Music player that dances to the music

Do not have a dance partner when you wanted to dance ? Take a look at this new cute and compact sony music player named "Rolly" that can dance to the music. It has some cool features built into it.
- Ofcourse the first thing is that it plays music
- It generates motion according to the music
- It has builtin sensors to detect and avoid obstacles.
- It can be controlled with a bluetooth remote
- It can be used as a wireless speaker over bluetooth(including mobile phone)
- Customizable motion

It is not yet available for the worldwide consumers. Its is going to be released only in japan in setptember this year. You have to see this video to appreciate the grace in its dance. An official video is also available, but it is a little bit boring. You may want to take a look at the google-transalted english page. Try browsing around the japanese links to see more details.

Using Canon S2IS digital camera as webcam

Here are the two links that I found on this subject. One is the Cam4you and the other is Softcam.

cam4you is a freeware. I tried cam4you and realized that there is a big catch. After googling, I confirmed that my understading about the catch is true. Here is a nice tutorial on using cam4you and the tutorial's author confirming the catch. Do not confuse this with Cam4you-remote, which the application author confirmed that it cannot be used as webcam.

The big catch is that you cannot use the camera as a webcam which can be used for video conferencing. In other words, the digital camera cannot be mimicked as a webcam which can be used with your yahoo/MSN messenger. What you can do is to upload the pictures to a location on the web, which gets refreshed. So, your viewers have to refresh their page every time they want to see the latest image (Note that some browsers like opera have the built-in capability to auto-refresh at a chosen frequency. You also can get addons firefox & IE which can do this).

It seems that this limitation is not there in softcam, which can grab any piece of your screen and provide that as a feed from the webcam. The feed can be used in chat clients like Yahoo/MSN.
It is a licensed software. Though a shareware version is available, I did not try it out. I will try it out and will update this post later

Copy music from iphone to PC

Copying music from PC to iphone is very obvious. I am sure that many people would like to copy the music from their iphone(or ipod touch) back to the computer. This link gives a nice tutorial on how to copy the music from you iphone. If you are having a mac, there is a graphical tool called "Senuti" that can automatically get the music. Or else if you use windows/linux, you have to use some sftp utility to download the music from the iphone. The only catch is that the filenames will be gibberish. You need to rename your music files once you get them on your PC.

Logitech quick cam messenger works with old drivers

I had problems getting my logitech quickcam messeger webcam to work. I tried installing the latest drivers meant for this webcam i.e., quickcam v11.5. I did not have the original driver CD that I got with my webcam. So, I downloaded the latest drivers from logitech webpage. I have windows XP with service pack 2. After installing the drivers the installer asks to connect the usb of the webcam. But the webcam is not detected. Disconnecting and reconnecting, or rebooting and rebooting and rebooting also did not help.

When I googled for it, I found that many people faced this problem. But most of the discussions ended without any solution. Some solutions suggested to replace some set of files in the drivers which did not work for me. Even manually picking the .inf files also did not help me in getting the webcam to work.

Finally, in one post which was giving a workaround for similar problem in windows vista, I found a link to the old drivers (quickcam v8.4.8). That did the magic for me. Before installing the old drivers, I had to clean up the old mess that I left around. I uninstalled logitech usb webcam hardware through the device manager. And I uninstalled the driver pack and the logitech application software via the add/remove programs.

After cleaning up all the mess, I installed the 8.4.8 package. It asked me to reboot the PC. After rebooting, the installation software asked me to plug in the usb of the webcam. There was a big pause and I was holding my breath. Finally, the webcam is detected thus ending the week long battle. Once the webcam is detected everything became a piece of cake!

Added CHDK firmware. Could not tune motion detection

After a row with vendor of card reader from ebay, and after some hiccups, I was finally successful in loading the CHDK firmware into my canon S2IS camera. Loading the CHDK firmware is easy once you follow the instructions carefully. I tried to be smart by not reading the manual fully and guessing the remaining.

I realized lately that the memory card should be kept in locked state for the firmware to load. If the card is not put in locked state, the CHDK firmware would not load. The camera will continue to work with the default firmware(by canon). The interesting thing to note here is that the pictures can still be recorded in the memory card even if it is locked. Till now, I thought that the lock physically protects the card from writing. But now, I understand that it is just a logical protection. i.e., The software has to respect the lock on the reader. I can write a software that will not honor the lock and will write it into the memory card even if it is locked.

I experimented a little with the new firmware and enhanced capabilities. I liked the RGB histograms etc stuff. I still need to explore lot of new functionality. The most interesting thing that drove me to upgrade to CHDK firmware is the motion-triggered photography, especially the lightening photography. But I am not much successful with it. There are a bunch of scripts on motion detection and others that one can explore.

The problem with the motion triggered photography is that there are a bunch of parameters in each script, which needs to be tuned. I am not able to tune those parameters to quickly take a photograph after motion is detected. The camera takes a lot of time after the motion happened. Added those parameters, the camera settings also should be tuned well. I was able to improve somewhat by setting the manual focus mode, and continuous shooting mode. Another problem is that the picture is not taken even if there is motion. I guess we need to tune the "threshold" parameter properly.

I will write one more post if I am satisfied with my experiments on motion triggered photography.

Hack your canon powershot camera

Incidentally, this is my first post on gadget other than iphone. I will try to do more justice to my blogname "gadgetsandyou"(not "iphoneandyou") by trying to write more about other gadgets too. Technically, the following is not really hacking, but just upgrading the fimware in a twisted way.

Do you know that you can power up you canon powershot camera with enhanced capabilities. All you need to do is to install an add-on firmware to the existing firmware. The best part of this exercise is that the original firmware from canon does not get erased or overwritten.

This is the article that I first came across related to this topic. It finally lead me to the home page of the CHDK project. With this you can enhance your cameras which has DigicII/DigicIII processors. This is the list of supported cameras.

Some of the cool additional features that you would get are as follows
- Enhanced Image Capture
- Additional display information
- Additional Settings
- Support for custom scripts (I am exited about it)
- Continuous display of battery charge
- RGB Histograms
- Motion-detection triggered photography
- Additional applications like calendar and games.

The above is just a tip of the iceberg. There are lot of major and minor enhancements. I am going to try this out this weekend. I will post my experience.

Showtime: video recording for iphone

Showtime is a native application that can be installed on a jailbroken phone. It brings video recording capability to iphone which I think is one of the basic functionality of any high-end phone. Initially, I was surprized when apple did not offer video recording capability on iphone. I had to reconsider my decision of buying iphone. Finally, I bought iphone expecting that the future software updates will bring the capability.

On a jailbroken phone, in the installer, you can find "showtime" in the "multimedia" category. But there is a catch to this. The current free version records only 5 secs of video. You need to donate to get a license key which do not have any limitations. Currently, the software is just in its bare bones. There is no capability to delete the recorded videos, which I think is very odd. I am sure that they will add this capability in the future releases.

Update:
I am wrong in saying that there is no capability to delete recorded videos. If you swipe across the filename, it will give an option to delete the file. Also, the recorded videos are kept in /var/root/Media/PBFVideo/ (/var/mobile/Media/PBFVideo on 1.1.3 phones). You can use SSH/SFTP to transfer videos on and off the iPhone. Go here for more detailed information. It has information about the current features and the upcoming features.