This image, depicting many different flying machines, is from the Library of Congress, dated circa 1885. The full image appears below along with many different cropped versions showing the detail of the piece. The Library of Congress description of the engraving also appears below.

No. 18 shows a collapsible Montgolfier balloon from 1784; no. 23 is the design for a glider balloon as described in “Reflections on the aerostatic sphere,” 1783 (September); no. 24 depicts Jean-Charles (l’avocat) Thilorier’s plan for transporting troops across the English Channel to invade England, ca. 1800; and no. 32 shows the dirigible balloon glider used by Charles Guillé for an attempted ascension in Paris, November 13, 1814.

TAKEN FROM www.paleofuture.com

These are our favorite “green” sports cars. Some get awesome gas mileage while smoking the competition, and others use advanced bio-fuels to eek out ever higher performance over their gas-guzzling brethren. Big Oil doesn’t like any of them, because they all mean one thing: if you buy them, Big Oil makes less money.

#1 Greenest Sports Car: Tesla Roadster

Built from the same chassis as the Lotus Exige 265E is a next green sports car, the Tesla Roadster. Tesla has taken the most radical approach to being green; they removed the internal combustion engine and substituted a small 70-pound electric motor. Powered by a 3-phase, 4-pole electric motor producing 248 horsepower, which is good for 0-60 mph in 4 seconds. Despite the 70-pound motor, the battery adds enough weight to bring the total weight up to 2690, which is 600 pounds more than the Exige and Elise. The one thing you don’t hear from the bio-fueled cars is gas mileage. The Tesla can proudly say it gets 135 miles per gallon equivalent.

Download Tesla Roadster desktops in the FastWallpapers.com Tesla gallery

#2 Greenest Sports Car: Toyota FT HS

The Toyota FT-HS finishes out the line up of environmentally friendly sports cars. The FT HS is the only prototype in the line up because it will be the first hybrid sports car. The FT HS promises to be a real performer with help from an electric motor and a 3.5-liter V6 engine. The combination electric motor and V6 are said to produce around 400 bhp and accelerate to 60 mph in under 4 seconds all while producing ultra low emissions.

See more pics of this sweet concept car by Toyota here.

#3 Greenest Sports Car: Lotus Exige 265E

Another offering from the British is the Lotus Exige 265E. The thing that sets this Exige apart from any other Lotus is its ability to run E85 ethanol and 95-octane unleaded fuel. Thanks to the 109-octane rating of ethanol, the boosted 1.8-liter Toyota 4-cylinder inline engine makes 46 more horsepower than its non-ethanol counter part, the Exige S. Its low weight of only 2061 pounds does not hurt either. The 0-60 mph acceleration drops from 4.1 to 3.8 seconds. Lotus has accomplished building the fastest car ever to leave their stables and the first Lotus to promote the use of renewable energy sources at the same time.

Click here to see more desktop background pictures of the Lotus Exige 265E.

#4 Greenest Sports Car: Trident Iceni

A small British company called Trident has produced a two-seater sports car called the Iceni. The Trident Iceni is the only Diesel fueled car that made it into the line up. Powered by none other than a GM sourced 6.6-liter V8 turbo diesel engine. The V8 produces 520 lb/ft torque at only 1800 rpm. That is enough power to propel the Iceni to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds and a top speed over 200 mph. Most impressively, the Iceni can do all this with 60 mpg and 1,000 miles on one tank and it runs on pure vegetable oil. The Iceni is also the only car in the line up that will unfortunately never make it stateside.

Go to the Trident Iceni desktop gallery here.

#5 Greenest Sports Car: Porsche Cayman

Porsche has proved that sport cars can be just as fuel efficient as the common car, if not more so with the Cayman. The Cayman is Porsche’s greenest car ever with a 2.7-liter, 241 horsepower, and boxer-engine. The Cayman starts at $49,400, which is cheap for a Porsche. For under $50,000, you cannot have both the speed and style if you want a Porsche. Performance is good with Porsche’s 0-62-mph claim of 6.1 seconds. The Cayman’s fuel economy is a respectable 23 city/32 highway compared to the more powerful Cayman S’s 20/27 mpg. It’s no Toyota Prius, but it gets the job done, and in style.

