I hadn’t linked Cat and Girl for a while, but Dorothy’s take on the reactions to Michael Jackson’s death is spot on. (via The Null Device)
Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization (via CDM): This is just an incredible presentation. Camera movement is one of the things that sets apart low budget from ‘professional’ filmmaking and it’s good to see the potential for yet another gap narrowing. Indiependents sometimes waste so much time and resources on it, it’ll be nice to let computers handle it so we can do some actual filmmaking.
The Astounding World of the Future!
Auto. Sueño y Materia - Cars and landscapes, an exhibition at the Laboral Centro in Gijon, Spain, looks very interesting. Even though automobiles are pretty ubiquous still, exhibitions like this make me feel the car is already a 20th century anachronism…
China blocks Hummer takeover, because of the environment. →
That’s right, not even China wants Hummer. Ouch. (via The Null Device)
I guess this is Being A Man Sunday. Here’s a japanese website with How-to videos on useful topics such as tying a necktie, doing some ironing, shining shoes or entertaining guests with magic tricks. I’m ashamed to admit I’m still mastering the T-shirt-Do. (via A Continuous Lean)
The trailer for Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. Put simply, the best Shakespeare film adaptation (since it’s an adaptation of MacBeth), and high on my Best Movie Ever shortlist. No cinematic moment gives me the goosebumps as much as that ending. Makes Arthur Penn, the guy who shot that ending to Bonnie and Clyde, look like a wuss.
Dial Hard: So funny. Jonathan Glazer did a few Stella adverts, I wonder if this is one of those.
The rather interesting blog The Map Scroll has a post on Why We’re Fucked, that is, the world’s humungously uneven Balances of Trade.
You already know the United States owes a lot, China is owed a lot, however the true story lies here, in a per-capita account balance map. Americans and Australians, still not surprisingly, consume a real lot more than they can afford, but who else? Iceland, also not surprisingly is a black hole of deficit, but then come Greece, Spain and good old Portugal. Whaa? Us Portuguese spending far more than we can? No way, I’m sure we earned all those German automobiles with hard labour!
Another useless trick
On with the Processing saga. One of the things I’m interested is in live video manipulation and EyeToy-like interaction with the computer. So the other day I went to buy a cheapo webcam so that I could do my experiments without risking an accidental punch at my Canon HD camera, besides keeping a cleaner desk. I entered an electronics store, picked up the ten euro camera that didn’t look like a total piece of shit (the images it generates, however, are the glorious crap-o-vision you expect - which is nice), and went to the cashier. Just as I was going to pay I realized that here was a nerdy, badly shaven creature about to buy a webcam. “Hm, quit the mid-90s prejudices and cybersex superstitions”, I thought. “People constantly buy webcams, right? This electronics store sells at least a dozen different models, so there’s as much demand for webcams as for, say, mice and keyboards. Besides, most laptops have incorporated webcams, and people have all kinds of uses for them… It’s just that I can’t think about anything else right now!” I paid for the camera, and the guy at the cash register winks at me. The fucker.
Anyway, I did buy my blob brightness and positioning sensor to get some work done. I’m trying to see if I can come up with a gesture-based interface for something we’re doing at my Master’s, but in the meantime I got to get my Processing confidence level high enough. As a first exercise, I did some eye candy: an application that converts brightness data to depth data. That’s not much, but I’m still learning my way around the JMyron computer vision library, which looks like the fastest shortcut to where I want to be. Since Processing web applets apparently can’t access people’s cameras (which is a good thing, I suppose), you can’t see my experiment online, instead you’ll have to download a compiled application to try it. Both the Windows and the Mac versions require, I believe, Java on your computer, and the latter version is untested, so I’d love to hear from you if it works. There are quite a few options I added to that program, press ‘H’ to see the instructions. Enjoy!
Your logo makes me barf →
A weblog about f-ugly graphic design. Mild when compared with a walk outside. After all, Portugal is the country where authority uses Comic Sans, and where some genius was probably paid millions to come up with this as a brand identity to Europe’s biggest sporting event (thankfully UEFA redesigned that logo to something a bit less humiliating).
Object oriented
During the last couple of weeks I’ve been learning Processing, another tool in my Master’s degree’s utility belt. My workgroup is supposed to deliver a big project in one month and Processing will be our programming language of choice. I’ve meant to learn it for a long time, but there’s nothing like real need to get me to actually do something. So I bought my first programming book in nearly a decade - Daniel Shiffman’s Learning Processing (which besides being a good manual I found a very fine primer on computer programming) - and got on with it.
You can see the results of my first half-decent experiments → here, and I’ll be adding more as I go on. Be careful though - I did some experimenting with (annoying) sound too. All things Processing are actually Java, so there’s a slight chance you might need to install Java on your computer. Enjoy!
Alan Clarke’s Olympic posters proposals. It’s funny people (including me) find them reminiscent of Otl Aicher’s Munich 72 posters, even though we find they were actually quite different when we actually look at them. Given the strangeness of the 2012 games’ logo, perhaps Aicher’s psychedelia would be a more fitting choice.
