Shot now, focus later.

Silicon Valley star-up Lytro is releasing a new kind of camera that will change the way pictures are taken: the company is calling it 'light-field' technology.  Rather than focus the image on a standard sensor, this technology also records the angle of the light which allows the picture to be refocus after the fact.

Its a little oddly shaped and has very few controls: on/off, shutter, and zoom.  The memory is fixed (no SD card).

An example of what you can do with this technology:

Same picture, different subject is put in focus.  With a regular camera, this would be two different pictures (good luck getting BOTH cats to stay in the same location).

The company has a photo gallery, with some of the pictures you can change the focus on.  There is a picture of a Nixue Tube clock


Here are a couple of articles:
Technology Review
CNet

Science, Magic, and Religion

File under: things to do if I had more time:

History 2D from UCLA, Science, Magic, and Religion is online.
Eighteen hour long lectures.

Clipboard

Clipboard is a new service in beta that allows users to clip parts of webpages and still maintain the layout of the webpage.  It allows you to share pieces and parts of webpages with friends.  Seems pretty cool.

Why the UN should never be involved with the Internet

Underscoring and providing yet more evidence that the United Nations should have no role in Internet governance, the General of the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) says that the Internet would be a better place if it was patented and controlled.  BoingBoing has the sad story.

The Beautiful Symmetry of Math

Copyright / Patent trolls - its the zombie apocalypse

Sad news on the "information wants to be free" front.  Time zone data may not be the most sexy thing, and probably is something most people don't ever think about, but there is a data base of worldwide timezeons. 

The full story is on Stephen Colebourne's blog. 

The short story is that a company called Astrolabe has filed suit against the open source timezone project claiming copyright infringement.

First off, I didn't know you could copyright facts (see 1st question), but what is really insulting is that this company offers free products: a free birth chart (aka horoscope).

Really?

Two video editors

I don't normally deal with video much, partly because of the lack of software, but here are two free/open source editors:


VLMC from the creators of VLC, the Swiss army knife of a media player, has been in alpha (0.10) release for quite a while.  Looks powerful, yet simple, but unfortunately, is still a bit unstable.




Just found out about Lightworks.  Its a public beta, Windows only.  Haven't downloaded it yet.