See more desktop pictures of the Porsche Cayman here.

#6 Greenest Sports Car: Koenigsegg CCXR

Like Lotus, Koenigsegg has found the use of bio-fuels like E85 ethanol can add substantial performance to their already powerful engine. The CCXR bio-ethanol version of their CCX sports car is the fastest, most powerful sports car that can call itself environmentally minded. With 1,018 bhp, the CCXR will hit 60mph in 3.0 seconds. Its top speed is over 250 mph. This is a car that uses Green technology to increase performance.

TAKEN FROM fastwallpapers.com

We don’t know why, but the first thing we thought of when we saw these photos was a shark. Doesn’t really look like Lamborghini’s bull, but it’s definitely aggressive. So, what’s this, you might ask? Well, it’s the Lamborghini Embolado concept car created by Luca Serafini, student in final year of the Industrial Design Course at the University of Parma, Italy. And it’s a cool concept, not like the Lamborghini Alar, which we presented a few months ago and which was hideous.When Luca designed the concept, he thought of it as a replacement for the current Gallardo model and the whole design starts from the Gallardo. The name Embolado comes from a Spanish festival, named “Embolado Bull” (or Toro Embolado). Luca even created a Superleggera version of the Embolado. Of course, probably Lamborghini will never take this seriously, but still, it’s a great design. You can also check Luca Serafini’s page on deviantart.

TAKEN ROM www.autounleashed.com

How to Spot a Photoshopped Image

BountyFishing works like so:

• Participants go fishing and photograph what they catch
• Participants then submit these photos to the BountyFishing website
• BountyFishing awards cash and prizes for the longest validated catch

The biggest hurdle we faced was how we were going to validate and authenticate the fish photos our users submitted. Photos altered with Photoshop can be incredibly convincing. With a few simple clicks of the “Quick Selection Tool” the fish shown below (top left) was selected, dropped into a separate layer, and stretched to add more than an inch to its length. With a little more work to move the shadow and soften any rough edges, the resulting image (top right) shows no signs of tampering.

Unaltered image

Photoshopped image

The solution we found was to use a piece of software developed by Hany Farid, a professor at Dartmouth College who is renowned in digital forensics. When the fish was stretched, Photoshop filled in the missing pixels by interpolating their values from the original recorded pixels. These regularly spaced new pixels are a specific combination of their surrounding pixels. Such regularities rarely occur in natural images, so their presence can be used as evidence of tampering.

Shown below is the output of the BountyFishing software that detects these correlations – the red-coded regions corresponds to the doctored portion of the image.

This software is used by federal law enforcement agencies and can detect various forms of tampering.
We have exclusive rights to the software for measuring fish, but if you really feel like getting your hands dirty with digital forensics Hany Farid’s website has an interface to MatLab for manipulating and analyzing digital images. In addition to the software above, a few other dead giveaways that a photo has been altered are:

• Excessive cloning - repetition of a particular piece of the photo, often used to stretch or morph images.
• Inconsistencies in lighting and noise. The easiest way to spot altered lighting is to increase the contrast of a photo so all the differences in lighting are exaggerated.
• Look for shadows that don’t match up what’s casting them.
• Optical aberrations, including patterns that aren’t seamless or appear to be inconsistent (or artificially consistent) with the surrounding area.
• Using human anatomy and other reference points BountyFishing verifies the authenticity of the ruler’s length.

We’ve got a flash demo of how we authenticate photos that gives a little bit more information about how this all works.

