The Insider News

NYTimes.com[^]:

A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat. The amplification process is called Eulerian Video Magnification, and is the brainchild of a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

Friendster is a social network that was founded in 2002, a year before Myspace and two years before Facebook. Consequently, it is often thought of as the grand-daddy of social networks. At its peak, the network had well over 100 million users, many in south east Asia. In July 2009, following some technical problems and a redesign, the site experienced a catastrophic decline in traffic as users fled to other networks such as Facebook. Friendster, as social network, simply curled up and died.

Quote: Digital Trends[^]

Now that we can navigate a computer screen through gestures, could a three-dimensional interface that recognizes gestures be far behind? According to Jinha Lee, who created a 3D desktop when he interned at Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group, the future could be closer than you think.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I've been a 100% remote worker at Microsoft for just about 5 years now. My last two jobs were both 7 year long gigs, so this isn't the longest I've worked somewhere, but clocking in at a half-decade, it's the longest I've worked remotely. Given that I haven't yet been fired, it's fair to say that I'm a pretty good remote worker.

Free Pascal Answers[^]:

These are many new improvements of Object Pascal programming language in Free Pascal compiler. I don’t know how much new are they, but at least they are new since Delphi 7 language.

Mozilla Hacks[^]:

At first glance the Firefox Marketplace for Firefox OS may look similar to the Apple Store or Google Play Store but there is a key difference: it does not lock you into Mozilla or lock you into your Firefox OS phone. It enables you to sell a web app that will run on any open web device by way of the receipt protocol. Non-Mozilla marketplaces can participate in selling apps on Firefox OS out of the box by implementing the receipt format and users won’t notice anything different when running a paid app from either store.

Hack a Day[^]:

Your hands do a lot of work between the keyboard and the mouse, why the heck are you letting your feet be so lazy? Dossier van D. is putting an end to the podiatric sloth. He built this set of three foot pedals which have gone through two versions of functionality.

The David Walsh Blog[^]:

I recently learned a cool technique from Simurai about how to animate PNG sprites with the CSS3 animations' steps() property. The main idea in this technique is to "recreate" some kind of animated GIF but with the tiles of a PNG sprite. As with everyone I know, I played to Street Fighter in my childhood and when I saw this ... guess what popped in my head?

Building Windows 8[^]:

People want similar mobility on their PCs as they get on their smartphones. It is unlikely that your end goal is just to get connected to the Internet. Instead, connecting to the Internet is a step (or a hurdle) towards what you really want to do, like surf, socialize, or explore, and you would prefer that your PC is connected and ready for you to use whenever you want and wherever you are. We looked at the fundamentals of wireless connectivity and re-engineered Windows 8 for a mobile and wireless future, going beyond incremental improvements. This is a good example of work that requires new hardware to work in concert with new software in order to realize its full potential.

The Windows Club[^]:

Some malware cannot be removed from your computer easily, once they get past your anti-virus protection and integrate themselves deeply in your system – sometimes making it unbootable. In such a situation, it may be advisable to use Rescue CDs. A Rescue CD will help you recover your system by removing nasty threat that resist removal by regular antivirus software. These CDs perform a scan and removes computer virus without booting the computer system.

Wired.com[^]:

When you open the door and walk into the room, it even smells like the 1960s. It reminds you of the old garage where your grandfather kept his twin Chevrolet Corvairs. But those aren't cars you smell. Those are computers. This is the "1401 Room" on the first floor of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California — the room where Robert Garner and his motley crew of amateur technicians have spent the last decade reviving two of the massive IBM 1401 mainframe computers that littered the business world throughout the '60s and on into '70s.

The Awl[^]:

In Spielberg's future, you only have to twirl your fingers at a computer screen to make it do what you want. It looks cool enough, but it's time for us to let it go: we’ve built our graphics and our electronics around interface eye candy, rather than trying to come up with new and more effective ways to control our real and imaginary gadgets. The best thing you can say about touchscreens are they look good on camera and they’re better than T9 texting, which is kind of like being better than fax machines.