The Geek Church

Thought we would start with a little retro look from 1980 to 2010.

This is Textie, a texting app for the iPhone.

The Hanvon B10 Touchpad has been delayed.

Darth Vader has been doing some things for DoCoMo. He’s asking who is my boss, for some odd reason.

The Kobo e-reader is ready to ship.

Here’s another game that uses the iPad and iPhone, the Padracer.

The Lala Music Streaming Service is closing down.

The Microsoft Courier may have been killed.

Speaking of discontinued items, the HP Slate could be canceled.

And here’s a simple phone from Samsung with the Stride.

Check out Denon’s new receiver, the AVR-391, which can be purchased for a low price.

I’ve been hearing that the Samsung BD-UP5000 has some firmware issues, like it won’t play Avatar.

The Black Nintendo Wii is coming to the United States soon.

Dreamvision introduces three new projectors.

Here’s some deals for the day. The Kodak PlaySport HD for sale on Amazon and the Kodak Zx1 for sale at eCost.

Director James Cameron is designing a camera for the Mars Rover.

Here is the Acadalus CPS-H1 self-leveling camera head.

Cyberwalk Omni-directional treadmill lets you walk any way you want.

Great disasters in nature are an unfortunate part of life on Earth and various relief efforts are made by governments, organizations and individuals to help those in need. Of course, New Orleans is still feeling long-term effects since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Furthermore, there are also the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile earlier this year and relief efforts are currently in progress to help survivors of these tragic events. Now, engineers from BP are proposing a possible solution to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Their idea is to construct an enormous, underwater dome that would be placed over the spill to stop the further spread of oil and provide an opportunity for the spilled oil to be sucked up later. According to the Wall Street Journal, BP hopes to have this dome built and put in place within two weeks. However, a similar attempt to stop an oil spill with an underwater dome was made in 1979 after the great spill at the Ixtoc well off the coast of Mexico. Unfortunately, this effort ended in failure because the dome couldn’t withstand the damage inflicted by rough seas and the project was inevitably discontinued.

Nonetheless, smaller oil spills have been handled through the use of an underwater dome, though the builders of those domes weren’t facing a underwater depth of five thousand feet like the BP engineers are confronted with now. Sadly, time may be running out in this situation. Even if these engineers succeed in executing their plan, it might not be in time to stop the spread of oil to the coast, which is predicted to occur in a matter of days. So, actually stopping this oil spill entirely would be nothing short of a miracle. Personally, I hope the BP engineers or someone else can find a way.

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We live in a world where any person can suddenly become the victim of violent crime without warning at any time. For example, a citizen walking home at night could be attacked, brutally beaten or even killed on the street by aggressive assailants who chose their target at random for any reason based on their intentions at the time. Perhaps an even greater problem than the existence of violent crime itself is the fact that other citizens commonly stand by apathetically or walk away and do nothing to help the victim due to their own fear of being hurt. Well, in the Netherlands, a interactive billboard using augmented reality technology was developed to confront the problem of apathy toward violent crime.

Apparently, the issue of public service employees like paramedics being attacked on the street is a real problem in the Netherlands. So, the augmented reality billboard was created as a method to raise public awareness of the problem and encourage people to take action by helping victims of violence. Currently, the interactive billboard is being used in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The billboard itself works by continuously playing the scene of a staged, relentless attack by assailants on a paramedic worker. The billboard’s screen is split up into sections and this depicted scene with the paramedic under attack takes up most of the screen space. Then regular people who happen to pass by the billboard are actually filmed right on the street and the live footage of their reaction or ignorance to the billboard is captured and displayed for themselves and others to see on a smaller section of screen on the top upper part of the board. Thus, real citizens are being filmed in real-time on one part of the billboard’s screen while the staged attack scene continues to play on the other part of the screen. This was done to give onlookers the sense that they are involved in the staged attack scene and confronts them directly with the issue of being apathetic in such a situation. The billboard uses a layer of previously recorded blue screen film to make this unique presentation possible.

Then four practical tips are offered to the onlooking citizens on the street as they continue to watch the billboard. According to the billboard, people in a violent crime situation should ask others for help and speak out about the problem, call 112 during such an attack, stay with the victim and make photos for the police while being willing to file a report of the event. Furthermore, the slogan for this project is “You Hold The Key To Greater Safety On The Streets”. It seems that this augmented reality billboard could serve as a real wake-up to people about the grave immorality of being apathetic to violent crime victims. These people in the Netherlands could really be on to something here. Personally, I think we definitely need this special billboard in the United States as well.

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