Now I really want to learn CPR

Great video of how much different TV-shows and movies actually use a green screen when they are shooting scenes. It’’s kind of a sudden wake-up because everything looks so real. Some places they are really hard to spot, but I promise you that after you”ve watched this little video you”ll be able to spot green screens a lot better.

It almost seems like Ugly Betty is being shot entirely in front of a green scene, which is kind of disappointing. I”ve never actually watched the show but I like to think that the casts are actually out in the real world doing their acting. This is a lot cheaper for the studios because they don”t have to pay for transportation, expensive actors and lighting on location.

[That''s How It Happened]

This is an amazing 30s video of a pigeon riding the subway. Now you might think, well how is that cool -- if you take a look at the video it’’s pretty clear that the pigeon knows where it needs to get off. The speaker announces the next station, it starts walking around, the doors open and the pigeon quietly walks out. It’’s quite impressive that the pigeon have learned to do this, or was this just a coincidence?

This video reminded me a lot of Moscow’’s stray dogs who has adapted to the way humans live and get around. Scientists have studied groups of these dogs and they seem to have a hierarchy which is really close to that of a wolf pack. The stray dogs found out that people were more likely to give them food at subway stations. It’’s really interesting how these animals adapt to the way we live.

You can read more and see picture of Moscow’’s stray dogs: “Smartest Dogs: Moscow’’s Stray Dogs”

If you have a story that you just really want to get published and exposed to the world, then why not contact me and let me post it right here on the blog. Just think of all the benefits that everyone gets.

It’s basically a win-win-win situation for everyone involved.
You as a guest poster gets:

• Exposure
• Link-love
• Great comments – hopefully ;)
• Access to a lot of great readers

The reader of this blog gets:

• A great story
• New version of an original story
• A new perspective
• Refreshing new ideas

Me as an author gets:

• A small break
• Interesting new and fresh stuff
• New readers

So you have a story or an idea related to technology, photography or any of the things that I write about here on the blog. Well then you are the perfect guest poster for this blog.

If you think any this sounds interesting then drop me line either through the contact form or on Twitter – @matiassingers.

When can we expect to see these as the standard police car?

If you’re tired of reading and hearing stuff like:

• Oh you should turn that light off
• You should really walk instead
• You should turn your computer off
• Buy a Prius and save the planet
• The polar bears will die tomorrow if you don’t sell all your electronics and go live in a tree.

Then you will love this article. Okay maybe you haven’t heard all those things but you get the point. I’m all for people taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint, now this is not steps that bumps them back to the stone-age simply just things that they can do without actually making their lives worse. Just saying carbon footprint almost made me puke a little.

I thought it would be time to get some balance in all the pro-global-warming blog posts all over the internet. So like a scale we have to balance the two sides and this is the counterweight to blog-posts like these: “Want to argue about Global Warming? There’s an app for that” and “Global Warming: Technology vs. Choice”.

Things to do if you want to go anti-green

• Leave all your lights turned on – 24/7
• Buy some new lamps and set them up outside so the bugs can have a party
• Leave your car running when you go into a store
• Turn your AC on max roll down your windows and drive down the highway
• Buy a universal TV-remote and go around your neighborhood at night and turn on all the televisions
• Turn your heater to the max and go around naked
• Steal a tray on Monday just before Trayless-Tuesday
• Green is NOT the new black – Brown is
• Buy a chainsaw and go cut down some of those new wind turbines near you
• Make your own steam room/sauna in your bathroom. Turn on the water at the warmest and leave it running for a day or two.
• Join the Anti-Green Movement
• Buy a Lamborghini Murciélago and use it to the max – everyday!
• Build a house just like Mukesh Ambani’s residence Antilia
• Buy a private jet and use it – a lot! Not just for vacations and overseas trips, no for everything!
• Buy stocks in General Motors and make them build cars like in the good ol’ days

This was just a short list to get your mind working on more ways to speed up global warming.

Please do not take this seriously.

