strong ties to McAfee’s mature endpoint-security management platform, but it lacks some standard NAC capabilities, such as a captive portal for guest users, the ability to authenticate users against external repositories and the option of creating custom endpoint checks.The product comprises a central server, a software agent called McAfee Policy Enforcer Agent and management hooks into McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), which also is used to manage pretty much all of McAfee’s antivirus, antispam and host intrusion-prevention tools

Noncompliant, infected, or misconfigured systems pose security risks and incur costs due to system downtime and restoration. Even one infected host on the network can cause disruptions to network bandwidth or infect other compliant systems.

Boost NAC with McAfee Network Security Platform to protect high-risk areas on the network by identifying, quarantining, and remediating any infected device. Benefits:
* Minimize risk of outbreaks while allowing for policy flexibility
Protect your network from zero-day threats and infected guest devices; monitor the network continuously for threat assessment and attack behavior originating from all types of devices
* Minimize exposure from noncompliant, infected, or misconfigured systems
Allow only authorized devices to have network access: enforce compliance by scanning devices to test their overall security posture as they attempt to log onto a network
* Reduce downtime and risk
Guard against infections and vulnerabilities from mobile devices; identify and quarantine misconfigured systems and company laptops that fall out of compliance; enforce network access decision at the system level; remediate noncompliant devices automatically
* Make intelligent decisions based on real knowledge
Gain visibility of system and network threats with efficient security collaboration; breakthrough McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator® (ePO™) integration provides real-time visibility of actionable system host details, as well as the most relevant host IPS, anti-virus, and spyware events
* Leverage your existing network infrastructure
Deploy to all ePO-managed systems in your network infrastructure without hardware replacements; get continuous, broad protection that keeps up with the latest threats using the advanced version of McAfee Total Protection for Endpoint Advanced, which includes NAC; manage it all from a single, centralized console.

Size : 99 MB

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Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition 16.5.0.135

Norton AntiVirus™ 2009 Gaming Edition is the fastest virus protection you can get. * It stops spyware, worms, bots, and other threats cold—without slowing down your PC. When you’re gaming, your protection should get out of the way. Norton AntiVirus™ 2009 Gaming Edition does exactly that.
Gamer Mode

* No alerts + no notifications = no interruptions
* Optional settings to temporarily suspend updates, behavioral scanning and intrusion prevention
* Enabled automatically when your PC is in full screen mode
* Activate manually with a quick click on the Norton system tray icon

Lightning Fast

* Rapid Pulse Updates every 5 to 15 minutes
* Installs in less than a minute
* Adds less than 1 second to boot time

Light as a Feather * Uses less than 6MB memory even without the Gamer Mode performance boost
* Needs less than 50MB hard disk space on installation
* Runs only 2 processes at a time
* Performance graphs display CPU and memory usage and how little Norton is using

Respects your needs

* Smart Scheduler holds resource intensive actions for when you are not using your PC
* Resource usage table shows you the what, when and how long for background actions taken by Norton AntiVirus
* Delivers consistently strong protection - that’s why Norton AntiVirus has won more consecutive Virus Bulletin 100 awards than any other AV software

Size : 62 MB

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WinRAR 3.90 Beta 2 (32 and 64 bit)

WinRAR is a powerful archive manager (Win32, Linux, Mac). RAR files can usually compress content by 8 percent to 15 percent more than ZIP files can. WinRAR is a powerful compression tool with many integrated additional functions to help you organize your compressed archives. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format.

WinRAR puts you ahead of the crowd when it comes to compression. By consistently creating smaller archives, WinRAR is often faster than the competition. This will save you disc space, transmission costs AND valuable working time as well. WinRAR is ideal for multimedia files. WinRAR automatically recognizes and selects the best compression method. The special compression algorithm compresses multimedia files, executables and object libraries particularly well.

Features of WinRAR:
- Using WinRAR puts you ahead of the crowd when it comes to compression by consistently making smaller archives than the competition, saving disk space and transmission costs.
- WinRAR provides complete support for RAR and ZIP archives and is able to unpack CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7Z, Z archives.
- WinRAR offers a graphic interactive interface utilizing mouse and menus as well as the command line interface. WinRAR is easier to use than many other archivers with the inclusion of a special "Wizard" mode which allows instant access to the basic archiving functions through a simple question and answer procedure. This avoids confusion in the early stages of use.
- WinRAR offers you the benefit of industry strength archive encryption using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a key of 128 bits.
- WinRAR supports files and archives up to 8,589 billion gigabytes in size. The number of archived files is, for all practical purposes, unlimited.
- WinRAR offers the ability to create selfextracting and multivolume archives.
Recovery record and recovery volumes allow to reconstruct even physically damaged archives.
- WinRAR features are constantly being developed to keep WinRAR ahead of the pack.

