Google's Biggest Duh

You're in gmail, you want to send an email and add and attachment. You can add files from your Google-drive.

You're in gmail, you're reading an email that has an attachment. You want to save it to your Google-drive. Oops - there's only View and Download. Duh!!!!!

Follow-up : Thanks Google for adding this much loved feature :)

How You can Be a Billionaire

Start a company that publishes - you guessed it - books. But, only publish one book on any subject. You can see what'll happen - the top authors in every field will be stepping over each other to write The Book on that subject. Forget you making them deals. They'll pay you to be able to write The Book on their subject.

iWatch = iPhone

Not time to buy AAPL yet obviously - the big players are still doing their best to drive the stock down..

Anyhow, my take is that, if AAPL played their cards right, they'd make the iWatch have the entire functionality of an iPhone - except for the small screen size of course - so you'd have to communicate using Siri.

Here's a good deal - if you don't have a phone plan, and you buy an iWatch with a new contract, you can use your iPod as an iPhone - if it's within range of your iWatch - how does that sound? Or your iPad too -- which people might like more. Basically, now the iPhone is no longer what you used to think of it as - though you could still buy one of those if you wanted. Essentially, the full (full-screen, etc) iPhone functionality can be realized using a combination of either iWatch and iPod or iWatch and iPad. Nice?

A Practical Use for CV

How about a footrest to put under your desk at work that's smart. When you leave the desk, it retreats to the wall. When you approach, it only moves (to the right position) if you lift up both feet off the floor invitingly. You get the idea - it needs to be smart.

Extending Computer Vision

Thanks for visiting the Embedded Vision Academy and accessing resources provided by BDTI. We are interested in your experience in using these resources. If you answer a few questions for us, your name will be entered into a drawing to receive your choice of:

        A copy of Gary Bradsky’s Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library, signed by the author. (We will either send you a copy of the current edition now or you can opt to wait for the new edition.)
        A Raspberry Pi development kit

    We will draw four winners from among the names of those who respond to our questions by Tuesday, October 16.

    To enter the drawing, please reply to this message and insert your answers to the following questions:

        What resources did you download?

ubuntu Virtual Machine

        What did you did you do? For example, if you downloaded the OpenCV QuickStart Kit, did you build the example applications? Or, did you use OpenCV to create your own?

No, I don't see a tutorial on how to do that - I did play some of the examples. I'm not a software guy, but I want to build CV apps

        How did it go?

Playing the examples is easy. We need a presentation on a hello-world approach to building a new app - how to you build a motion detection app on your own - not use someone else's fully packaged app.

        Do you have any suggestions for similar tools?

Hello world docs would be nice

        What additional embedded vision resources would you like us to offer?

Take 5 of the most popular cameras, ranked for quality and cost and build a library for them - someone should be able to buy one of those 5 and then go to the website and get everything he needs to build an app. If it could be ported to Raspberry Pi, super.

iView - Another First from Apple

Something tells me the bad guys might have this already.

This should shake up the Microsoft/Dell/Samsung idiot complex pretty soon once it's out :

Basic idea - you put on sync-goggles like in the early days of hi-tech 3D movies - and in the current age of 3D gaming.

Then, you can set a property on a window on your desktop - make it hidden to plain view. Basic idea is simple - the window that only you should be able to view will only flash exist on the screen

Low-Cost Home Security

Intrusion-detection is something you can get - from ADT, say. This simple idea is one step ahead.

Have a camera positioned outside your house, looking at your property - say the walkway leading to your yard, or your yard. You need a loud-speaker, or simple audio-device and some processing power as well. You might be able to manage with Netduino or Raspberry Pi or something like that.

Here's what you do - if you detect motion - of a large enough sized body (maybe 3D is the way to go - 2 cameras?) - then you put out an audible alert. You should probably have a conspicuous camera (the fake) that makes the noise - so if the crook gets frustrated and decides to vent, you don't lose much.

You need a thingy on your keychain that's like a car-remote-key that you can use to disarm the thing for 5 minutes - maybe even do simple commands like 3 quick presses disarms for 1 hour, etc. When it's re-arming, you hear a special chime before you get the annoying buzz.

You're going for deterrence here. And low cost - there's not communication with a base-station, remote recording/monitoring, etc. I so badly want to get something like this working as a hello-world home-security project.

Resources :

Embedded Vision Alliance
MG International : Poseidon
Cernium Archerfish