Thursday, May 08, 2008
Processing in Javascript
John Resig has ported the Processing visualization language from Java to Javascript. Amazing stuff.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Mentos and Diet Coke Explosion at 1200fps
Heard about the Casio EX-F1 camera? It can do ultra-high speed burst shooting captures 60 still images per second as well as high speed movie recording of up to 1200 fps. Here's a good example of the latter — Mentos and Diet Coke at 1200fps. Just beautiful. There's so much that you miss at normal speed.
High-speed recording in consumer-grade cameras? Doc Edgerton would be pleased.
High-speed recording in consumer-grade cameras? Doc Edgerton would be pleased.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Iron Man
My son and I watched Iron Man this afternoon. Big thumbs up from both of us. If you plan to see it, stick around until after the credits, there's a stinger. If you already saw it and missed the stinger, just do a search for "iron man after credits scene". It was on Youtube earlier but Marvel made them take it down.
New Passport
My passport was about to expire so I sent in a renewal application. I was expecting a long wait but the new passport arrived today, twelve days after I sent in the application. They even sent the old one in a second package that arrived today as well. Government bureaucratic efficiency? The new one looks spiffy. There's an RFID chip and antenna embedded in there somewhere. It's probably in the back cover but seems to be pretty well hidden.
Friday, May 02, 2008
retrievr
retrievr is a service that lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch. According to the About page, retrievr picks interesting images from Flickr. It seems to work pretty well. I've found some of the strangest (and most interesting) images by drawing different shapes and using various colors with retrievr.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Less Clutter, More Space
My home office has always been a cluttered mess. Too many books. Too many papers. Too many gadgets. And not enough working space. Not any more. I'm on the road to getting organized. I recycled my old AnthroCart desk and bought a new desk with plenty of work surface and storage space.
Now I needed somewhere to store all of the scanned documents that could be accessed from any of our home computers. I looked at a lot of different options (such as the Netgear ReadyNAS and the Apple Time Capsule). I ended up buying an HP Media Vault MV2120 (along with a second SATA drive to do RAID 1 mirroring). It was very easy to set up, quiet and unobtrusive.
My scanning workflow is pretty simple. I run each document through the ScanSnap. Once OCR is complete, I drag the PDF to the appropriate folder on the Media Vault and I'm done. The ScanSnap is incredibly fast so it's easy to take a pile of documents and run them through in a few minutes.
The saved PDF documents are in "PDF Searchable Image" format which means that they include page images as well as searchable text inserted by OCR. File size varies between 100k per page for black and white up to 300k per page for color. But disk space is cheap. 50GBs would store 150-500k pages of scanned documents.
We have a mixed Windows / Macintosh household so it would have been nice to buy a single scanner that works with both. Unfortunately Fujitsu sells two different models: the S510 for PCs and the S510m for Macs. But, as it turns out, the hardware is identical and with a small amount of effort you can download and install the software to use the S510 with a Macintosh. (And the color scheme of the S510 matches the rest of the gadgets in office better than the S510m anyway).
By the way, the ScanSnap S510 was on sale at NewEgg (with a $50 rebate from Fujitsu) when I bought it in March. The sale and rebate program are over now but I've heard that the S300 (or S300M) is quite nice as well and is over $150 cheaper.
Now I needed somewhere to store all of the scanned documents that could be accessed from any of our home computers. I looked at a lot of different options (such as the Netgear ReadyNAS and the Apple Time Capsule). I ended up buying an HP Media Vault MV2120 (along with a second SATA drive to do RAID 1 mirroring). It was very easy to set up, quiet and unobtrusive.
My scanning workflow is pretty simple. I run each document through the ScanSnap. Once OCR is complete, I drag the PDF to the appropriate folder on the Media Vault and I'm done. The ScanSnap is incredibly fast so it's easy to take a pile of documents and run them through in a few minutes.
