Archive for December 9th, 2005
December 21st, 6:45pm is the time for Unsilent Night 2005, where composer Phil Kline organizes a participant-powered sound system. What the hell does that mean!? Bring a boombox, tape-player, or even your DAP mini-speakers, and everyone plays the same 43 minute piece of music! Sort of like a moving ambient abstract performance piece, this has been going on in New York since 92 and is in its second year in San Francisco. Go here for the scoop. Add a bunch dudes dressed like Santa and you’ve got a life experience!
December 9th, 2005
Normally, the stuff on the Make blog would totally excite me - but being without my tools and tinkering equipment right now it more despressing than fun cuz I can’t try any stuff out! But this do-it-yourself macro-lens out of a Pringles can and old camera parts pretty much blew me away. Of course, I don’t have a spare camera body (or a Pringles can for that matter!), but it’s still amazing… It brings to mind my friend who fabbed a vacuum distribution system for his car’s intakes out of Home Depot stuff.
December 9th, 2005
Looks like everything is going full circle. Saw this really cheesey Egyptian themed laser chess set on Gizomodo today and it totally brought back memories of playing laser chess on my Atari ST! Boy, has computer technology progressed a long way since those days! While trawling for images of old skool laser chess, I found this nice set by some college students who put one together for a class. Nice. Now where’s my green laser pointer?
December 9th, 2005
I’ve seen more elaborate Christmas light setups in terms of sheer quantity and gaudity (that’s gaudiness to the rest of you), but this video shows someone who really took it to a new level! I’m curious how this was setup - using MIDI, or perhaps some kind of professional lighting design gear? Escellent overall, but definately needed a green laser or two!
December 9th, 2005
Being a big fan of fansubbed anime torrents, I have to put up with some god-awful typesetting, ass-ugly typefaces, and wost of all, a lack of understanding of video/tv production techniques. While I can decipher yucky script fonts and tolerate bad fake perspective compositing, when the fansubbed subtitles get cut off at the bottom of the screen I am left with no option but to watch on my computer. That is not why I bought my TV. But in all fairness it can’t all be blamed on the hard-working fansubbers. I think my TV needs to see the doctor for a case of excessive overscan. Overscan is when tv manufacturers expand the screen image waaaaay past the edge of the visible portion of the tv to compensate for the vast array of video signals the set may need to display. Someone who bought a $2000 set is not gonna be happy if they get video artifacts such as white bars, static remnants, etc on the border of their screen - so many tv makers set the overscan excessively high. There is a way to fix this - if you are brave enough to risk screwing up your TV. Many sets have a ’service menu’ that is accessible through a secret power-on button combo. In this menu you can change all sorts of crazy parameters such as geometry, color, etc. But this ain’t like your computer monitor’s setup menu - one wrong setting and you can render your television useless. Tempting, but dangerous. To calibrate all this stuff properly, check out these DVDs with test patterns, color tests, etc. (The Avia one can be found as a torrent.)
December 9th, 2005
Way of The Rodent has an uber-cute Katamari Xmas tee-shirt which I would fully buy if it was availble in the US. I guess it’s time to bust out the old xacto knife, masking tape and acrylic paint and make my very own one-off Katamari shirt. What about a series of one-of-a-kind Katamari t-shirts with a different twist on the object being rolled for each design. One day the prince can roll around a …, and the next he can push ‘n’ shove the whole globe! Haven’t seen the Katamari Indiana Jones clip, check it out!
December 9th, 2005
December 21st, 6:45pm is the time for Unsilent Night 2005, where composer Phil Kline organizes a participant-powered sound system. What the hell does that mean!? Bring a boombox, tape-player, or even your DAP mini-speakers, and everyone plays the same 43 minute piece of music! Sort of like a moving ambient abstract performance piece, this has been going on in New York since 92 and is in its second year in San Francisco. Go here for the scoop. Add a bunch dudes dressed like Santa and you’ve got a life experience!
