Supercharge Your Canon Camera with Open-Source CHDK Firmware

Digital cameras have powers beyond what is immediately available to the user. On a standard Canon, for example, the fastest shutter speed option offered is 1/1,600 second, but the hardware can handle much more than that -- up to 1/60,000 of a second.

CHDK, the Canon Hacker's Development Kit, is an open-source software project that can be loaded on cameras using Canon's DIGIC II or DIGIC III firmware platforms. It unleashes new features including RAW file format, live histogram display, a battery readout, and the ability to run scripted actions on a camera.

CHDK does not replace the existing firmware on your Canon, so the process is completely reversible. The existing firmware stays intact, while the CHDK software is loaded on demand from an SD card.

• Unlimited Interval Shooting -- Use your camera for surveillance, or use it to shoot at precise intervals during a lunar eclipse or meteor shower.

• High-Speed Shutter -- Use this override option in the AllBest firmware to explore life's littler moments. You can also override the camera's slowest shutter speed settings to shoot exposures of a minute or longer.

• Long Exposure Intervalometer -- Take multiple long exposure shots all night, then assemble the shots into your own time lapse videos.

• Shoot better HDR pics with CHDK's auto-bracketing features.

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.. official wiki here

New game gizmo uses mind control

An Australian company is gearing up to release a computer headset that allows people to control video games using only the power of their minds.

Emotiv Systems, founded by four Australian scientists in 2003, will release the $US299 ($315) EPOC headset on the US market this year. Australians will be able to order it online.

Featuring 14 sensors that measure electrical impulses from the brain, the headset - which plugs into the PC's USB port - will enable games to register facial expressions, emotions and even cognitive thoughts, allowing players to perform in-game actions just by visualising them.

The headset works in a similar way to voice recognition, in that it must first be calibrated using Emotiv's software to recognise patterns in the user's electrical brain impulses, which are used to perform 30 preset actions.

When the player performs those same thoughts in the game the software knows to associate them with the correct action, such as rotate object or push object.

"If you look at the way we communicate with machines up to this day, it's always in a conscious form, so whether you turn on and off the light or you program software you always consciously tell a machine to perform a task for you," Emotiv CEO and co-founder Nam Do said in an interview from the company's Pyrmont offices.

"But the communication among ourselves is much more interesting because we have non-conscious communications, so we read body language, we read facial expressions and we also have feelings and emotions which differentiate us from machines.

"Our vision for the next generation of man-machine interface is it's not going to be limited to just conscious [interaction]."

While the headset will work in a very limited sense with existing titles, Do said the major game developers and publishers were designing a number of their upcoming titles to take full advantage of the technology.

For instance, an in-game avatar would be able to mimic the human player's facial expressions - smiles, winks, grimaces, and so on - in real time, and other non-human characters in the game could respond to these.

"If you shoot somebody and you're smiling, the non-player character can turn around and say to you, 'What are you laughing at? You just killed that dude,' " Do said.

The headset could also detect the players' emotions - whether they're bored, angry, engaged, happy, stressed, etc - and adjust difficulty levels, in-game music and the game environment accordingly.

Characters could also react to a player's emotional cues.

In horror-themed games, enemies could intelligently select the perfect time to startle a player based on how they feel, rather than having opponents in the same positions every time a mission is reloaded.

But the most powerful aspect of the EPOC is its ability to detect thoughts. Players can just think about performing actions, such as lifting or pushing objects or making them disappear, and have the game act accordingly without the need to push any keys or buttons.

All of these features have been publicly demonstrated to thousands at gaming conferences using a role playing game developed by Emotiv. It will be included for free with the headset and was trialled in Sydney by smh.com.au.

Do, who came to Australia from Vietnam in 1995 on a university scholarship, said his intention was not to replace the keyboard or traditional game controller; he simple wanted to add another layer to the experience.

"You can still move around using your joystick, using your keypad, using your mouse and keyboard, just like a normal game, but there is a lot of activity that we take to another level by adding a headset - such as being able to levitate an object by thinking about it," he said.

Do said the company was first concentrating on the larger US market - which has about 9 million hardcore gamers - but was working with Australian resellers and distributors to launch the product here.

Regardless, Australians would be able to order the headset online from US retailers or from Emotiv itself.

"We're working very hard to get the headset to other markets at least by online ordering," Do said.

He said that, while the company was initially focused on gaming, the technology had applications in any situations where humans interacted with machines, such as in medicine and robotics. Further, market research companies and even Hollywood studios were tapping Emotiv's technology to measure reactions from focus groups.

Emotiv spent two years developing its technology in Sydney before moving its headquarters to San Francisco, the home of Silicon Valley, in 2005. It employs about 50 staff - neurologists, biomedical scientists, mathematicians, engineers - but its entire research team is still based in Sydney.

Moving to the US, Do said, meant Emotiv was "closer to all the action, all the [big gaming] companies, all the clients and also access to money, because, as a start-up company, money is always one of the key considerations".

