[Johnny Lee]’s colleague [Paul Dietz] has done some interesting work using interactive tables. He’s specifically researched how to determine how full a drink glass is. In the video above, he’s using Microsoft’s Surface, but this technique should work with any IR camera based multitouch table. Determining the drink level requires custom glassware that has a small prism inside. When the liquid level is above the prism, light passes through, but when it’s below the top it reflects more IR light back into the table. Using this information, restaurant staff could serve drinks in a more efficient manner.
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If Lifehacker's river of news is flooding your brain, there is a dam available. Switch to our trimmed-down top stories feed to skip the extras and get right to the good stuff. Don't care about Mac-only downloads or the iPhone? Customize our URLs to see only the posts you want. This week's most popular posts include:
Top 10 Online Freebies and Deals "Unless you're a financial Jedi Knight or economic Sith Lord, you probably don't have a ton of control over our turbulent economy. What you can reign over is your spending and saving—and when you know where they are, you can take advantage of deep discounts and general freebies across the web."
Five Best Travel Sites for Cheap Tickets "If you've got travel plans for the upcoming holiday season, the time to book your tickets is now. The question is, where can you find tickets cheap enough to offset the extra $40 you'll have to spend to check your bags and enjoy a snack on your six-hour flight."
Five Tweaks for Your New Ubuntu Desktop "With the recent release of the popular Linux distro Ubuntu's 8.10 version, code-named Intrepid Ibex, we've recently detailed some productive-minded Ubuntu Kung Fu, as well as a user-minded tour through 8.10."
Is Your Printer Wasting Your Ink and Money? "Everyone's been there: You just bought an expensive ink cartridge for your printer, you use it for a while, and then suddenly—much sooner than seems reasonable—your printer tells you that you're either low on or out of ink."
Dilate or Shrink Your Pupils on Command "If the eyes are the window to the soul, being able to manipulate how your eyes appear to others is a rather tricky life hack."
Five Memberships Worth Signing up for "Smart Money magazine crunches the numbers on the cost versus benefit of various paid memberships to find you five with a high value."
Brain-only Computer Interfaces Becoming Reality " In the clip below, see how a completely paralyzed man, who could otherwise only communicate by moving his eyes, uses his mind to type out thoughts on a computer."
New Windows 7 Taskbar, Peek Feature Look Awesome "Microsoft has already caught some flack for "copying" the OS X dock with the new Windows 7 taskbar; the video above from the Professional Developer's Conference both addresses that criticism and takes you on a guided tour of the new taskbar."
Windows only: Create ISO-format disk images quickly and easily with Free ISO Creator. After downloading and installing the software, all you have to do is click Add File(s) or Add Folder to choose the data you want included in the image, select a name and location for the ISO file with "Save ISO As..." and click Convert. You can even create a bootable disk image by clicking Options and selecting the appropriate IMG file. Now you can burn the image to disk with ISO Recorder or mount the image as a virtual drive in Windows with the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel, Clonedrive or Daemon Tools. Free ISO Creator is a free download for Windows.
Windows/Mac/Linux: Looking for a quick way to upload and download files from a Google Docs account? If you're familiar with command line tools, check out GDataCopier. Once I installed a new version of Python (2.5 or higher required) and the GData API for Python, it was just a matter of running gdata-cp.py and I had every document in my Google Docs account backed up to a folder on my desktop. It would also work great for uploading a batch of documents to Google Docs. And of course you can set it up with a crontab to schedule regular backups. Looking for alternatives to futzing in a terminal window? Windows users can use DocSyncer, sync between OpenOffice.org and Google Docs with OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs or download Google Docs from Firefox with a Greasemonkey script. GDataCopier is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux, requires Python to run. Thanks, TerrenceMarburger!
We all know that you're supposed to get in a good, long stretch before a workout, right? Unfortunately most of our commonly held beliefs regarding stretching are dead wrong, according to the New York Times—at least in the way you may be doing it.
Researchers believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes' warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds—known as static stretching—primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them.
But with static stretching out the door, how do you warm up your muscles before a workout without damaging them?
According to the article:
THE RIGHT WARM-UP should do two things: loosen muscles and tendons to increase the range of motion of various joints, and literally warm up the body.
To do this, they suggest starting with a light warm-up jog to raise your body's temperature. Make sure to keep it light, and to do it immediately before you plan on a more intense workout.
After you've warmed up, the article suggests ditching your static stretches for more dynamic stretches, like lunges, leg kicks, or the "Spider-Man"—a drill in which you "drop onto all fours and crawl the width of the court, as if you were climbing a wall." Whether you're an occasional exerciser or a fitness freak, check the article for more detailed options on how to warm up in a healthy manner.
Social bookmarking web site Delicious turned five yesterday, and in that time the site has signed up 5.3 million users, bookmarked over 180 million URLs, and helped bring social bookmarking to the mainstream. For many, social bookmarking has replaced traditional, local bookmarking entirely, while others never caught the social bookmarking craze to begin with. Which are you?
Got more to say? Let's hear your bookmarking thoughts in the comments.
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Is Free Traffic or Traffic Exchange True??Yes! Where to begin from?? TrafficSwarm!!! Why? Coz its the daddy of all Free Traffic and traffic exchange solutions!! Try out !<a href="http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?869696">Click here to join</a>
[ScottSEA] has 15 cats. As you can imagine, with 15 cats, a simple litter box just doesn’t cut it. [ScottSEA] uses the CatGenie. While a self cleaning cat toilet is a technical marvel, it has one major drawback. Much like an ink jet printer, it has disposable cartridges. Those cartridges, just ike some print cartridges, have a built in counter that disables them after so many uses. After adding up the totals for 15 cats worth of cartridge use, [ScottSEA] started hacking. He has posted directions on how to manually refill them, as well as reset the internal counter using an Arduino.
We suggest that he find a way to harness all that cat power for his home electronics. How many watts could you produce per cat?
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Windows only: Create ISO-format disk images quickly and easily with Free ISO Creator. After downloading and installing the software, all you have to do is click Add File(s) or Add Folder to choose the data you want included in the image, select a name and location for the ISO file with "Save ISO As..." and click Convert. You can even create a bootable disk image by clicking Options and selecting the appropriate IMG file. Now you can 
We all know that you're supposed to get in a good, long stretch before a workout, right? Unfortunately most of our commonly held beliefs regarding stretching are dead wrong, according to the New York Times—at least in the way you may be doing it.
Social bookmarking web site Delicious turned five yesterday, and in that time the site has signed up 5.3 million users, bookmarked over 180 million URLs, and helped bring social bookmarking to the mainstream. For many, social bookmarking has replaced traditional, local bookmarking entirely, while others never caught the social bookmarking craze to begin with. Which are you?
