I recently went on a diet and lost 20 pounds in about 5 weeks (4I /22 to 5/29). I didn’t do a fad diet; I simply ate less. It turns out that it’s incredibly easy - and cheap - to lose weight. The trick is to eat a lot less than your currently eating, and a lot less than you are served by pretty much every restaurant in the US.
Ok so now I’ve done a new thing with my two-drive Mac Book Pro. In my earlier post I installed a terabyte raid in my Mac Book, by removing the optical drive. I wanted to really accelerate boot time and application, but I also wanted to have lots of storage (the other 500GB) to store my media.
Ok maybe Harry Potter will match it. But OMG that was a good movie.
here’s the deal - I am not a trekkie. I am a star wars fan, but I have only seen some of the star trek movies (the 80’s ones); I watched some Next Gen but not the later two series. So I want to get my not-a-trekkie credentials clear.
I’m born in 74, so I grew up on old star trek reruns, and I probably watched them when they first aired in a past life. So I was quite familiar with Roddenberry’s original episodes.
In short, J.J. Abrams has my undying admiration; the writers, Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci, should earn Pulitzers.
I feel SO STRONGLY about this movie? Why? It’s done perfectly. Even if you only vaguely know the Star Trek story from the original episodes, you should be delighted by this version.
If you know nothing about Star Trek, you should still see the movie
The opening sequence had me in tears; a few sequences later had me in tears.
This kind of film making makes me feel sorry for other movies. Seriously, all I could talk about after the movie is “why aren’t other movies this good? Why do directors have to work with bad scripts? Why do good scripts have to work with bad directors?”
Thank you, JJ. Damn.
A number of industrious individuals have achieved what to some is the holy grail of iPhone accessories: an iPhone keyboard. But most have done it in a very hard-to-repeat manner, and few have shared the methods they used.
Expanding on their audio port modem , PerceptDev engineers Zack Gainsforth and George Dean developed a hardware and software solution that allows infrared keyboards to be used for typing on the iPhone, using less than $20 of electronics.
Zack created a modified version of the microcontroller firmware used for the audio port modem, expanded to detect an infrared signal or read from a USB host controller, then read the data transmitted by an attached keyboard and convert it to an FSK signal for transmission to an iPhone.
George then modified the iPhone application to interpret the keyboard data and display the appropriate characters on-screen.
We will be releasing schematics and source code with the release of iPhone hacks.
(This is a cross post of: http://www.perceptdev.com/labs/content/iphone-keyboard-no-jailbreaking-required-using-20-sdk)
Is disbelief in evolution a survival trait?
In conversation with dozens of Darwin advocates, I have noticed a strange correlation: People who have a strong affinity for Darwinism - such that they bring it up in conversations and discuss the folly of religionists who challenge it - also tend to have strong views about overpopulation and about minimizing their own offspring.
And aside from Darwinist apologists, I’ve found another strange correlation: The socioeconomically educated science people I know - mid-to-upper middle class - who are strongly scientific - tend to have small numbers of children.
It’s not absolute - I know a number of scientifically minded people who do not beat the drum for evolution but certainly agree with it, and they have a couple kids.
And I for the record have no issue with evolution as a workable scientific theory.
But doesn’t this contradict survival of the fittest (an expression not coined by Darwin by the way)?
Ok recently I have been working on backing up my 17″ Mac Book Pro OS X machine (10.5). I am pretty good about backups… but not offsite backups, which would survive theft or server crash or house burning down.
I’ve become even more superstitious of late, because of what I’ve done to my Mac Book Pro - installing a striped RAID of two 500GB hard drives.
One of the projects I’m excited to be working on is stereoscopic or “3D” television. I’m going to be showing one off at Foo Camp this weekend. There’s a lot of good websites on the topic but I’m going to try to give a superfast, biased tutorial of what you need to know. As expected, a good dry tutorial can be found at Wikipedia.
1) To create a 3D effect you need to show a different view to each eye. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, and glasses is the most common way to get the effect in movie theatres or with monitors.
2) Floating 3D where you don’t have to wear glasses is called “autostereoscopic”. Printed holograms are autostereoscopic. They’ve been around for decades and they don’t look like the princess leia hologram from episode IV, do they? Autostereoscopic monitors exist - but they don’t use laser beams to draw the image miraculously in front of your eyes. Rather, they’re similar to the amusing but bad holograms we’re used to. Try not to think about autostereoscopic technology for now so we can get back to reality.
3) You can buy one kind of 3D television today. They use what are called shutter glasses. They’re heavy, and they alternately blank each eye based on signals they get from the TV. There’s another type of 3D television coming out on the market, that uses polarized glasses, using the same tech in the theatres. You can purchase 22″ 3D monitors using this technology now. A good analysis of the different approaches can be found on the Real-D blog.
