Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

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Hold everything…

July 8, 2009

What’s this?  Strange teaser footage that shows some cool thingsIdentifyable cool things?  (*cough* Jenner! *cough*)  A press conference/interview tommorow with Jordan Weisman?  The above is supposedly in game footage?  A new Mechwarrior game?

Sign me up!  !! !!!!  (That high-power beast of a computer may well get it’s legs worked out after all!)

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I wants

May 21, 2009

Now this is an idea who’s time has come!  If I say “Old skhool Transformers” and “Ravage” you’ll probably get the mental image of the good ol’ Jaguar that transforms into the even more good ol’ cassette tape.   Here’s the genius marketing:  update him to today’s portable media, and you have this beaut, with full working USB storage action, and looking pretty good to boot.  Shame it’s only 2GB…

Today I also visited the finished Breezehouse owned by one of the principals of our firm (the one being lifted into position here).  First time I’d seen it finished, and I have to say holy f!k that is one amazingly gorgeous house!  MKD did a fabulous job on this thing, spatially the house is excellent, the details are excellent, the lines are excellent, the proportions are excellent and the breeze space is just brilliant.  Damn.  His own additions to the base design (including a nice simple yet elegant fountain) tie it nicely into the site.  I was very impresed (if you can’t tell yet).

Yes, I certainly want!

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Oldskool dreaming

April 6, 2008

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?).

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How Cool is THIS?

January 11, 2008

Um… very, I say!  Head Tracking desktops and more using your Wii.  Wow…

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How the MPAA ate my signal

November 22, 2007

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. 

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LotD

September 22, 2007

I normally am not a fan of overly flash-ified sites, but this one I find very neat: http://edgeent.com/. Fun!

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Wow. Just wow.

August 12, 2007

First, watch this: Animator vs Animation

When you’ve regained the ability to breathe, watch this: Animator vs Animation II

Darned brilliant. Brilliant!

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Brilliant!

August 2, 2007

These are horribly brilliant! BRILLIANT I say! Animated Spamland Transcripts. Oh well done brothers!

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Thesis Fulfilled?

April 7, 2007

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

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LotD

January 5, 2007

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.

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