I passed a few hours this afternoon at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where the Game On exhibition is currently underway. I missed this in Edinburgh last year so it was a pleasant surprise to stumble upon it.
I’ve never really been all that into gaming. Mainly, I think, because I was crap and not a big fan of losing. I vaguely remember the children of friends of my parents bringing around their Atari VCS to play with and I can’t have been much older than three. Next up was my neighbours’ ZX81 and my best friends’ Acorn Electron before my first computer which was a Spectrum 128 +2A. I then had a C64 and dreamed of an Amiga with a meg of RAM before moving into the world of the PC.
The notebook of choice in the geek community is undoubtedly the Moleskine – favoured by Hemingway, Matisse and Van Gogh. Instead of fishing around in your bag for a pen when inspiration hits you, somehow tethering your pen to your notebook keeps it ready for use anytime. You can either shell out for a BookSling or buy a flat pen. However, I’ve come up with a free alternative that is compatible with most pens:
“Final” in every sense of the word for the nominees and eventual winner of the Darwin Awards 2007 (ironically announced in the same week as 12 school districts in Florida effectively banned the teaching of evolution). For the uninitiated among you, the Darwin Awards are named after Charles Darwin and are given posthumously to those that kill themselves by performing some remarkably idiotic act and therefore advancing mankind by removing themselves from the human gene pool.
Another unwanted awards list is this breakdown of the worst science stories of 2007. This is how the media spreads fear and panic among the non-scientific populous who in turn fan the flames with chain emails. I can forgive Joe Sixtooth for not checking their facts before blindly forwarding these ‘warnings’ but professional journalists should really know better.
The last review of 2007 is far less idiotic and much more creative. Nicholas Felton is a graphic designer in New York city who produces a personal annual report on the facts and figures that constituted his past year. I’m not sure that I’d remember to record everything I do over the course of 365 days.
Google just posted their annual review in terms of what people are looking for online. The Google Zeitgeist goes back to 2001 and I always find it a fascinating snapshot of the year. Plus I usually learn some extra stuff too as there does tend to be something of a United States bias.
This year, Google have placed little introductory snippets of information about their various tools that you maybe didn’t know about at the bottom of each page.
I spent the afternoon watching the Hearts vs. Falkirk match on Saturday (while nervously keeping an eye on the Australia vs. England Rugby World Cup quarter-final — third victory from three matches I think, which means we get to keep them or something).
After a couple of pints debating the offside decisions which led to the late surge from Falkirk, I made my way down to the Grassmarket to meet some friends and catch the Edinburgh urban downhill night finals which were a part of the 2007 Fat Face Night Series. Judging by the turnout I wouldn’t be surprised if this was repeated again next year.
I was amazed by just how quickly the top guys were flying down the course. It was very exciting to watch but I think only because of the great view we had. We were so close you could feel the breeze from the riders passing by you. It could have been a bit tricky to catch anything than the occasional blur if you were elsewhere. Head on over to Flickr or check out my friend’s shots for some photos.
If you understood that then apologies for the obligatory joke. If you didn’t then I can safely assume that you’re not a regular at Slashdot where I came across this on the RSS feed at the start of the month.
ASCII renditions of things just keep on impressing me. It started at university with FIGlet generators, returned last year while watching the 2006 FIFA World Cup and then once more a good few weeks ago standing 10 meters away from the computer monitor to watch a VideoLAN real-time transcoded version of a HD stream from a colleagues home media server.
Now it’s possible to do this while walking around using these ASCII goggles to present you with a view of the World in a Matrix/Terminator style. Actually ASCII is only one of the possible filters available. Cool but not without use for a change I’d say - surely these things could quite easily be modified to assist people with any number of eye defects.
I rushed home straight after work this evening to keep up with proceedings from the Apple media event. Okay, I’m the first to admit that I’m somewhat of a magpie and easily attracted to shiny things. Especially so when the shiny thing in question is designed by Apple – much to the amusement and bewilderment of most of my friends!
For the most part, Apple just seem to understand how their customers want things to behave and look. Observe the reaction to the Intel sticker question. Of course the $200 price-drop for the 8 gig iPhone which was also announced today isn’t going down too well with people who have purchased one in the past couple of months. One of the dangers of being an early adopter.
A lot of people (Ed Colligan for example) are having to eat some humble pie with the success of the iPhone. It was the biggest selling smartphone in the USA for the month of July.
Some people remain unconvinced. NBC have abandoned the iTunes Music Store in favour of the much more DRM restrictive Unbox from Amazon. Universal already receive money from each Zune music player sold as compensation based on the assumption that it will be used for playing illegally obtained music. Way to your treat your customers Microsoft. Maybe this is one reason that they’ve only just recently sold one million units. Or maybe because they’re brown. Maybe because they use the terminology “squirting”. Who knows.
I’m now wondering whether to cave in and get the iPod touch or wait it out for the European iPhone launch. The fact that the joystick-type-thing on my K800i is starting to misbehave may just swing it to the latter.
No, that’s not my new chimpanzee impression but the sounds uttered last night by the 250,000 people who watched the annual Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert that marks the end of the month-long Edinburgh Festival.
I’ve watched the show from various vantage points over the past few years: South of the castle on Bruntsfield Links, Queen Street and had a great view last night on Princes Street, at the junction with Castle Street.
Around four tonnes of fireworks were let off over a period of 45 minutes and five pieces of classical music that was annoyingly barely audible. Maybe I’ll try and get tickets for the band stand next year.
The most impressive view however was last year when I was flying back from a friends wedding. The flight was delayed enough for the Fireworks to be going off just as we were circling Edinburgh on approach to the airport. Of course I couldn’t hear the music from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra but the unique view more than compensated for this!
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
- Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of The Future
Computer graphics are intimately linked with mathematics. I studied a little graph theory and path analysis algorithms as a part of my university degree but never really implemented anything of note. Unlike the two links that caught my eye recently.
A couple of weeks ago the BBC ran a story on repairing images that may be damaged, incomplete or otherwise contain unwanted elements. I thought that was cool enough until I was shown a YouTube video demonstration of content-aware scaling and resizing.
I’m still waiting for the “pan, zoom, rotate” functionality from the movie Blade Runner. Actually, we might not be too far away. (There are some fairly weighty concepts involved in dual photography but make sure that you watch the video to the end for an example of what can be achieved.)
In light of recent postings of software lists in the comments I thought I’d better chime in with my two cents. After all, it is my blog! My favourite piece of software of late which always gets a good reaction from my less geeky friends is the marvelous MacOSaiX, which produced this topical image (click for larger version):