TAKEN FROM www.bountyfishing.com

  

One of my favourite ‘looks’ is the sort of old-collage feel of old photos and old paper. It’s a favourite because it lets you work images and text together really easily. In this tutorial we’ll put together a poster where there is a main photograph and a lot of text using the old-collage feel.Step 1

This tutorial is based on a job I did a few days ago for a charity client who needed a poster to promote an upcoming event. They are a choir made up of homeless people called the Sydney Street Choir and it’s a pretty neat little organisation which you can learn about at www.sydneystreetchoir.com. The brief was to promote the event use this really nice photo (shown) of the choir down by the Sydney Harbour Bridge shot by John Marmaras and to include some written copy which I’ve shown below the image.

Unfortunately there is a lot of text to go on the poster and although this image is gorgeous, it is very busy, so using the photo as the background for the poster would present problems in getting all that text working over the top. I know this is a problem, because I spent an hour trying to make it work before deciding that I should try something else!

The Text…

www.sydneystreetchoir.com
SYDNEY STREET CHOIR
Performs With

Jonathon Welch
from THE CHOIR OF HARD KNOCKS

Mark Trevorrow
aka BOB DOWNE

Massed Choir of 110 People
Gabriel’s Big Band
Also Featuring Jeremy Brennan

Tuesday 27 Nov 2007 At 7:30PM
Northside Conference Centre
Cnr Oxley St & Pole Lane, Crows Nest
Tickets: $35
All Proceeds to Sydney Street Choir
Tickets Tel: 9439 7822

SYDNEY STREET CHOIR connects with, inspires and empowers, those who are living or working in homeless or disadvantaged communities, through creating music, performance and passionate expression, that truly opens people’s hearts.

Step 2

So if the photo-as-poster model isn’t going to work, then we need another look. I decided to put together what I call the old-collage feel. This is a good one to work with as it’s very easy to combine elements on a page since everything is meant to look a little messy anyway.

The first place we go is to iStockPhoto where I found these four images that I will use to put the poster together. You can purchase the four items from iStock by clicking these links: 1 2 3 4

Step 3

To begin with I used the starburst paper as background by pasting it into the background layer, pressing CTRL-T to rotate and resize it accordingly.

Next I placed the text on the page. I have used Univers Condensed for this poster. Because I knew there was going to be a lot of text, using a condensed font seemed like a good idea so that it’d be easier to get it all in. With the main heading “Sydney Street Choir” I tried a few permutations before deciding that Sydney wasn’t a particularly important word and by shrinking it down I could make “Street Choir” a lot larger and punchier.

After that I used a large soft brush and in a new layer painted black over the top right corner and around the bottom. I then set this layer to Overlay so that it would darken the paper but in an organic way. You can see the result in the following image and the painted areas in the image just below.

Step 4

Next I placed the photo on the stage and because I wanted it to look like something thrown down on a piece of paper I gave it a thick white border. I also added a faint drop shadow so that the photo looked to be interacting with the background. With this look your aim is to get the various pieces of the composition interacting with each other on the canvas. You can do this by overlapping, shadows, adjusting the lighting to match, adjusting colouring to match and so on.

Step 5

Next I wanted to add the paper on to the stage. Because all three items (the paper, the tape and the baggage tag) are isolated on white, it’s quite simple to cut them out. Just use the Magic Wand Tool (W) with a Tolerance set to about 32, then click in the white areas, holding SHIFT down so you can select them all. Then go to Select > Modify > Expand and use a value of 1px. This cuts out a thin border across the whole image and ensures there is no white on the edges. It’s a quick and dirty technique and if you wanted to cut something more complex then you might use a better extraction technique.

Once you have the white selection expanded, press SHIFT-CTRL-I to invert the selection and then you can hit CTRL-C to copy the image out and paste it into the main image.

Step 6

After pasting in the object I added a small drop shadow and moved the paper behind the photo layer (which I had settled in the bottom right corner so as to leave lots of room for text along the left).

Step 7

Now we start adding the text. In the image below all I have done is paste the text in and space it out a little with line breaks. This looks sort of OK, but is pretty boring with everything being uniform. It’d be much better if we worked on the type a little to give it some variation and highlight the more important parts.

