Had a most interesting dream last night that involved elevators, pistols and fabulous spycraftian action. Could my dreamworld have been channeling this old game: Elevator Action? I loved this game back when it was in arcades… hmmmm. However it arose, it was certainly an exciting dream. Before it morphed into something truly odd… (as dreams are wont to do, eh?).
Um… very, I say! Head Tracking desktops and more using your Wii. Wow…
The great and mighty Fry’s held a sale the other day on upconverting DVD players. My monitor can handle HD signals and so I said to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be great to watch DVDs with your computer off on your beautiful widescreen monitor in upconverted 1080 glory?”
Of course! I went out and bought one, and brought it home, and duly hooked up the component output from the DVD player into my monitor, and set the DVD player to output to 1080i, and put in a disk, and pressed play, and awaited the glory.
Except, you see, the MPAA and the DMCA have decided that I cannot be trusted with a 1080i (or 720p, for that matter) signal through the component output.
Oh no, no way can I be trusted with it. I could, I suppose, do something naughty. Not sure exactly what, but I guess I would do something very bad. See, they have mandated that only through HDMI can you send the upconverted signal. You can’t even buy an HDMI to Component converter, those are illegal too. So you are stuck with your 480p signal. Note that this 480p signal is what would being upconverted by on-board electronics to a higher def signal (using code specifically designed for that). It isn’t high-def to begin with.
Thanks to the MPAA, I am not able or allowed to view my legit, store-bought disks in a manner that would suit them best. Instead I am forcibly truncated to the straight 480p signal.
The joke at the end of all this is that it is actually now advantageous for me to buy bootlegged disks, disks that have had the copy protection stripped; my player will happily upconvert those disks. I would even save a few bucks doing that, it’d be a great deal all around for me.
Good show, MPAA.
I normally am not a fan of overly flash-ified sites, but this one I find very neat: http://edgeent.com/. Fun!
First, watch this: Animator vs Animation
When you’ve regained the ability to breathe, watch this: Animator vs Animation II
Darned brilliant. Brilliant!
These are horribly brilliant! BRILLIANT I say! Animated Spamland Transcripts. Oh well done brothers!
This is very cool. Some years ago an architect had this flash of insight and developed a new theory for the constructions of the great pyramids at Giza. To test his theories, he turns to a realtime 3D model and AI systems… which is precisely what I began to investigate in my own Thesis for my architecture degree (at about the same time he came up with his theory, actually, interestingly enough). Rock on — I may not have been able to persue the fruits of my thesis, but it is very cool to see the very concepts and hopes I had being put into practice.
Here’s the paper you can download: http://khufu.3ds.com/introduction/datas/intro/downloads/Kheops_Story.pdf
Sadly, my own thesis (Maya Visions) is not on the web right now. Hmm. And I’m leaving it that way… because? I might well just rectify that!
(Ok, that’s odd — if you misspell my last name (the missing n) and put my name into google, the first article that comes up is the article about me in the Mountain View Voice… how about that.)
Current Possibility: Being Infectious
I am finding it most amusing that a good number of my spam over the past couple of days have been about “Fantastic christmas gifts!” or “Special deals to start the holiday season!” Kinda missed the boat there, guys.
Today’s LotD: Worst of the Worst video game ads from the late 80’s and the second installment about the early 90’s. Funny enough on their own, but doubly so with the rather sharp commentary.
I’ve gotten an upsurge in spam lately, and it’s most interesting — there seems to be a trend lately for clusters of nearly identical spam messages coming in droves of droves. I’m guessing it’s banks of spambots spewing it out in chunks, but it’s amusing and weird. Every few days a new batch… most recently it’s been of the same word, but with the name of the person in the From: header. As a technique I have to question it, really — even if you were fairly green, you’d think 10 messages like that would tip someone off, no?
At any rate, I broke down and further set up my procmail rules to sort out my known friends, a whitelist of sorts, to reduce the chance of accidentally deleting messages in a quick scan of ‘yes, no, yes yes yes yes, no yes’ of my emails.
This post comes post-xmas, and I trust that everyone created for themselves a fantastic holiday. I didn’t get a chance to go home this year due to late time-off-requestness and my parents came down to visit instead. We had a fantastic time, and got to hit a couple of very nice restaurants. Food bloggage ahead…
Wow, it’s been a while, but the cssZengarden just updated with a few new designs, some of which broke into the “interesting” category…
Interesting look in a distressed way
Funny, amusing
Design-wise, this one is the niftiest