• Use the USB port on the back for iPod/iPhone/iPad/External harddrive: A lot of people have asked for this feature and I’ll try to just summarize what it’s about. So lets say you have an iPod/iPhone/iPad that you would like to connect to your HDTV to show your family some photos, videos or just play some music; well then you could buy the Universal Dock and play it on the TV but what the Universal Dock is lacking is the Apple TV’s interface. Image you plug your iPod/iPhone/iPad into the Apple TV with the standard 30-pin connector and you would then be able to access it as a library on the Apple TV and all of this is controlled by the Apple Remote. You would be able to show your photos from you iPod/iPhone/iPad through the HDMI cable on your 42″ HDTV. Some of this is partly possible with the ATV flash.
• DVR capabilities: People want this because they think it would replace their TiVo or whatever DVR they have right now but it really isn’t that simple. There is a lot of reasons why Apple wouldn’t implement a DVR features to the Apple TV:
  1. It would cannibalize the whole iTunes Store and why would Apple want to work against their own store. Apple doesn’t want you to be tied down to your cable-provider but would rather that you bought a season-pass on iTunes and you could then watch the episodes whenever you wanted to.
  2. Apple is really trying to push for more streaming media and a DVR wouldn’t make sense in that optic.
  Just for a moment imagine that the Apple TV could actually record a TV stream from the decoder it got then you would be able to stream you recorded contents back your main Mac.
• Ability to stream a DVD from another device on the network: I do realize that it would require a pretty stable and fast internal network connection. Well if Apple doesn’t want to add a DVD/Blu-Ray drive to the Apple TV then atleast make it possible to stream it like you do when you “Remote Install OS X” on a MacBook Air. I can’t believe this isn’t an iTunes feature yet it doesn’t seem to be that extensive.
• Ability to play files and formats outside of iTunes: If the Apple TV could stream whatever media file from you Mac to your HDTV people wouldn’t have to convert their .mkv(yeah I’m looking at you pirates, aarrgh) files just to playback on their TV. Right now it’s just easier for people to go plug their laptop into their TV and play their contents from that. This should be possible with the ATV flash.
• Play HD material over 720p: Really? Come on Apple? You can do better than that, we do write 2010 right now and that means 1080p movies and the people want it. We’ll soon be talking 3D TV(oh god no) and you should at least have 1080p playback at that time.
• Apple TV applications: Apps are the new craze and everything out there needs to have these so called apps. Car radios, eBook Readers,  Squeezebox and the list goes on. Why not give the Apple TV a little App Store of its own, you could have YouTube.app, Hulu.app, Netflix.app and so on – it would be kind of like Boxee.

As it is right now Apple sees the Apple TV as somekind of little niche hobby project that they can just leave and let people hack them. I think there is a lot of possibilities in the Apple TV and it could be such a great little delivery device. Apple might even go make a whole new product like a dedicated mediacenter computer, not like the Apple TV nor the Mac Mini. But who knows? I think they are focusing a lot more on the iPhone/iPad OS right now.

Here is a couple of screenshots from my iPhone showing how it looks:

This is how the frontpage with the posts is looking on a iPhone. Notice the little “Mobile Theme” switch.

Some pictures of how the basic functions and categories look on the iPhone, I really like the way they are displayed.

Here is the features I was telling you about in the beginning of the post where the visitor can “Message” me and then I’ll receive a push notification on my iPhone through Prowl. It’s a really cool feature and something I had been looking at before. I was looking at implementing pushme.to but this just seems way easier because I was already using Prowl.

Review recap:

So what does this MindMap tell us about how people think of Google Street View? Well first of all we can see that a lot of people think the Google Street View got its own website, which it doesn’t and secondly some Danish people seem to have a hard time spelling Street View – but they find the article anyway. It does seem pretty weird that Google hasn’t registered for the googlestreetview.dk domain and a lot of people doesn’t seem to know that Google Street View is a part of maps.google.com. Because if you knew it was a part of maps.google.com you wouldn’t be searching for those keywords.

Funny thing is that I received 8 unique visitors who searched for “nude danish street view” that fits pretty well in the statistic that 25% of all searches online is about porn and that the word “sex” is in the Top 3 most searched words on search engines.

Have you experienced things like this yourself or do you have funny stories of how people found your blog/site/article? If you do then please let us all know in the comments section below.

On a little side note: I’ve received over 6000 pageviews in the last 14 days – thank you guys so much!

Google Street View is finally here. Everyone can now go explore Denmark on their own computers.

A couple of days ago the Danish site Krak.dk launched their own version of Street View. Their pictures are better than Google’s but their complete lack of a proper user interface and there is no way you can navigate around without ending somewhere completely different. Google probably saw this as an attack to their Street View features and they quickly launched their Danish version. It’s been years since the first Google Street View car was spotted here in Denmark and the 21th of January was the day it went online. It’s reported to be working in over 100 Danish cities all over the country, great news for a lot of citizens here in Denmark but also for visitors. It should work on the iPhone Maps.app and on Android phones too.

Quickly people started exploring the pictures and places around the country. Photos started to appear around the internet especially on Twitter. Here is a couple of tweets from Danish tweeters:

• @mikkelmarius “Interesting street view: Someone being run down just in front of my office. http://bit.ly/7W8PTU #streetview #copenhagen” [tweet]
• @streetviewfunny “First Nude found in Denmark via Google Street View NSFW -http://tinyurl.com/ykntsts #streetview” [tweet]
• @streetviewfunny “First Danish Rubber Necker found via Google Street View - http://tinyurl.com/ykey6rp #streetview” [tweet]
• @streetviewfunny “Danish Couple Shopping for some Marital Aids via Google Street View - http://tinyurl.com/ylbazfz #streetview” [tweet]

Those are all pretty funny and they are now added to all the other funny Google Street View photos. It appears that the photos are taken on widely different times.
This road supports the claim, try to move just one step forward and see the seasons jump from fall to summer. See more right here: Google Street View

Google employees with a little waving.

Google Street View also came to Sweden and a bunch of other improvements – check out the source for more information. I wonder if their new patent for ad placement will ever actually be real?

Here is a man teaching a woman how to use a cellphone:

[Google Latlong Blog]

Danish source [Ekstra Bladet]

Update:
@iTelling just sent me this photo from Google Street View. This is the TV show “Hvor fanden er Herning?” shooting on location.

Check it out here