While most Android and Windows Phone devices act like external drives when connected to a computer with a USB-cable, transferring photos and files to and from an iOS device is a little more tricky. This is where the iStick, a Kickstarter project comes in. iStick is a USB-drive with an integrated Apple Lightning connector, making it compatible with more recent iPhone, iPad and iPod generations.
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]
Designed to shield the exposed edges of Lower Manhattan from increasingly-disastrous storms, this impressive system of parks and other public spaces is also designed to serve the everyday needs of New York citizens.
Rising sea levels and increased flood frequencies may eventually are the driving threat behind this competition entry. Big U, an urban design scheme authored by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and others, is one of a set of submissions to Rebuild by Design, a competition from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This plan calls for a series of discrete interventions that together form a protective buffer.
Jeremy Siegel, one of the project leads, elaborates: “Because they all work individually, you end up with a system that’s resilient. If you have a breach in one area, it’s localized and you can organize evacuation into neighboring compartments. It’s a little bit like the hull of a ship, where you’ve got different segments, and breaching one area doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole system fails.”
One of the advantages of this segmentation is the ability to build in sections, breaking a massive construction project down into discrete steps that can be implemented sequentially for budgeting and other pragmatic reasons. Each area features its own personality and amenities, including aquariums, swimming pools, walking paths and seasonal markets.
Learning local lessons from Hurricane Sandy (and national ones from the likes of Katrina), the architecture teams participating in the competition sought to address social as well as engineering needs. Located anywhere else and their ambitious plans might sound far fetched, but New York City is already home to Central Park and The High Line.
Siegel notes that, particularly in a place like NYC, “If you’re going to be investing so much money into an infrastructure for resiliency–that’s going to be sitting along one of the most spectacular coastlines in the world–there’s a huge opportunity there to also improve civic infrastructure, so it can protect the city, but also become a platform for civic life.” As for other proposed schemes, you can see and read more about the finalists and (eventual) winners at Rebuild by Design.
A long-abandoned underground space may soon be turned into a subterranean version of the High Line park, complete with high-tech sunlight harvesting.
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Out of four recent proposals for a radical overhaul of Penn Station in New York City, this concept is far and away the most dramatic.
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A tale of two neighborhoods, these graphics (and their hybrid) stunningly illustrate how much further you can get on foot when you take a walk through an …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]
A Modernist classic, the famous Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe was originally built with a raised platform but that has not managed to save it from floods, leading its custodians to an extreme solution: jacking the building up when the neighboring river rises.
Per the Chicago Tribune, options under consideration include moving the home back away from the water’s edge or raising it permanently in place, but both of these (argue advocates of the third alternative) fail to preserve the structure in its planned context.
As ArchDaily reports, “The mechanism itself would use a series of trusses, which ordinarily lie flat on their side, but are raised to a vertical position by hydraulic rams when a flood is detected. The cost of installing the system is estimated at $ 2.5 million – $ 3 million.”
The cheapest option would be to move the house away from the river, but that, in turn, takes away its key views and a critical driver of its raised and cantilevered form – imagine, if you will, shifting Falling Water away from the river over which it sits.
The favored option might sound far-fetched, and raises preservation questions, like: what lengths should we go to in order to save widely-studied buildings, and how justified is their position in history books in the first place if their structural design features such flaws?
Steel shutters and sliding doors turn this award-winning lofted cabin into an ultra-secure shelter on demand, while stilts raise it up and help protect it from …
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The exterior is a rectangular box made of heavy concrete balanced on stilts, but step inside and you’ll see an unexpectedly amorphous all-white interior.
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German architecture studio Bembé Dellinger brings an ultramodern touch to a lakeside suburb with ‘House R’, a cantilevered daylight-filled all-white home.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]
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Everybody sends and receives lots of photographs through email, especially us photographers. We all inadvertently lose track of some of those photos too. That’s just the way it is. It happened to me and, yesterday, thanks to the app I’m reviewing today, I was reunited with one special long-lost photo of mine!