The saved PDF documents are in "PDF Searchable Image" format which means that they include page images as well as searchable text inserted by OCR. File size varies between 100k per page for black and white up to 300k per page for color. But disk space is cheap. 50GBs would store 150-500k pages of scanned documents.
We have a mixed Windows / Macintosh household so it would have been nice to buy a single scanner that works with both. Unfortunately Fujitsu sells two different models: the S510 for PCs and the S510m for Macs. But, as it turns out, the hardware is identical and with a small amount of effort you can download and install the software to use the S510 with a Macintosh. (And the color scheme of the S510 matches the rest of the gadgets in office better than the S510m anyway).
By the way, the ScanSnap S510 was on sale at NewEgg (with a $50 rebate from Fujitsu) when I bought it in March. The sale and rebate program are over now but I've heard that the S300 (or S300M) is quite nice as well and is over $150 cheaper.
MarsEdit
Trying out MarsEdit. Seems to work.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Two Worlds
I'm dogfooding some Macintosh software on a spiffy new MacBook Pro. Rather than carry around two laptops, I've retired my old Toshiba and set up Windows in Bootcamp on the MBP. I also set up Parallels to use the Bootcamp partition. (I considered using VMWare Fusion but I already had the Parallels license).
Migrating the data from my Toshiba was fairly painless except for one thing: moving photos from Picasa to iPhoto. There's no easy way to retain the albums in Picasa without moving them one-by-one into iPhoto. And frankly, Picasa is more powerful than iPhoto anyway. If the buzz that Google is developing a Macintosh version of Picasa is true, I may end up moving my photos back to Picasa.
Migrating the data from my Toshiba was fairly painless except for one thing: moving photos from Picasa to iPhoto. There's no easy way to retain the albums in Picasa without moving them one-by-one into iPhoto. And frankly, Picasa is more powerful than iPhoto anyway. If the buzz that Google is developing a Macintosh version of Picasa is true, I may end up moving my photos back to Picasa.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Boot Camp time offset
I've got my MacBook Pro set to dual-boot between OS X and Windows. After rebooting from Windows to OS X, I noticed that the clock was off by several hours. I reset the time and then noticed when I rebooted into Windows, the clock was offset again. It turns out to be a problem with how OS X and Windows store time for the hardware clock. OS X stores GMT, Windows stores local time. There are several ways to fix it.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Flux capacitor not included
Along the main road that enters our neighborhood, we spotted a familiar looking car with a For Sale sign in the window. It was a De Lorean DMC-12; best known as the time-traveling vehicle from the Back to the Future series.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Laptop woes
My work laptop for the past 2-1/2 years has been a Toshiba Tecra M4. It's been fine for the most part except for one glaring flaw — the GPU overheats and fries itself. It happened for the second time last week. I just got it back and it's fine but in addition to the overheating, time isn't kind to laptops. What seemed speedy 2-1/2 years ago now feels so sluggish. Time for an upgrade.
Big Dog Robot parody
Have you seen the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot video? It's amazing technology; able to negotiate difficult terrain including ice as well as recover from someone trying to push it over. But it's an odd contraption — it sounds like a chainsaw and looks like a lumpy box with two sets of human legs sticking out; one walking forwards, the other backwards. Absolutely ripe for a funny parody.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Give One, Get One (Finally!)
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I donated to the One Laptop Per Child Give One, Get One program (G1G1). And now, two months later, our OLPC XO laptop has finally arrived.
One thing that's intriguing about the XO is using it as a ebook reader. Folding the screen back into "tablet mode" and turning off the backlighting you get a very crisp grayscale display. I've played with the Sony Reader and the XO screen in this mode looks just as nice. The XO includes a reader for PDFs as well as other ebook formats. Except for battery life, the XO compares quite favorably to the Amazon Kindle.
One last thing, with the arrival of the XO, our home has reached a new milestone — we now have One Laptop Per Congdon.
