December 03 2018, 09:49

Interestingly, why hasn’t anyone come up with a program that performs horizontal or vertical scanning of space? Imagine you have a long shelf full of products, and you want to capture it all beautifully. But you can’t step back because of the wall. Ideally, you’d take your phone in your hands and walk from one end to the other. Essentially, the phone needs to stitch together a panorama, but in this case, the panorama isn’t radial as it usually is, but parallel. That is, the phone should take frames every 1/N seconds, and then stitch together the middles of the minimal possible width (the faster you move the phone, the wider it will need to capture, which can lead to distortions). You could do interesting things with this. For example, drive along the street with your phone and get a panorama of the street. Or walk along the aisles of a bookstore and get a panorama of the shelves.

December 02 2018, 15:22

I’ll tell you, there’s no better urban transportation system than in the Netherlands, especially in Amsterdam. The quantity and quality of options to reliably get from point A to point B are off the charts in my personal rankings. Maybe it’s because I only see the good side. Huge respect for the bicycles. In Amsterdam, where the weather is just as bad as in St. Petersburg, and they manage to keep it without any mud or bad vibes—impressive. Though, I still don’t know what happens here when it snows.