By modifying a laser pen and using a detector you are able to play music over distances that could reach half a mile. To do this the laser needs to be modified by using amplitude modulation. This is then pointed at the sensor which picks up the changes, converts it in to a signal that can be used as music. As with anything with a laser in, be careful when you try anything and do not look at the laser as it could damage your eyes.

To build the device you need to gather together a few components such as a potentiometer, toggle switch and a phototransistor to name a few and then follow the instructions over at Instructables.

Watches are getting very interesting over the last few years which LED watches becoming quite popular from Tokyo Flash. Often they are made from slightly different materials to get a sleek look. The latest I came across was the 900 Abacus watch which uses a ball and magnet to tell the time. There are no hands or numbers on the watch. To tell the time you take a look at the magnetic sphere which moves around the face. The sphere is not fastened down and when you walk around the sphere moves around freely under the glass till you hold the watch flat. At this point the sphere rolls to the correct time. As it only has 1 sphere, it only tells time by hours which means you need to roughly estimate how many minutes past the hour it is.

The watch is also water resistant down to 30 meters.

The watch prices will start just short of $150 with more information available at Questodesign.

I came across a cool video today from SIGGRAPH 2007 which shows a process to manipulate images with out having to chop them up the usual way. The process uses gradients to find continuous lines of pixels which can be removed without effecting the subjects of the image. When the subject of the image does get manipulated for some reason, a marker can be put on to the image telling it to preserve that part. Also, objects can easily be removed by marking them negatively. The software will then take the gradients near by to fill in the gaps.

This type of manipulation will be very useful for websites which can be displayed on various sized screens such as high res large monitors right down to pocket pc sized screens. The full effect of the image could be displayed with out cropping out the main parts of the image.