X27 – ultra low light night vision color camera


As someone who works with technology for years now, I might sometimes appear as a “know all, seen all” kind of guy.  But that’s far from the truth.  Sure, there is plenty of technology I know or even slightly aware of.  But there is still a whole lot that blows my mind when I come across it.

Via this blog post, I came across an X27 – ultra low light night vision color camera.  And my mind is blown.  This technology provides high definition, color video images in ultra low light conditions (no moon, overcast).  The level of detail this camera picks up is simply unbelievable.  Check out this video comparing X27 to some other night vision technologies.

The X27 camera takes videos in darkness that looks like they were shot in the daytime. And they’re in color…none of this black and white, thermal, or infrared stuff. The camera was developed for military use, has an effective ISO rating of 5,000,000, and has a comically long name: “X27 Reconnaissance Day/Night high Fidelity true real time low light/low lux color night vision Imaging Security / Multi Purpose camera system”. Pricing information is not available, but I bet you’re paying for every single one of those words. (via digg)

Sure, military is probably the first and only sector that can afford this.  But as with anything, once the technology is available, it will make it’s way down to the rest of us, opening new doors in law enforcement, security, photography, movies and TV, entertainment, health and safety, environment and animal welfare, and other areas.

Super cool stuff!




asciinema – record and share your terminal sessions, the right way


asciinema is a tool to record terminal sessions and share them as videos.  But unlike many other tools that provide this functionality, ascinema does a very smart thing – instead of encoding the session into a video it interactively replays it in a text mode, which allows one to select and copy-paste commands and outputs from the playback.  The resulting “video” is also much lighter and faster than it would be if encoded into a video stream.

This is great for demos, tutorials, and other more technical scenarios.  The website also has a collection of recent and featured public screencasts.




appear.in – your friendly Skype replacement


Every day some new super hyped web service is born, and every other day some old web service is decommissioned. It’s been going on for so long, that rarely do I pay much attention to these things.  I need a few recommendations. I want to hear excitement. I want to hear why and how this can be useful to me.  A mere press release doesn’t cut it.

Today, I was recommended a service that is so easy and useful that it blew my mind.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you appear.in .  Think of the all the good things Skype is, without all the bad things that come with it.  Video, voice, and text chat, screen sharing, free, multiple participants (up to 8), private and public conversations, excellent voice and video quality, and no installation of software necessary – works right out of the browser, even on the mobile.

appear.in

It’s so easy and fun to use that I’ve spent most of the day chatting to my colleagues even when they were in the same room.  We had two and three way conversations with screen sharing and text messages (handy for the URLs) and it worked really well.

Come to think of it, the only thing that I didn’t see (maybe it’s there and maybe it’s not) is file transfer.  But there are so many different ways these days to send a file that I don’t worry about that too much.  A quality video chat with screen sharing is a different ball game altogether.

Enjoy!