Words cannot describe this escalating Rube Goldberg machine, just watch
Archive for category media
Rainy Day Experiments
Oct 3
It was pouring rain all day today, so I used the time to set up a little water drop lab and kept experimenting with it. Here’s a blue drop of soy milk into water.
This is taken with my new Tamron 70-300 lens, and using the built-in flash.
Star Wars Trek
May 18
Last night was the grand opening of Bass concert hall after it was closed for remodeling. In order to showcase all the new features, they had a wide range of music for the bill, from opera to old American ballads to choral to jazz… to the most awesome finale featuring Ghostland Observatory. The University of Texas band and orchestra played alongside them!
Terminator iPhone meta-game
Sep 26
The hype team behind Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles has released a multi-platform metagame, named Terminator Ambush.
Play consists of two levels. On one hand you are the hunted. Use an iPhone to check in using your GPS location via their Ambush iPhone application. Which looks like this:
You get points for putting in more location, but then the other portion of the game comes into play. On the Terminator Ambush website, you are tracked by your check-ins on a non-descript virtual map. Hunters can use this data to try and determine your next check-in point and lay a trap. If they get you, you are terminated.
I’m not sure if it’s entirely working, as I used the iPhone app while running around town today. It shows my plots but my score has not been updated at all. The plot points were much shorter distance apart on the virtual map than I had thought, that with the large trap reticle, it should be easy to terminate people. What I mean is, I went in 10 mile sweep through Austin while running errands, and my path markings are just about contained in a one-inch square area.
Yes, it’s a little big-brothery that you are uploading your GPS data, but luckily it doesn’t show any real-world tie-in for people to actually track you or anything. But, meta-gaming like this is a fun idea, that I expect will become even more popular now, with all the iPhones and other GPS phones being released. There was a another game announced previously called Parallel Kingdom which has a more involved concept of building virtual buildings and such as a sort of GPS MMO.
Photosynth
Aug 26
An eon in modern time ago (a year) I posted a small extrinsic blurb about the upcoming Microsoft technology dubbed Photosynth. I thought the link explained and showed it better than I could, so no need for a further post. But now it is released, and now it deserves the shoutout.
This is a simple “synth”. It was taken by some guy in Austin on his cameraphone. He took a few shots of the 360 bridge (a pretty noticeable landmark), just across the river from where I used to work at Origin. I think this shows the power of Photosynth. First of all, this was easy to find, I just did a Photosynth search for Austin, and it was the first choice. Second this was only a few short photos in a cameraphone. This isn’t the Taj Mahal demo with 400 shots with a $5000 DSLR camera. No, this is normal guy with possibly time on his break from work to snap a few shots through a window and upload them. You can still zoom in on them and skirt all around his view.. and it captures his view amazingly well.
That’s all I have to say, except one more thing, kudos to Microsoft to allowing embed code. Normally that wouldn’t get kudos, because every website on earth has some free embedable content on it nowadays, but kudos for finally coming around. (but an iframe? seriously?)
Been messing with fractals, the last few days. Here’s one I particularly like.
(click to see it ocean-sized)
ghosts in the machine by ~rosicrux on deviantART
old.
I still get that twinge of jealousy with all his equipment that would have cost a pretty penny back then. Not to mention his parents never seem to care about him wardialing thousands of calls on their line. My parents freaked out everytime a computer would dial me. But how else would I join those wionderful BBSes and get my TradeWars on?
WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars
And I do mean old. I will say that I had almost this exact same dot matrix printer that I used for many many years. Kudos on using the Spectrum, but the amazing thing to me is that the hard drives act as speakers.
Here it is… the remix of Radiohead’s “Nude” :
Big Ideas (Don’t get any) from 1030 on Vimeo.
I’m not a dead doctor, Jim
Apr 20
Wiki Articles of the Day. My attempt at making the wikipedia chain addictions into something (anti-)productive for you, the reader! (Henceforth tagged as WAOTD.)
Hedy Lamarr – Talk about a Renaissance woman. Not only a gorgeous and celebrated actress, but also an award winning scientist.
Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1913 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American actress. Though known primarily for her great beauty and her successful film career, she also co-invented an early form of spread spectrum encoding, a key to modern wireless communication.
I may slot these into the extrinsic posts instead.
ubiquitous super mario theme
tetris theme
zelda theme
and a little more… range
Tron via cardboard
Mar 28
