Danny Boyle has decided that Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller will share the roles of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster, switching roles every night of the his stage production of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Iñigo Quilez has more code-fu than you. In the video above, he creates a an eyecandy demo using Photoshop.
It’s a simple idea. He simple creates a 9 by 9 image, and places carefully chosen pixel values to write the assembly. The “magic” is that he saves the file as raw data, and then renames it as a .com file for execution in a DOS shell. Since the file is read as a raw stream of bytes, using Photoshop in this way, isn’t any different from using a hex editor. In fact, back in The Day™ (i.e. 1992-1994) PC World would recommend using write.exe to edit different DLLs in Windows 3.1 in order to create custom menus in file manager and such. The only catch was to avoid memory alignment problems by keeping the edited string the same length as the original.
Jeremie Francone and his advisor Laurence Nigay from the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction group at Grenoble Informatics Laboratory in Saint Martin d’Hères, France have created a demo that incorporates head tracking along with the gyroscope in the iPad and iPhone to implemented a 3D view without the annoying glasses.
Watching the video (attached below) shows that the effect is very impressive, especially with theholodeckesque background. While I’m sure this technology took quite a bit of work to develop, this is the type of thing that I’d hope would be converted into a simple widget for other visualization apps to take advantage of.
HMS Ark Royal – former flag ship of the Royal Navy, veteran of Bosnia and both Iraqs – is available for purchase. All offers considered! Bids and plans for the boat are required to be submitted in writing.
The last aircraft carrier that made big news when sold was the Varyag. Unfinished, and rusting for a few years, the Russians sold it to a Chinese real estate mogul who said he wanted to turn it into a casino in Macau. Instead, it got towed to Dalian, a new paint job, a new name, the Shi Lang.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
It is the year 2011, and I now have a robot maid. Alas, it does not have a sassy voice, and even though it comes in sexy black, it does not come with a french accent either. Mostly it just beeps, like robots from a long time ago, but occasionally it does speak in a feminine voice, but only to chide me. (“Error one. Please move Roomba to a new location and press the ‘clean’ button.”) It’s definitely not fast, and it’s not thorough, since there are some places too small for it to fit, but I do like that I don’t have to vacuum. My favorite thing it does is how it desperately tries to claw its way back to the charging station if you try to drag it away so you can work on it. That said, I still will be eagerly awaiting the commercial arrival of a Mahru-Z like bot.
Opening the box, I found this sticker on one of the plastic bags:
This robot contains an electronic and software interface that allows you to control or modify its behavior, and remotely monitor its sensors. For software programmers interested in giving Roomba new functionality, we encourage you to do so.
Because the functionality of iRobot Roomba can be changed by you or other third parties, usage of this Roomba is subject to the enclosed End User License Agreement. If you do not accept this agreement, please do not open this package. For more information, visit www.irobot.com
Now that’s nice. More companies should take a pro-hacker stance. A “you assumed the risk” stance towards added functionality is great. If Igive them money, and don’t ask for support, then why should they care what I do? I’d love to be able to download a a more efficient floor covering algorithm to it, perhaps even have actually remember the shape of the rooms from run to run. Unfortunately, the hacking sites are filled with lameness like adding Knight Rider lights, and Maybe there’s a community of people doing useful things, but somehow I doubt it.
A 17 year old high school student survived the 220 foot jump with a broken tailbone and a torn lung.
He did it on a dare.
Katamari Hack by Alex Leone, David Nufer, and David Truong, is a nifty little CSS3 and HTML5 hack that allows the Prince to roll up the elements on the page to that infectious tune.
The US Navy is celebrating a century of naval aviation with vintage paint schemes. The T-45C pictured above is decked out in a modified of scheme reminiscent of the 1938 Enterprise Air Group colors. (The red nose is new, due to training plane color requirements.)
The Air Force did something similar a few years ago for the 90th anniversary 111th Fighter Squadron, which is now part of the Texas Air National Guard.
While normally I despise anything retro or vintage, I do enjoy these color schemes. The Navy has tended to retain distinctive squadron insignias (the F-14 squadrons seemed to be especially distinctive), reminiscent of nose art on the tails of their airplanes, while the Air Force have defaulted to boring two letter codes. Supposably, nose art is added to a some aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it’s hard to find examples on the web beyond scorecards.
Continue reading
Built by Kokoro – a division of Sanrio. (Yes. That Sanrio.) – and Hiroshi Ishiguro of ATR the Geminoid DK is the first Geminoid modeled after a gaijin. In this case, professor Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University in Denmark.