4) Movie theatres currently display a pretty good form of 3D using “passive” glasses that are lightweight and don’t have batteries or shutters. They give a different image to each eye. The glasses probably cost less than $1 since they give you one free with your ticket.
5) The easiest movies to make into stereoscopic form are computer-generated animated movies, since they are modeled in 3D on the computer to begin with. Converting existing 2D movies to a simulated 3D (sort of like colorizing a film) is a labor-intensive, manual, computer-assisted process. Shooting good 3D cinema (with stereo cameras) has a tremendous learning curve but a number of major directors are starting to do just that.
6) There’s a huge pipeline of 3D movies. Some of the stats I’ve heard point to there being a new 3D movie every month in the next couple of years. Thus, it’s natural that you’d want a 3D television if you’re the wait-for-DVD type.
7) There has been 3D television for years, in the form of shutter glasses and frame-flipping TVs. There’s a de-facto standard called “field sequential 3D” and you can buy DVDs of this type of content on Amazon.com as well as a variety of hole-in-the-wall specialty e-tailers. The quality has never been that compelling however, because the DVDs are only 720×480 pixels. New 3D televisions and LCDs run at full 1920×1080 HD resolution, so that the frame to each eye is approximately 1920×540 worth of data, because half the lines go to the left eye and half the lines go to the right eye.
The red-blue or red-cyan glasses approach is called anaglyph. It’s great for 3D comic books and short content sent over television. The color variation of broadcast however is so high that it’s hard to get a consistent effect over broadcast TV. Plus, it alters the natural color of the scene. Anaglyph techniques are good demonstration, but will never be a mass market product.
9) You can encode stereoscopic content on a Blu-ray. Candidate formats are side-by-side and over-under. Side-by-side would provide a 960×1080 pixels of image quality to each eye; over under, 1920×540. Depending on the approach used to provide the 3d, these images would be expanded to fit the screen (shutter glasses alternate eyes in time; polarizing glasses provide every other line to each eye).
10) Interestingly, any kind of 3D content on a computer is a candidate for viewing on a stereoscopic monitor. We’re still in the alpha stage, so there are too many bugs and incompatibilities to count, but there are a number of great implementations of specific games. For instance, you can play World Of Warcraft, and a dozen other games, on any 3D screen or monitor. Nvidia makes a stereo driver, and iz3d provides drivers for their 3D gaming monitors.
Instead of damning with faint praise, people are praising the new generation of 3D with faint damnation: “It doesn’t hurt as much to watch 3D anymore”. While hardly a glowing endorsement, if you haven’t tried out passive 3D - in a movie theatre, you shoud.
If you haven’t seen 3D with passive glasses, you really should. I have tried shutter glasses and unfortunately my brain doesn’t buy the trick; it gets annoyed that something is being pulled over my eyes 30 times per second. The passive glasses, however, I find very fun.
The best in-theatre stereo I’ve ever experienced is at Walt Disney World, Magic Kingdom, the Mickey’s PhilharMagic movie. It has Donald duck following a string of Disney Princesses. My 5-year-old daughter literally stood up and reached out to try to grab floating jewels, and that kind of visceral reaction means that the technology is working.
If you haven’t started developing applications for the iPhone and porting your existing apps, you should. As we know, bandwidth gets cheaper and CPUs get more powerful every year, and if you aren’t targeting mobile, you’re targeting the death of your business.
(Did that wake you up? Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating the threat, but I thought that fear mongering was the new leadership. Just kidding.)
Anyway, while I’m still busy finishing off iPhone Hacks for O’Reilly, Jonathan Z. has already published and practically sold out the first real book on iPhone development.
The good thing about his book is that you can develop apps on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, and that it turns out applications port over to the ‘official’ Apple SDK without significant effort. So the winning strategy seems to be: Develop an app with the current open toolchain, test it on your own Phone with the open tools, simulate it with Apple’s tools, and ship after June when Apple finally lets more people into the club to sell their apps.
And if you don’t want to give Apple 30% of your earnings, realize that according to some reports, over 2 Million people have jailbroken their phones - and thus have Installer.app on their phone. You can already target these phones with your shareware application - today - and make applications that rival Apple’s because they can access ALL the iPhone SDKs, more than the the “SDK Lite” that Apple offers.
So get started now!
-damien
Now that you can hit space bar and preview everything, I thought it was about time I could peek into my various huge zip files and see if my file was there.
Voila, you can. Here’s the link
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/t_trace/20071125/p2
Comments(5)
