Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
By dragging a printed paper strip over a linear array of 49 fiber optic strands a 7×7 pixel image can be formed. The effect is very cool, animated text and even motion captured from video can be shown.
I want to know what the application was that the designer used to make the paper strips, looks complex but powerful.
[via ektopia]
You would think that this was done on an old Mac computer but it wasn’t. Very impressive. I need one of their shirts.
Not strictly a work of Machinima; Paul Robertson’s Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 is a masterpiece animation based on the graphic look and feel of platform handhelds. A kind of machinima recursion; where animations inspired by games have inspired animations. Paul’s style did actually get him a job in the games industry, but he was obsessively animating these seductively disturbing game-inspired tales before making games. His work has been shown in many galleries in Australia, but until now hasn’t found a big exposure online. For me, his non-interactive animations are more about what games ought to be than what a lot of games are. The kind of indulgence which triggers all the soft spots of delicious wrongness in a way Reality just doesn’t appreciate.
The guys could build them pretty good back they couldn’t they? 30 years and it can still send back science data.
Voyager 1, already the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, reaches 100 astronomical units from the sun on Tuesday, August 15 at 5:13 p.m. Eastern time (2:13 p.m. Pacific time). That means the spacecraft, which launched nearly three decades ago, will be 100 times more distant from the sun than Earth is.
My friend Greg reminded me of this stuff. Pykrete is a mixture of ice and wood chips that is darn tough, won’t melt quickly, and can be formed using molds. Neat! Now I wish it was 100 degrees cooler out so I could make some of my own.
When I fist read the description on how this worked I was totally amazed. The clocks never need winding by hand because the mechanism is powered by a difference in temperature. A variance of a degree between 15-30 C is enough to cause a liquid (ethyl chloride) in a sealed container to expand or contract and in turn wind a spring with a ratchet. The clocks are exquisitely made and are fairly rare. If you find on, even a non working one you can expect to pay over $2,000 US for it. I find the concept of a temperature driven clock fascinating. I can’t help but wonder if the dynamic properties of ethyl chloride could be used in other projects.
If your like me you have way too many files on way too many hard drives. One way to help this is to have a network attached storage (NAS). Yeah, you could just stuff a bunch of hard drives in a beige box of death and load up XP. A few network shares later and you have a NAS. You could do that, sure, if you wanted to take the easy way out. But I can tell you want to live a little, be on the edge. Yeah… The Edge. It’s where the alpha nerds meet for a midnight snack of Jolt Cola and double stuffed pizza before going back to their tricked out 733t hax0r boxes. It’s where you want to be. Building your own NAS out of the cast offs from the junk bin of a local thrift store will get you closer to that edge.
So gather up your hard drives, your mother boards, your USB key drives (you want all the IDE channels open for drives man!) and grab a copy of FreeNAS (just about the coolest software for this sort of thing) and go to town. I’m working on consolidating my collection of hard drives (everything from 20GB to 120GB) into a big pile of storage that is at least running in RAID 1. RAID 5 is my goal but that’s only if the hardware gods smile upon me.
Like me, soon you will be on the Edge.