Dec/110
Unpowered Color Contacts – An Optical Illusion
Gone are the days when contact lenses were the domain of the visually impaired. Unpowered color contacts mean that everyone can participate in the grand optical illusion – special effects contact lenses.
Unpowered color contacts mean that no correction is made to the sight of the eye. This means of course that they will not help you see better if you are expecting an improvement in your vision, but it does mean that, with the right lenses, other people will see YOU better, and how.
Imagine wearing some stunning royal blue lenses to a dinner party. Who could resist them? Or maybe a deep green would suit you better?
Or, if you are really up for the optical challenge, you could go for some stunning special effects. Cats eye lenses are very popular, as are zebra (black and white striped). Or, if you want to make people a bit nervous, how about red eye lenses or perhaps zombie or vampire lenses for a scary effect.
The choice made available courtesy of the Internet now is huge! You can get all manner of special effects, to go with your wardrobe or just to scare people ….. Some manufacturers will even custom paint lenses for you so you can decide exactly how you would like to look.
Which ever way you look at it, color contacts can bring about a grand optical illusion, one where you disappear, and whoever you want pops up in your place!
Nov/110
Optical Promotional Mouse Mats
If you are creating a promotional mouse mat designed to be used exclusively, or near exclusively, with optical mice and you’ll need to take into account different design factors that will make your mouse mat successful with optical mice, verse mouse mats that are designed for use with trackball style mice. The main difference of course is the tracking mechanism on the mouse itself, trackball style mice of course use a trackball to gauge user movement, whereas an optical mouse uses an optical sensor that actually takes pictures of the promotional mouse mat surface to gauge user movement.
Luckily for you this design requirement of the optical mouse means that you now have an excuse to create a highly detailed graphic to cover the entire surface of your promotional mouse mats. Detail and resolution is the key here; and you’re not going to want to skimp on either when designing your mouse mat. In fact the more detailed graphics and the more high the resolution the better the results of the optical mouse performance. Any number of material substrate choices will work well and they all have various advantages though no real disadvantage.
Plastic makes an excellent material choice for your optical mouse mat because graphics can be printed directly onto the plastic and then covered with a transparent layer of protective plastic to keep everything in shape. Additionally plastic is very inexpensive and thus he will be spending less on your mouse mat campaign. Glass also makes a very attractive mouse mat material, though you will not be printing high-resolution graphics onto the glass. Instead your mouse mat will have to use frosted or somehow textured glass to create the necessary surface differences for the optical mouse to track.
The advantage here is that frosting or text rising glass is fairly inexpensive both the material and labor costs. If you would like your optical promotional mouse mats to be made out of metal you do actually have a bit of work ahead of you and should expect to encounter some high production costs. Because optical mice require a high degree of detail in order to track their movement you’re going to need to etch or somehow texturize the surface of the metal mouse mat to make it suitable for use with an optical mouse.
The easiest and least expensive option is to use a traditional brushed texture approach such as the type found on brushed aluminum finishes, and the most expensive mouse mat will have a highly detailed engraved finish depicting some graphics. The downside to a brushed metal mouse mat is that you will be unable to effectively brand to the product with your company logo or slogan thus making its promotional value dubious. This caveat is avoided with a glass mouse mat because well in this surface may be frosted it is still possible to put a graphic on the underside of the glass and have it show through to the surface of your mouse mat.
Oct/110
Optical Migraine – See the Remedy
It is Hard To See The Truth
Ever been sitting down, maybe reading a book, when your vision becomes slowly engulfed in a pool of twisted hallucinations and pain? This is what is commonly known as a optical migraine. All though there are pre-symptoms the problem isn’t that people can’t identify them, it’s that they’re at a loss when they strike.
There are very specific, simple things you can do to right now to start combating them both effectively and quickly. I’m going to talk about 3 factors which in my personal life have had the greatest effects on reducing my migraines. I don’t want to lead you into thinking there’s a cure that I’m offering. This is no cure, but rather an invitation to a world where you simply don’t have migraines. Contradicting? Maybe, but by depriving a migraine of the necessary things it needs to strike, you can effectively prevent optical migraines from ever occurring.
Think of it as another way of looking at an everyday problem.
