Tech

This is one of the most fun Tenori-On analogues I’ve come across. It’s really well done, too! Click the squares and put some headphones on. See you in 3 hours.

The makers of CyanogenMod have announced on Twitter that they are working on CM9 and should have a release ready by early 2012. This is very exciting news as the new version of the popular Android OS, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich has a whole bunch of new fixes and improvements over the currently-prevalent Gingerbread releases, which have been around for over 2 years and are a little dated.  It's coming soon! ...

Every man and his dog is playing Skyrim, to the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth of spouses/girlfriends, howling in impotent rage as their man is sucked into a strange world. A world where the less armour a lady wears, the better her armour rating. A world where people don’t freeze to death standing in the middle of a stone courtyard being blasted by horizontal snow dressed in a vest and sackcloth trousers. ...

This is a copy of an article I came across while looking at swordsmithing on Wikipedia and I made a fascinating discovery – nanotubes have been around and in use for much longer than we realise! Science is awesome! Carbon nanotubes are no longer the proud boast of 21st century materials scientists. It appears their discovery was unwittingly pre-empted by mediaeval Muslim sword-smiths whose tough Damascus blades taught the Crusaders the true meaning of cold steel when they fought over the Holy Land. ...

After nearly turning my HTC Desire into a matte-brown and rather expensive paperweight, I emerged on the other side with a bright shiny new phone which now has a whole bunch of things installed on it. The first thing that I did after recovering it is immediately flash Oxygen 2.1.4 on it. It’s an Android 2.3.4-based firmware which was built from Google’s released source code, meaning it’s not some leaked hack job like a lot of the “Desire HD” ROMs out there. ...

While browsing the web looking at videos, I stumbled across a series of clips that were shot on regular 30 or 60 FPS cameras like mine and then slowed way down with incredible results. I was intrigued, as one would naturally be by such tech. I discovered that folks did this with a plugin called Twixtor, which through some mathematical wizardry does some highly impressive things with frame interpolation. What this means is that is seamlessly inserts additional frames between your existing ones in order to slow down the action by quite remarkable amounts. ...

I came across this on DeviantART! It’s a simple (ish) piece of flash programming but it produces some rather pretty patterns and is quite addictive. Spirograph freaks, eat your heart out! Psychadellivision by ~Volcanic-Penguin on deviant ART

Hey folks! I’m going to start to play with time-lapse photography and one of the most useful tutorials I’ve found out there is this one on Vimeo.

A friend linked this to me. It’s a spectacular piece of time-lapse photography. I can only imagine how long this took to shoot.

A ferrofluid is a made up of nanoscale ferrous particles suspended in a carrier fluid such as an oil or even water. They behave in a similar fashion to non-Newtonian fluids in the sense that you can do some rather funky stuff with them. Here’s an art installation! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5Zzm2TXh4 I like science!

A friend linked this and it’s a brilliant idea! Drawing 3D light paintings using a long-exposure photograph and an iPad. Note that I’m not saying “OMGOMGOMGOMG THE IPAD IS AWESUM GET OEN NOW!!1!”. However, what these guys did is bloody clever!

Ok, so as I mentioned in my previous post on the topic – I made some lovely new Tornado wicks (so called after the Tornado weave that is used to make them), following Jez’s instructions on the topic and with some modifications that Alien Jon and I came up with. On Sunday I got the chance to play with them alight and after some fairly heavy thrashing I can now post a pretty balanced review. ...

I just installed a nifty tool on my G1 which allows me to post stuff from my phone wherever I am. Scary! It’s like Twitter Lite! Hope you enjoyed my web design post – I have another in the works about how to keep your data safe and prevent data loss. If you haven’t already, I’d suggest joining DPS where you’ll find a slew of useful photography tips. See you next time! ...