One thing that's intriguing about the XO is using it as a ebook reader. Folding the screen back into "tablet mode" and turning off the backlighting you get a very crisp grayscale display. I've played with the Sony Reader and the XO screen in this mode looks just as nice. The XO includes a reader for PDFs as well as other ebook formats. Except for battery life, the XO compares quite favorably to the Amazon Kindle.
One last thing, with the arrival of the XO, our home has reached a new milestone — we now have One Laptop Per Congdon.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Clean Is Happy
Clean Is Happy is an advertising campaign for the Washlet toilet seat. It's basically a heated toilet seat with a built-in bidet. Watching the clean and happy Washlet people in the video talk around what this thing is actually for is kinda funny: "You just sit down, do what you came to do and then... reach for the remote".
Amazon sells these seats. Who is buying them? According to Amazon, it's Macintosh users:
Amazon sells these seats. Who is buying them? According to Amazon, it's Macintosh users:
Naymz
Someone sent me an invitation to Naymz, an online identity aggregator. Not thinking too much about it, I clicked on the link, signed up and let it send out some invitations on my behalf. (If you received an invitation from me, you can ignore it if you like).Maybe I should have spent a little more time poking around. Although the UI experience is fine, it sends you down the path to upgrade to a paid account early and often. And it's both refreshing, and a little disturbing, that the first entry in the FAQ is "How do I delete my profile?". I was really tempted to just cancel my account when I saw that.
What Naymz provides is a way to aggregate personal online content so that it's easier for someone to find you. But I can already be found pretty easily via Google or Live Search. Do I really need Naymz?
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Netflix Profiles and Watch Now
Our family has been sharing one Netflix account for about two years. I wish I'd known about Account Profiles! I just split our three-at-a-time plan into three profiles: one for me, one for my wife and one for the kids. Each profile has its own queue.
We also started using Netflix "Watch Now" feature. The choices are somewhat limited but the quality is pretty good. If Netflix expands the program and adds support for XBox 360 and PS3, this could be a killer feature.
We also started using Netflix "Watch Now" feature. The choices are somewhat limited but the quality is pretty good. If Netflix expands the program and adds support for XBox 360 and PS3, this could be a killer feature.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Garfield-less
garfield minus garfield:Strange but it does work. And it's a lot less effort than the Live-Action Garfield over on LasagnaCat.
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let's laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Horton Hears a Who
My son and I went to see Horton Hears a Who this afternoon. I was a little skeptical based on the trailers but this is a terrific film. By far the best film adaption of Dr. Seuss. The storyline follows the book, but fills the rest of the time with more details and lots of humor; all wonderfully animated. Whoville reminded both of us of the landscape from The Neverhood. Huge recommendation; even if you don't have kids.
By the way, I assumed that Horton Hears a Who was the first Horton book, probably because I read them in that order. But it wasn't. My younger son and I read Horton Hatches the Egg this evening and discovered that it was published in 1940, 14 years before the other one.
As a point of comparison, we watched Bee Movie last night on DVD. It's not a bad film; just not much fun. The kids were bored well before the end. In the extras, Jerry Seinfeld says that all they initially had was the title and that it would be about bees. It shows; there are 10-15 minutes of fun and then the film runs out of ideas. And there's nothing really original here. Personally I found the early trailers for the phony "live action" version of Bee Movie to be a lot funnier than the film itself.
By the way, I assumed that Horton Hears a Who was the first Horton book, probably because I read them in that order. But it wasn't. My younger son and I read Horton Hatches the Egg this evening and discovered that it was published in 1940, 14 years before the other one.
As a point of comparison, we watched Bee Movie last night on DVD. It's not a bad film; just not much fun. The kids were bored well before the end. In the extras, Jerry Seinfeld says that all they initially had was the title and that it would be about bees. It shows; there are 10-15 minutes of fun and then the film runs out of ideas. And there's nothing really original here. Personally I found the early trailers for the phony "live action" version of Bee Movie to be a lot funnier than the film itself.
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