Wash It Out
In fact when I tell these ‘solutions’ to most people they aren’t even going to implement them because they seem too simple too work. It seems to them that relief to optical migraines which are so devastating and painful can’t be contained within such fool-proof methods. The first of these methods is drinking water. Pretty easy right? I mean you’re probably going to tell me that you all ready drink TONS of water, hey maybe even BOATLOADS? The thing is that most of us ‘think’ we’re getting enough water.
However the truth is far from it, 80% of Americans are living in a state of almost constant water deficiency, what can this cause? Let’s dwell into just some of the problems created by de-hydration; fatigue, exhaustion and you guessed it – optical migraine.
What I want you to do is start a cleanse. For the next week drink a minimum of 8 cups of water, yes 8 cups or about 4L per day. This is the first step to reducing your optical migraine.
An Entire Lifestyle
The next two steps are very closely entwined, actually I suppose you could say these are all on the path. The path to what? A healthier and more vital life which isn’t stripped of the fundamental stepping stones that we’re quick to skip over now.
What I’m trying to recommend is exercise and sleep. Exercise is a great way to get your body in action, get your blood pumping and fresh oxygen flow into your brain. Sleep is a great way to de-stress and really just relax.
You’re Not Finished Yet, Rome Wasn’t Built In a Day
Oct/110
Optical Mark Readers
Over time, several input methods have been implemented meant to speed up and automate input of data to computers as much as possible, while standard data entry is pretty much irreplaceable and still the most extensively used input method, other ways of inputting data are also being embraced and becoming increasingly popular with several computer systems. One of them is the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology.
The uses of this vary but usually they are used in situations of data entry where the solutions are limited and bound to a few possibilities, thus they are used to process results of surveys and results of multiple choice examinations. (which are just two examples of their variety of uses)
Pros
The main advantage with OMR is their speed, they identify certain marks on sheets and record them at very fast rates thus provides a lot more productivity over usual input methods.
As the system of reading and recording data is automated, human intervention is not required thus saves costs and also human error is eliminated.
Cons
As OMR is still fairly unpopular, many people who are required to provide their input on OMR forms tend to wrongly fill them resulting in a high rejection rate from the reader, very clear instructions must be provided however the rejection rate is still fairly high.
Due to the very sensitive nature of the reader, the entry forms should be in perfect condition, any crushes or folds would result in wrongly produced or rejected results. The increased use of this method should hopefully reduce the rejection rate due to wrongly filled forms as awareness would increase familiarity and more sophisticated readers may tolerate even input forms which are not necessarily in perfect condition thus the disadvantages of the method maybe eliminated and could make it a very efficient method in deed, or as with everything in technology, new innovations maybe born resulting in methods like these which aren’t entirely foolproof becoming outdated.
Sep/110
Choosing an Optical Drive When Building Your Own PC
Choosing the right optical drive for your home built computer is quite an easy task once you know the difference among the basic optical disc drives.
A CD-ROM drive can only read and play CDs. You cannot use it to write and save information on a CD. A DVD-ROM drive is better than the CD-ROM because it can both read and play CDs and DVDs. For writing and saving files onto a CD, you need a CD writer. For writing and saving files onto both a CD and DVD, you need a DVD writer.
A CD writer and DVD-ROM drive is usually sold as a combination. You can do it to rip your favorite music files from your CDs, write new files on a CD, and play DVD movies. If you are building a gaming computer, you will need a CD drive at the very least. You will need the CD drive to install and play your PC game CDs.
For a more complete solution, you should get a DVD writer. The DVD writer can allow you to read and write on CDs, read DVDs, plus write files onto a DVD. This is very advantageous since DVDs can store a few gigabytes of memory while a CD can only store a few hundred megabytes of memory.
There is also an expensive route that you can take when choosing an optical drive for your custom-made computer. You can get a Blu-ray writer. Blu-ray writers can read and record data on CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. More powerful than DVDs, Blu-ray discs can store several gigabytes of memory — up to 50GB. A Blu-ray writer can be ten times as expensive as DVD writers so you should carefully watch your budget. You can easily cross your budget threshold with such an expensive computer hardware.
You should also take note of the speed of the optical drive that you purchase. Faster is better. A 48X CD drive means that is 48 times faster than the first CD drive. The same concept applies to DVD drives. A fast CD and DVD drive can greatly save you time when you are burning files onto a CD or DVD.
If you lack the space inside your computer case, you can also get an external optical drive. These drives can be connected to your computer from the outside!