Circumstances came to pass that I was introduced to this App called, Lost Photos. The promise this App makes to you is to uncover photos buried deep in your email account. After all, the photos we share with family and friends are the ones we care most about and would hate to lose track of any of them forever, right? With the App Lost Photos, that just won’t happen. If it’s in your email, you’ll get it back. If you have more than one email account, you can search them all. The limitation is that you have to do them one at a time. Simply enter your username and password for each account.
There is no learning curve to use this App. After downloading and installing it on your Mac or Windows computer you’re presented with this simple interface:
Could it be any easier? All you need to do is enter the login credentials of the email account you want to search for those lost gems. For me, it’s my gmail account. I’ve had this account ever since gmail began in the 90s. Along the way I’ve had to delete some of the old ones because of bloat and my account pushing the 15GB limit of gmail. Still, there are over 100,000 emails in there and I know there are hundreds of old photos that will be so much fun to find and revisit.
Before pushing the green “Find my photos!” button, there are some options which you might find helpful. There are three simple options which are accessed in the handy pull-down menu. Set these however it pleases you.
NOW you can push the green button! Could it be any simpler?
Now you wait. The size of your email account and the photos in it will determine how fast Lost Photos finishes its job. From my experience with the app, it will finish in under two hours. The app even has a safety mechanism if it finds too many photos. In the video below, you’ll see that actually did happen to me and the App paused the download to prevent the risk of my email provider detecting excessive downloading from the account and possibly disabling it. So the App has got your back.
In my case, after scanning over 100,000 emails, it recovered over 3,000 photos. One of them, I show it in the video, is one precious photo that I thought was lost forever. Now I have it back! That’s worth the $ 2.99 price of the app to me! When you download the App, you get the FREE version, which will recover just a few lost photos in your email account. That probably won’t be too helpful so the full version is an upgrade you will want to buy. If you’re ready for a ride down memory lane, just download the free Windows version or free Lost Photos for Mac. Here are a couple that I recovered.
Let me give this one 5 stars because it does perfectly what it’s designed to do and it’s very intuitive to use.
The folks at Macphun software that created Lost Photos are currently running a contest for found photos. You can check out the rules and enter that contest here.
For more articles on finding lost photos, backing up and best practices try these:
The post Retrieve Lost Photos from the Black Hole of Your Email Account by Keith Cuddeback appeared first on Digital Photography School.
Branding is critical for a successful photography business regardless of the genre, and photographer Art Wolfe has built perhaps one of the strongest brands in his field. Wolfe has been shooting nature and wildlife images professionally for more than 30 years all over the world. This story on Photoshelter’s blog gives some insight on how he built his photography business. Learn more
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]
Using recycled construction waste and rapid prototyping processes, a Chinese company is showing off how 3D printing technologies can be applied to building at astonishing new speeds and scales. More specifically: Winsun New Materials used a series large 3D printers to frame up 10 houses in 24 hours with a skeleton crew of builders.
These scaled-up printers mimic the additive approach their smaller plastic-extruding cousins, but deploy a mixture of glass fiber and scrap concrete instead.
The function-first walls of these homes are designed to provide shelter via robust solid surfaces and structural support, all while minimizing materials. Built-in truss shapes (with spaces in between) are made to leave calculated gaps for the later insertion of plumbing, electrical, passive and active heading and cooling systems.
In this initial run, the resulting prefab frameworks for ten residential structures were assembled in less than 24 hours and for just a few thousand dollars a piece. Securely enclosed by a small crew of builders, the weather-proof shells are then ready to be finished by other teams.
Given the pace of urbanization and construction within the country, it seems apt that innovators from China would be pushing limits like these, hopefully with more (and similarly eco-friendly) innovations yet to come.
A basic earthen structure is formed and finished by traditional clay-firing processes – like pottery on a massive scale to build abodes for long-term desert …
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From a location-independent home that looks like a spider to a cargo container that unfolds into a residence, these prefabs are ultra-portable and modern.
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Over six years, one dedicated man has constructed his dream house, complete with boulders, trees, gardens, pools and ponds. It is the kind of luxury home you …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]
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Over the last few years here at dPS, we’ve run very some very popular competitions with our partners to give away, to lucky dPS readers, some of their great photographic products.