Step 8

Here you can see I’ve changed the text so that the names of the main two performers are highlighted, the words ‘from’ and ‘aka’ are shrunk right back since they aren’t important and ‘the Choir of Hard Knocks’ and ‘Bob Downe’ are subtitles. The other three performers (who aren’t as well known) are also shrunk back and will be only really read if the person is really interested. We want people passing by to see the title (Sydney Street Choir) followed by the big acts (Welch and Trevorrow) and hopefully that will draw them close enough to read the rest.

Note also that the text is also set in Univers Condensed (in various weights) and the type sizes are relatively ordered. It’s important to have some consistency and continuity in your text, don’t just have a huge assortment of different sizes and weights and fonts or things can start to look a little chaotic. So the morale of the story is variation is good, too much variation is bad!

You’ll also see that I’ve pasted in a couple of extra photos (of the two main acts) and used the same Layer Style of drop shadow + thick white border on them - but have sized them down accordingly so that the white border didn’t overwhlem the photos. I’ve also transformed and rotated each so it all looks a little random.

Finaly there is also the “sydney street choir” logo which I was told late in the day needed to be on the poster (gotta love last minute client changes!). Now it’s going to be difficult to cut that logo out because it’s complex, but fortunately it’s black on a white background which means all we need to do is set it to “Multiply” and the white will blend away leaving the logo stamped on the paper.

Step 9

Next I pasted in one segment of the tape image from iStockPhoto and have arranged it to look like it’s holding the paper down. Then I’ve written the “Performs With” text over the top to turn it into a subtitle linking the headline and body copy.

I’ve also pasted in the venue details down the bottom and given the text some treatment to highlight and fade back various parts (as we did with the performer list). Unfortunately the text is getting lost down there and since the venue and time is pretty important we need to do something about that!

Step 10

So in a layer down the bottom just above the background I pasted in a dark brown rectangle as shown (just grab the selection tool, draw one in and fill it dark brown) and then set the layer blending mode to Multiply. This effectively makes the bottom much darker and now we can invert the text colour to a beige colour. In case you are wondering the beige colour was selected off the paper above it using the Eyedropper tool since it’s always nice to keep colours matching on the image.

Step 11

Finally I have pasted in the baggage tag up the top right corner and layered it in between the title text and photo, then pasted in that rather long paragraph of description text. And with that we’re complete! At this point to send it off to print we would switch off all the text layers (except the main title) and save as a TIFF file, then open up InDesign, create a new document and place the TIFF file in. Then we would copy in the text in InDesign to make sure it shows up nice and sharp in the final print out poster. But since this site doesn’t really deal in InDesign we won’t go too much into that, I’ve included it though as a few people mentioned this in the comments of the last tutorial

Final Thoughts

This tutorial is not so much about technique as it is about layout and composition. In this case it would have been difficult to make the poster work just by using the photo as a background, I had all of three hours to do the entire job (charity work!), and still wanted it to look nice. Thanks to cheap stock images it’s possible to very quickly put together a nice look that will stand out in the places this poster is going to get put up.

Sample PSD

This download is a tiny version of the file (it’s 300px wide) because all the photos are stock or licensed. However you should still be able to see roughly how the layers interact from this little version. As with all the downloads on the site, any photos are copyright their original owners, please don’t use or distribute them.

TAKEN FROM psdtuts.com

Construction is nearly complete on the Beijing Olympic Stadium, shaped like a massive steel bird’s nest, and the swimming-pool-filled Water Cube, which looks like a piece of glowing alien machinery. This is an actual photo of the buildings at night. We’ve also got some less-surreal glimpses of them too.

Here you can see people posing in front of the Nest last week. And here’s a closeup of the crisscrossed steel girders that form the exoskeleton of the Nest. The Water Cube is actually made of high-tech materials that emulate bubbles to keep the heat inside the building.

