Month: June 2007

HARAJUKU | Tokyo Street Style – Japanese Street Fashion Site

STYLE ARENA – A great resource for Japanese street fashion shots, covering Harajuku, Shibuya, Omotesando, Daikanyama, Ginza, and maybe a few other painfully hip districts. The above link is for the Harajuku page.

When I was in Japan, my lack of personal style and fashion sense became painfully apparent. Nobody just goes out in Tokyo. Everyone is accessorized, layerized, their hair has been done, stuff has been pierced and painted and encrusted with crystals, things hang from every catch on their bags, cellphones, zippers. And every combination looks jarring to the unaccustomed eye at first sight. But I suppose that’s what fashion is. Ridiculous as it may be (and sound coming from me, after greater heads have long decided), I think Japanese street fashion is onto something.

(Edited)

One of the most amazing photo processing apps I’ve ever seen. Takes the premise of intelligent tools like AutoStitch and amps them a thousandfold. It’s being done at Microsoft now, but I think the presenter said that the technology was acquired along with a company.

Essentially, PhotoSynth grabs all the pictures of a given area, and recreates the 3D space by comparing data. The dataset shown in the video is Notre Dame cathedral made entirely from tourist photos found on flickr. Using the power of crowds to document something, the power of the web to aggregate the data, and technology to assemble them. In the process it creates a richer metadata context, automatically determining relationships.

Edit: Turns out it was announced last year, and small video demos have been available for awhile now. The video above came from this year’s TED conference in March. I found it via Slashdot today, and the BBC has plans to use the technology in a new documentary on How We Built Britain.

Of equal interest is the SeaDragon image scaling technology behind PhotoSynth. You can see it in action before the PhotoSynth demo in the video above. Straight out of an SF movie!

This is Microsoft’s corporate video of PhotoSynth. Also demos what it’s capable of:

Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style.

The new version is out, and I think I’m ready to leave the imperfection and GUI irregularity that is Mac Firefox once and for all. I’d initially switched over from Safari to have compatibility with Google Apps and Blogger, but now with almost complete feature parity* (RSS, Tab Session Restore, Spell-Check), Camino looks ready for the big time.

*Apart from Add-Ons, of course. But I hardly use any.

Oolong tea can help you lose weight – Slashfood

I said it last week, and now here’s more proof.

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Lunch, originally uploaded by sangsara.

A new sandwich shop has opened in my office building. These fat ones cost only 2.50 each. Bacon and tuna if you were wondering. I guess i’m pretty happy to have something new to eat.

A breakdancing accident that I somehow missed until Joystiq posted a remix today. It’s big on YouTube, with quite a few remixes.

Here’s the original:

With awesome English subs! They ripped off Michael Jackson’s Thriller concept, added dance moves from Beat It, and improved the lyrics a thousandfold.

Share mobile photos with Radar [cNet Crave]
Yahoo! Tech blog thoughts on Radar

I’m extremely excited about Radar, having just uploaded my first photo. It’s like a visual twitter, and only for your friends. So it’s like flickr + your friends + TV. Every day as you go about your business and take cameraphone photos of interesting things, you send them to Radar. And when you’ve got a bunch of friends doing that, you can see what everyone’s days have been like. It’s a continuous photostream of the recent past, in theory. I can only think of one friend with an unlimited mobile data plan, but hopefully more will play along. The days are long boring. I need my friendflickrTV.

There’s a custom app I’m about to download, but it will work even without it. You can see thumbnails of all your contacts’ photos through a page on your phone browser, or you can see them from a browser on a regular PC. The difference between Radar and flickr (that I can discern), is that Radar is strictly for friends. And it has an official Facebook app for integration (flickr hasn’t done it yet). Facebook, of course, is how I found Radar in the first place.