Johnny Chung Lee’s name has been turning up a lot in the world of tech lately for his experiments with Wii-motes. He’s turned them into Minority Report-like computers and used them to turn normal screens into touch-sensitive ones. After seeing his latest video on Engadget, I clicked through to his website and found some of his older (2004-05) experiments. Amazing! He’s the same guy who worked on the adaptive projector, which I’ve seen before.
Check it out:
I’m telling you, some time in the near future we’ll all be buying stuff like this from his developed with Apple or MS or something…
This amazing image shows a couple of planes on their descent onto a pair of parallel runways. The smaller plane is in the foreground; the larger plane in the background. This creates an optical illusion that makes it seems like the planes are merely a few feet from each other, when in reality they are a few hundred feet from each other.
http://www.noahwass.com/two_airplane_optical_illusion.aspx
KittenWar.com - You see 2 pictures of different cats, then you click on the one you like better. Simple and gets boring fast, but worth a laugh to see the funny-looking kittens.
ICANHASCHEEZBURGER.com - teh funstest. The best of lolzcats.com organized neatly in a easy to navigate blog. lolcatz make the funniest single-picture comics but its impossible to navigate their site. icanhascheeseburger is much better.
Engadget.com revealed on the 31st that they have been invited to an “Apple ‘product presentation for Mac’ at Apple Town Hall in Cupertino next week. The event gets started on the morning of Tuesday, August 7th, and while we weren’t promised an appearance by El Jobso, Apple was, shockingly enough, very open and clear about the fact that this is going to be a press gathering for Mac products (and Mac products only)”.
Looks like Apple will be updating the Mac before the iPod. So I was wrong about the order, but I was right saying that August 7th will be all about the Mac. Will everything else I said about the brushed aluminum iMacs be true also?
Today, there are over 540,000 words in the English language: 5 times the number in Shakespeare’s time. I find this amazing. As slang and new terms like “cool”, “Internet”, “blogs”, and “Google” are officially accepted, it not only complicates our lives, but enriches them. It is predicted that by 2049, the computation power of a single, ordinary laptop will exceed that of the entire human race. Combined. Kind of hard to believe, especially considering that every 8 seconds 34 children are born, and that number just keeps climbing. At this rate, the human race won’t fit on 2 Earths by 2049. Continue reading »
About noon yesterday (I left the night before) I got back from my short trip to Chicago, Illinois. I took a lot of photos, so check out the album at Pakman20.com/photos. I think from this trip I’ve learned 3 main things:
Ohio has very clean restrooms in their new, big, shiny, standardized rest stops.
Although the Sears Tower is higher than the John Hancock Building, the Hancock has a much better tour in their observatory and is presented much better. It’s cleaner, newer, has more information, and is designed well.
Straws can be made out of paper and still be durable. When I visited Shedd’s Aquarium in Chicago I noticed that is was very energy efficient/environmentally friendly. There were almost as many recycling bins as garbage cans, the back of every map and brochure had “please recycle” written all over it, even the bathrooms had replaced the expensive, tree killing paper towels with high efficiency blow dryers- each equipped with an LCD display that cycled through advertisements and reminders to recycle. But by far the coolest things were the straws at the restaurant and food court. Like the cardboard tube at the center of a roll of paper towels or wrapping paper, they were made not of plastic but recycled cardboard spiraled into a tube. Of course they looked and sounded cool, but I thought they might be a little weak in actual use. To my surprise, they were just as strong as plastic even after sitting in a glass of Coke for a little over a half hour, a feat that would rot any ordinary roll or paper into a deliciously feeble pulp. A cardboard straw is just as good as any plastic straw, except better for the environment. The wrappers identified them as “earth friendly straws” from aardvarkstraws.com. Now if only I could get these at my local Shop Rite…
Tremulous is not only unquestionably the best free game I’ve ever played, but right up there on my list with other games that I’ve payed for. It’s a great fps (first person shooter) with a little bit of rts (real time strategy) thrown in. You choose your side: humans or aliens (I’m always a human) and play away online. Even compared to non-free games, it looks great. Not top-of-the-line, but still great.
If you play as a human, you start out with only a rifle. You have to hunt down the aliens, and each time you kill one you get “credits”. You can use these credits to buy new armor, weapons, etc. Each time you die, you loose everything except your credits. But that’s not all. There’s also a lot of strategy involved. The humans have to protect their reactor, the main core of their base. The reactor provides power for other structures, such as respawn points (telenodes), medistations (heals you), armories, and turrets. If the aliens destroy your reactor of all of your telenodes, you loose.
The aliens, meanwhile, have to protect their “overminds”, the alien equivalent of a reactor, eggs (like telenodes), and so on. Aliens don’t have credits, though. Each time they get a kill they can evolve one step higher. The more they evolve, the bigger, stronger, and faster they get.
Tremulous is awesome. Even if it doesn’t sound like fun to you, trust me, try it. It’s free, so what do you have to loose? The music in that promo video is kinda weird, though.
I was reading The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW.com) and I came across this. They mentioned it because of Independence day, but even though the 4th has passed it’s still a cool screensaver, and it’s free.
It does a great job of rendering not only the fireworks, but also the smoke, moon, stars, clouds, ground (with the occasional mountain in the background) and wind, all fully customizable in it’s options menu. Throughout the whole thing, it pans and zooms through the explosions. It can even do the fireworks sounds, although I’m not sure why anybody would want sounds in their screensaver so I personally turned that off.
(click for larger version)
I was reading The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW.com) and I came across this. They mentioned it because of Independence day, but even though the 4th has passed it’s still a cool screensaver, and it’s free.