Version 3.90 beta 2 ChangeLogs:

1. Delay between right clicking selected files in Windows Explorer
and displaying the context menu is reduced. This delay can be
noticeable, when you right click several thousands of files.

2. Bugs fixed:

a) dragging a file over an existing archive in Windows Explorer
did not work for 64 bit WinRAR;

b) 64 bit beta 1 shell extension crashed if user right clicked
"Startup" folder in Start Menu and selected "Open" or "Explore"
commands;

c) "Scan archive for viruses" command in 64 bit beta 1 could fail to
autodetect some of 32 bit antiviruses detected by 32 bit version;

d) beta 1 hung when the entire folder specified as a mask
was excluded: 'rar a -xfolder arc folder';

e) sometimes beta 1 could hang when creating a new RAR archive
if archive comment or one of advanced NTFS options was specified;

f) ZIP encryption code was updated to include recent InfoZip fixes;

g) 64 bit version did not store the toolbar layout.

WinRAR 3.90 Beta 2 32bit

Size : 1.5 MB

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WinRAR 3.90 Beta 2 64 bit

Size : 1.6 MB

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CyberLink PowerDVD 9 Ultra Build 1719

CyberLink today launched the latest in its DVD player software CyberLink PowerDVD 9, which is offering DVD upscaling technology. PowerDVD 9 feature highlights include the new TrueTheater Technology, which is offering DVD up-scaling to HD-like quality Cinema Mode for watching Blu-ray Discs via Windows Media Center. It is a suite of advanced video and audio enhancement technologies such as the "TrueTheater HD" that up-scales DVD video for HD-like results and the "TrueTheater Motion" that up-converts DVD video frame rates for smoother playback. In additon, the "TrueTheater Stretch" technology stretches video without image distortion, while the "TrueTheater Lighting" enhances video image for a brighter, clearer movie. Last but not least, the "TrueTheater Surround" creates multichannel audio output for conventional stereo speakers.

The "Cinema Mode" option displays menu items and movie information in a larger format for home theater viewing on larger displays. Cinema Mode also integrates with Microsoft Windows Media Center to provide Blu-ray Disc playback. "FancyView" enables a navigation experience with animated, catalog-style browsing functionality. It is a fun way to browse through titles in a user?s Movie Collection, as a way of previewing chapters on a DVD, and works in both Classic Mode and Cinema Mode. FancyView can be used with touch screens, a remote control, keyboard, and mouse. The "Movie Collection" feature has been updated to allow users to input and share information on Blu-ray Disc titles as well as DVDs. Users can browse the titles in their Movie Collection using FancyView. As users roll over the titles they have watched using PowerDVD, the Flash Back display will show scenes from the movie. The software also supportsHDMI version 1.3, high-definition video standards Blu-ray Disc, AVCREC and AVCHD, as well as high-definition audio formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio, delivering the highest quality video playback on up to 7.1 channels of lossless audio. PowerDVD?s PC-friendly support of DxVA also promises to offer efficient playback of high-definition movies even on low-spec computer systems. CyberLink PowerDVD 9 is now available online and will be available in retail stores beginning in April, supporting the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish , Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, and Korean. CyberLink also offers OEM versions to PC and CE manufacturing customers.

Main features:
» TrueTheater Technology for maximizing your DVD Playback
» Watch Blu-ray movies like never before
» Play more HD video formats like MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), MPEG-2 HD, WMV-HD, and SMPTE VC-1 files
» PC friendly for enjoying smooth high-definition playback on both powerful or energy-efficient computers or notebooks
» New support for HDMI 1.3
» Rate your movies
» FancyView navigates in an animated fashion
» Cinema Playback Mode
» Remix Your Movies

Changes in PowerDVD 9 Build 1719 (2009-05-22):
* Windows 7 32-bit/64-bit compatibility support with High DPI solution
* Vista 64-bit compatibility support
* NVIDIA CUDA optimization for TrueTheater HD
* Netbook/Nettop small display resolution support
* Intel GMA500 (Menlow) platform support

CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra 9 Build 1501 FULL

Size : 117 MB

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