He said Emotiv had been approached by numerous suitors keen to acquire the company, but wanted to first see how far the technology could grow. Emotiv has also had meetings with the major game console makers about licensing the technology to them for future products.

In addition to Do, Emotiv was founded by 1998 Young Australian of the Year Tan Le; Neil Weste, a neuroscientist who sold his chip manufacturing company Radiata Communications to Cisco in 2000 for $US295 million; and Allan Snyder, the director of the University of Sydney's Centre for the Mind and winner of the 2001 Marconi Prize.

The four founders self-funded the initial $1 million needed to start the company but have since raised $US14.5 million in series A funding. It is now in the process of raising series B funding.

Feeding time...



The latest craze here is to have little fish eat the dead skin off your feet. Haven't tried it yet, but I might, I really might.

Iron Man Rocks!

I was expecting a lot from this movie, it's been my must-see movie since I first saw the trailer but I had started to prepare myself for disappointment.

I began saying things like 'the first movie in a super-hero franchise is always a bit slow as they have so much backstory to cover', because I was worried that I was expecting more than one movie could deliver.

I went to see Iron Man on Thursday night, and I tells ya, all my worry was unnecessary, because this movie is great.

Now I'm a bit of a tech-geek as I'm sure you've probably already gathered by now, so for me, the workshop scenes with Tony Stark testing and refining the different versions of the suit were a very worthwhile addition. Maybe not so much for everyone, but I liked it. Felt that it added depth to the storyline. I really don't like those whizz-bang movie scripts that gloss over everything and don't give the geeks in the audience a bit of substance to chew on ;).

Here, we get to see some of the nuts & bolts (obviously literally in this case), we get to see things fail, which for me adds realism (as much as can be expected in a super-hero movie), as you see that it's a suit that he actually builds and needs to test, not just something that he puts on that works perfectly first time.

The workshop is also the main location of the other surprise of this film.
It's funny. From the bickering between Tony Stark and Jarvis, his AI 'butler', to the visual gags of the initial suit testing, Robert Downey Jr, as usual, presents himself as an actor with a fantastic sense of comedic timing.

Jeff Bridges does a good job as the sleazy, overbearing, double-crossing business partner, and Gwyneth Paltrow does nicely as Pepper Potts, Tony's secretary, though the role doesn't really leave her much room to shine.

Iron man is the best super-hero movie I have seen, is showing now, so go see it if you think there is even the slightest chance you'll like it.

I'll rate Iron Man 9/10

oh.. And stay after the credits ;)

'Pig powder' regrows man's fingertip

An Ohio man has regrown a finger thanks to a medical miracle that doctors hope will enable patients to regenerate burnt skin and damaged organs, revolutionizing the way the body heals itself.

When Lee Spievack, a hobby-store salesman in Cincinnati, slashed off the tip of his finger with a model-plane propeller, the missing piece vanished along with any reasonable hope of his hand being whole again.

In a cutting-edge medical technique that seems ripped from the pages of science fiction, a powdery substance helped the 69-year-old regrow a fully functional digit with tissue, nerves, skin, nail, and a fingerprint.

Spievack had been helping a customer one evening in August 2005 with an engine on a model airplane behind the shop. He knew the motor was risky because it required somebody to turn the prop backwards to make it run the right way.

"I pointed to it," Spievack recalled the other day, "and said, 'You need to get rid of this engine, it's too dangerous.' And I put my finger through the prop."

He misjudged the distance to the spinning plastic blade. It sliced off his fingertip, leaving just a bit of the nail bed. The missing piece, three-eighths of an inch long, was never found.

An emergency room doctor wrapped up the rest of his finger and sent him to a hand surgeon, who recommended a skin graft to cover what was left of his finger. What was gone, it appeared, was gone forever.

If Spievack had been a toddler, things might have been different. Up to about age two, people can consistently regrow fingertips, says Dr. Stephen Badylak, a regeneration expert at the University of Pittsburgh. But that's rare in adults, he said.

Spievack, however, did have a major advantage - a brother, Alan, a former Harvard surgeon who'd founded a company called ACell Inc., that makes an extract of pig bladder for promoting healing and tissue regeneration.

It helps horses regrow ligaments, for example, and the federal government has given clearance to market it for use in people. Similar formulations have been used in many people to do things like treat ulcers and other wounds and help make cartilage.

The summer before Lee Spievack's accident, Dr. Alan Spievack had used it on a neighbor who'd cut his fingertip off on a tablesaw. The man's fingertip grew back over four to six weeks, Alan Spievack said.

Lee Spievack took his brother's advice to forget about a skin graft and try the pig powder.

Soon a shipment of the stuff arrived and Lee Spievack started applying it every two days. Within four weeks his finger had regained its original length, he says, and in four months "it looked like my normal finger."

Spievack said it's a little hard, as if calloused, and there's a slight scar on the end. The nail continues to grow at twice the speed of his other nails.

"All my fingers in this cold weather have cracked except that one," he said.

All in all, he said, "I'm quite impressed."