gHacks technology news » ted http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:26:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 TED Talks Translations http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/17/ted-talks-translations/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/17/ted-talks-translations/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 09:54:30 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/17/ted-talks-translations/ tedTED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, started out in 1984 and has since then widened the focus even further and is today seen as a global community of thinkers and visionaries that try to get a deeper understanding of the world. TED Talks was introduced to provide access to some of the talks online so that users from all over the world had the chance to view these speeches without having to attend a TED conference. Up until recently all speeches were only available in the English language which might have kept users from other parts of the world from accessing the resources.

This has recently changed with Ted Talks Translations which is a community driven translation project. The TED Open Translation project is home to 1048 translators who translate TED Talks into 42 different languages. The main page contains information about the current state of translations.

ted talks

The most popular languages are Spanish, German, Italian, Hebrew and Portuguese followed by the rest. It is possible to filter TED Talks by language. Translations are provided as subtitles and transcripts. Each video on the TED website contains a pulldown menu which allows to add subtitles to the video.

ted talks translations

The translations are interesting to users who have a hard time understanding spoken English. It makes the talks more accessible and easier to understand. Some talks worth viewing:

Hans Rosling on HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals
Matthew Child: 9 life lessons from rock climbing
David Pogue on cool phone tricks
Bill Gates unplugged

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/17/ted-talks-translations/feed/ 6 TED Talks List http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/31/ted-talks-list/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/31/ted-talks-list/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:19:38 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/31/ted-talks-list/ Ted Talks are a collection of talks by some of the worlds leading thinkers and doers on Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence the name TED). Many of the talks are inspiring and try to convey ideas on all sorts of subjects in those three categories. Many of the talks are available on the Ted website in various formats. They can even be downloaded to the local computer system.

Someone made an effort to put all of the published Ted Talks in a list with direct onsite links to the videos, the name of the talker, the title, a description, the date, running time and event it was held. This is an incredible useful spreadsheet for anyone interested in at least one of the focus areas of TED.

Below are three embedded Ted Talk videos. The first is by Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter who is talking about how Twitter’s growth was driven by unexpected uses, the second showing Dan Ariely talking about why people are thinking that stealing and cheating is ok (sometimes) and the last by Tim Berners-Lee who is talking about the next web of open, linked data.

The list of TED talks contains 500 entries so far and it seems to be updated regularly with new content. This one is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/31/ted-talks-list/feed/ 4 Torrent Episode Downloader http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/13/torrent-episode-downloader/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/13/torrent-episode-downloader/#comments Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:53:53 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5309 TV Shows are one of the most popular media that get downloaded from Bittorrent. It’s very handy for viewing missed episodes of a favorite tv show or to view tv shows in their original language and not the translated version that fails to catch the spirit of the original show. I don’t want to talk about the legal aspect. It is my opinion that everyone should make the decision for himself whether he downloads TV shows from Bittorrent.

Ted, which stands for Torrent Episode Downloader, is probably the easiest way to download tv shows from Bittorrent. The application has been designed specifically for that purpose. It comes with a range of preconfigured shows (more than 100) that are displayed by default. Many popular tv shows are listed including 24, Battlestar Galactica, CSI and Lost among others.

It works like the following. The user picks a show from the list and Ted displays a description of that show along with a list of episodes that are currently available. Episodes are just listed as Season 2, Episode 4 which makes it a bit harder to find out if that is the show that you missed for example unless you want to download a full season.

torrent episode downloader

Next to that is the original air date of that show and the availability on the network. The main advantage of Ted is that it is easy to use with close to zero configuration and has a wide assortment of shows in the list. Custom shows can be added to Ted as well. It does have some shortcomings though which I would like to address.

First of all not all episodes of the tv shows are listed which means that you will miss episodes if you use TED exclusively. If you use another Bittorrent client and Bittorrent websites for downloading those shows you could easily download everything from there right away which would make TED redundant.

There is not a lot of information available when downloading a show which is great for inexperienced users but experts will miss some details that they are used to analyse when downloading from Bittorrent.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/13/torrent-episode-downloader/feed/ 5 Microsoft Touchwall http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/14/microsoft-touchwall/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/14/microsoft-touchwall/#comments Wed, 14 May 2008 20:58:18 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4127 I really like to watch technology presentations and demonstrations, especially on the TED website but also on other websites. I recently came upon a presentation for Microsoft’s Touchwall, an inexpensive rear-projection system.

The video below is a demonstration by Director of Envisioning Ian Sands who explains various features and the technique behind the Microsoft Touchwall product. The software used to run the show is called Plex running on the Vista plattform. The other equipment was a plexiglass screen, a rear projector, an infrared camera and three infrared lasers.

The user can interact with the content on the screen in an organic fashion, unlimited zooming, watching videos, flipping through pictures and a lot more. The potential is amazing. The Touchwall does look incredible in my opinion and it is a shame that Microsoft has no plans on marketing the product.

Crunchgear has a lot of additional footage about the product on their website.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/14/microsoft-touchwall/feed/ 2 Even Researchers have fun with the Wiimote http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/28/even-researchers-have-fun-with-the-wiimote/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/28/even-researchers-have-fun-with-the-wiimote/#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:35:40 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=3955 I’m often amazed by the videos that are offered at the TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) website. Today I saw a very interesting demonstration by researcher Johnny Lee who was using the Wiimote, that is a controller for the Nintendo Wii gaming system, to produce remarkable applications. The five minute video is showing two distinct projects that utilize the Wiimote to its fullest.

The first project demonstrated a digital whiteboard, something that sells for several thousand Dollars, emulated by the Wiimote and additional hardware that do not cost more than $10. The software used in the demonstration can be downloaded from the researchers website and it actually has been downloaded about 500.000 times.

The other project demonstrated a head mounted 3d- viewer. This system was also using the Wiimote and some additional hardware. He mentioned that this technique will be included in a game by Electronic Arts as an Easter Egg.

As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024×768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC “webcam” available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support.

The homepage of Johnny Lee contains another video that is demonstrating how it is possible to track fingers with the Wiimote.

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