A classic illusion is the hollow face illusion, where a concave casting of the face appears convex. This is demonstrated neatly here, with a simple cardboard cutout whose head appears to track you as you move around. Very neat. There are lots of other cool illusions on the parent website, check them out too.
Category Archives: Toys and Gadgets
Interview with a Lawyer for Tivo
Wired is running this interview with a lawyer for Tivo regarding their new changes to respect broadcast flags for pay-per-view content. While it’s bad news for consumers, I think it is refreshing to hear a lawyer speak this candidly.
Best exchange:
WIRED: TiVo has always been about empowering the viewer. Why change now?
ZINN: Macrovision changed its policy. So the question was, Do we want to have a Macrovision license with certain restrictions, or none at all? We decided that as long as the restrictions were limited to pay-per-view and video-on-demand, consumers would still have the choice. If they don’t like a narrower window in which to view programming, they won’t purchase it. That’ll send a message to the content owners.
How to Make Lava Lamps – Oozing Goo
If you would like to wander back to the days of the Keith Partridge and Greg Brady and make a really groovy pad, you can go learn How to Make Lava Lamps at Oozing Goo. They also listed the two patents on the Lava Lamp, namely U.S. Patent 3,570,156 and U.S. Patent 3,387,396. Frankly, the idea of placing alcohol and turpentine in a closed container over a heat source sounds the teensiest bit dangerous to me, so if you end up with no eyebrows, don’t come crying to me. I’m not stupid enough to try it.
Yet.
What’s really amazing about this invention to me is just the idea itself: that somebody would buy a lamp that consists of globs of goo floating around in liquid. How does one even get to the point where one asks this question?
Bonus Coverage: A Method for Animating Viscous Fluids
PONGMECHANIK
*** PONGMECHANIK *** is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. Don’t miss the explanatory video either.
Unofficial Robosapien hacks and mods site
While reading today’s slashdot article on hacking the RoboSapien, I turned up a link to the Unofficial Robosapien hacks and mods site. Some good information about the IR protocols used to control the little robot. You can also look at Servo Magazine’s Hack-a-Sapien contest.
UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance
UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance is an implementation of the 5th version of the Unix Operating System for the ARM chip inside the gameboy. To do this, it runs SIMH, a PDP-11 simulator which has been ported to a bunch of different systems. The original RK05 disk image is combined with the PDP-11 simulator to make a functioning 5th Edition workstation.
It’s… just… brilliant.
On the right, you can see a screendump. Notice that it is compiling a simple Hello World C program.
If you are into this stuff, you can get lots of different PDP-11 software off the net with a minimum of searching.
New Gadget — A DVD Burner
Well, I finally caved in. DVD burners and blanks are now cheap enough that burning CD-Rs seemed like a waste of time, so I went ahead and picked up an inexpensive Toshiba model while at Fry’s yesterday. A quick bit of surgery and it was neatly installed in my server box, and I then set out to back up my entire website onto a DVD. Strangely enough, I’ve now got about 2.2gb of data stuffed away in my /usr/local/www directory, so saving it on CDs was becoming painful and required some thought. Most of the storage is actually in the form of a couple of thousand digital pictures that I’ve taken in the past year or so: now that I have them backed up, I can work on beginning to clean them and retaining only the ones that I think are useful.
I got this thing mostly as a backup device, but will probably also work on using it to develop a couple of short video DVDs. I’ve used tools like mjpegtools and vcdimager to generate VCD images before, apparently now the application of choice is dvdauthor, which can be used to stitch together dvd images and growisofs: a front end to mkisofs which is smart enough to also burn DVDs. I’ll have to give it a try, as soon as I can think of something fun to do with it.
Hacking Perl in Nightclubs
Alex Maclean thinks of Perl programming as a type of performance art. He improvises new programs that generate music while standing on stage. He explains the framework he created and how he uses it to control sound generating application.
Apple – iMac G5
Apple has just released a new iMac G5, and damn, it does look awfully cute. I like the trend of shrinking the footprint of computers, and in the grand scheme of things, the prices aren’t terrible considering it includes a 17″ LCD monitor and a new 1.6ghz G5 processor for only $1300. Very cool stuff.
RNC protests: Bikes Against Bush organizer arrested
BoingBoing reports that Joshua Kingberg was arrested at the RNC in New York for operating his bicycle mounted dot matrix printer. It’s an enormously cool hack: you basically ride the bike and it leaves a message in its trail in the same way a dot matrix printer works. The message is written in a water soluble chalk solution which washes right off. A very cool idea, and a pitifully sad day for free expression that he was both arrested and his cool gizmo confiscated.
But then the RNC is not known for its humor.
How-To Tuesday: Make 3-D photos
Those lads at engadget.com have a nice tutorial as part of their How To Tuesday series on producing 3-D anaglyphs using free software. It’s not rocket science, but it’s a nice link.
Holy Niche Market, Batman! — The Wave Pillow
Engadget reports on The Wave Pillow, an Internet enabled pillow that connects to a server and checks the waves at a beach that you specify, and then vibrates in time to the waves. Supposedly then, you can decide to either wake up, grab a surfboard and miss your classes, or alternatively roll over, go back to sleep and miss your classes.
BatBox installed on Linux Router
Just an update on the Linksys WRT54GS router that I bought. I’m as yet too chicken to reflash it, but I did install BatBox on my system. It just creates a ramdisk and installs some basic software onto the system, including a simple telnetd so you can log in. If you look at /proc/cpuinfo, you get
system type : Broadcom BCM947XX processor : 0 cpu model : BCM3302 V0.7 BogoMIPS : 199.47 wait instruction : no microsecond timers : yes tlb_entries : 32 extra interrupt vector : no hardware watchpoint : no VCED exceptions : not available VCEI exceptions : not available dcache hits : 4229955107 dcache misses : 25173 icache hits : 540860934 icache misses : 4080842876 instructions : 0
Nifty!
How to make a Smoker from a Trash Can
GeekDIY has a nice little project: How to make a Smoker from a Trash Can. It’s very similar to Alton Brown’s cardboard box smoker, but a little more refined and permanent. Interestingly enough, when Alton Brown was interviewed on NPR, he actually constructed very similar smoker. I could really use some smoked salmon, I’ll have to think about building one.
Unmanned Flight with Microsoft Flight Simulator
Slashdot is running an article about a Cornell group who built an unmanned model aircraft using rather conventional hardware and Microsoft Windows XP embedded. What intrigued me most about the story was that the group tested their algorithms for flight control by using them to control a simulated aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator. A brief dig turned up other projects. Of course, other groups have been working on autonomous helicopter control, such as CMU and SourceForge’s autopilot project. A cool hobby, if you have the green stuff.