TAKEN FROM  http://io9.com

Lester Chan’s GaMerZ has announced that he has unleashed the first wave of updates for 11 of his WordPress plugins. These include:

• WP-EMail 2.30
• WP-PageNavi 2.30
• WP-PluginsUsed 1.30
• WP-Polls 2.30
• WP-PostRatings 1.30
• WP-Print 2.30
• WP-RelativeDate 1.30
• WP-ServerInfo 1.30
• WP-Sticky 1.30
• WP-Stats 2.30
• WP-Useronline 2.30

The remaining four plugins, WP-Ban, WP-DBManager, WP-DownloadManager, and WP-PostViews will be updated in wave two. Lester has stated that all of these plugins should work in WordPress 2.5 only and they have not been tested in any version below 2.5. Also worthy of note is that the folder path of some of the plugins have been fixed. Previously, the path was nested in another folder which generated a ton of hate mail for Lester because it broke automatic updates. Now that the path has been fixed, the automatic plugin upgrade feature should work correctly.

*Note* I updated my GaMerZ plugins today on my personal blog through the plugin upgrader in 2.5 and all of them were upgraded successfully.

Lester has been developing plugins for WordPress for quite some time now. We have praised Lester’s work at various occasions and we use many of his plugins actively on this site (including the post rating system you see below). He is a meticulous coder, provides extensive documentation, download options and demos and even provides his own support forums. Please be patient with his server, it takes a while to load the linked page but the downloads are mirrored, so they should be quick.

On my own blog, I’m using at least seven of his plugins. If you are using one or more of Lester’s plugins, let us know in the comments.

It’s not quite a glass-domed city yet, but St. Petersberg has taken the first steps towards that goal. British architecture firm Wilkinson Eyre, best known for the design of the Gateshead Millenium Bridge in Newcastle, unveiled a bold new plan to revamp the old market of St. Petersburg, Russia by putting it entirely under glass. Over the next few years they’ll be putting a giant sheet of reinforced glass over Aprasin Dvor, a shopping district. A matching glass bridge will span the river. We’ve got some interesting facts about the project.

Here are some deets:
- A glazed crystalline glass tensegrity roof reflects weather conditions but keeps pedestrians dry.
- A new building on the Fontanka River will replace the decaying 60s Publishing House.
- A lightweight tensegrity footbridge will be built over the river. It’ll look like a shiny cloud. Images by Wilkinson Eyre

TAKEN FROM io9.com

At a first glance the Schimmel Pegasus Piano doesn’t look like a piano. With those beautifully sculpted curves this piano looks more like a futuristic spaceship. The Piano has over 200 strings with a key assembly of 10000 pieces with a fully adjustable hydraulic lid. Now you can have your own Schimmel Pegasus Piano because there’s one for sale until March 15th, only 14 were made ten years ago for people like Eddie Murphy, Lenny Kravitz, and Prince. The pianist’s touch determines the speed and energy of the hammer contacting and energizing the strings. The pianist’s touch determines the speed and energy of the hammer contacting and energizing the strings. Details in workmanship and material are paramount if the pianist is to enjoy playing the instrument and experience rich, expanded dynamic sonority. Schimmel keyboard/action systems are examples of exclusive workmanship, regulated to discriminating standards and ideally matched to the strung back assemblies. they are asking only $110,000, and their highest bit is currently at $100,000.

TAKEN FROM /freshome.com

This is the most recent picture of the upcoming Porsche Panamera mule; this particular model is one of the first spotted in the US. Caught by Fast Lane Daily viewer mcshin, who tells us:

Seen in Marina Del Rey, California today with a chase care behind. When I pulled my camera out the chase car would drive really close to the car and try and block my view. Thank goodness for the traffic.

The Panamera is Porsche’s first ever four-door, and should be htting the auto show stands in the very near future. Price estimates sit at anywhere from the high-$50,000 range all the way up to a $100,000+ Turbo model, competing right with the BMW 7-Series and Mercedes-Benz S-Class.

Watch today’s show, with the Panamera spy shot featured!

TAKEN FROM www.fastlanedaily.com