We are lucky enough to be able to do it again this week!
These three unique prizes are designed to help every level of photographer create BETTER pictures. Tamron is the world’s most awarded photographic lens line. Each will be won by a different dPS reader. Here’s what you could win:
 Tamron SP-17-50MM f/2.8 Di II VC |
 Tamron 18-270 f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD |
 Tamron SP 70-300 f/4-5.6 Di VC USD |
Learn a little more about Tamron here.
To win this competition you’ll need to:
Deadline to enter is May 17, 2014, Midnight PDT (PST). Comments left after deadline will not be considered.
By ‘best’ – we’re looking for people who have an understanding of the lenses and how they will best suit your needs. So you’ll need to check out the product pages to put yourself in the best position to win.
There’s no need to write essay length comments to win – but we’re looking to hear what you like about the lens and how it would help your development as a photographer.
This competition is open to everyone around the world no matter where you live – but there is only one entry per person. To enter – simply leave your comment below.
About Tamron
Disclaimer: Tamron is a paid partner of dPS.
The post Win One of Three Lenses From Tamron! by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.
[ By WebUrbanist in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]
What if we could make alternative transportation ultimately faster, cheaper and more convenient than personally-owned cars, the dominant transport devices of the 20th Century? The sharing economy has opened new possibilities for commuters and travelers, but integrating this dizzying array of options together with public transport is an essential next step in this ongoing paradigm shift.
OMGTransit is a Minneapolis-based startup that provides free, fast and simple sets of options for getting from your location to your destination without a personal car, be it by bus, shared bike (NiceRide in the case of the Twin Cities), shared car systems like Car2Go or ZipCar or private rides from Uber or Lyft. Available as an iPhone or Android application, OMG also offers a web app version – all with no cost to the user.
Boasting a beautifully-designed interface with attention to usability, color and detail, their free-for-all approach is aimed at helping them grow faster than the competition. Their team, headed by entrepreneur and technologist Matt Decuir, has its sights set first on major cities around the US and then the world (perhaps space thereafter).
More focused on next-step options than A-to-B directions, TransitScreen started out displaying realtime transit data in residential, commercial and institutional building lobbies. Their boards show people up-to-the-minute information on subways, commuter trains, buses, bike share, ride shares in cities around the United States.
Now, with SmartWalk, this same company has taken to the streets (or rather: sidewalks and walls) outside of offices, apartments and universities, projecting this data onto public surfaces for the benefit of anyone passing by. The data includes color-coded transit option types and times but also wayfinding cues regarding directions and distance.
Other players in this space include Roadify and RideScout, though not all offer options for all devices or for every type of regional transport. Some, like Google Maps in its current form, have broader reach but focus more on public transportation schedules (their acquisition of Waze is a step toward realtime data, albeit for personal cars). Whatever system(s) triumph, the goal is a worthy one: reducing friction in the use of alternative transit options to the point where taking, for instance, a bus to a bike to a shared car is easy, fast and cheap enough to obviate the need for a fully-owned automobile.
Public transportation is both the savior and the bane of the urban commuter. These six ideas stand to transform the way we move around the city of the future.
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An explicitly illicit use of dimensional data buried in Google Street View, the Urban Jungle project adds eerie layers of post-apocalyptic green overgrowth to …
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From the complexities of Facebook’s privacy policy to the ultimate strategy for rock-paper-scissors, infographics give us a visual way to process information.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]
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Smithsonian.com has announced 60 finalists for its 11th annual photo contest. More than 50,000 photographs were submitted by photographers from 132 different countries. Ten images were selected from each of six categories: The Natural World, Travel, People, Americana, Altered Images and Mobile. See gallery
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
More than 50 years after the satellites that captured the first high-res images of the moon plunged to the surface and were destroyed, a Wired article tells the story of a group of people that found the tapes after they ended up in storage in California. Re-engineering the old drives capable of reading the tapes, they’ve recovered these historically significant images. Learn more
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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