Okay, so maybe suggesting more Non-Proliferation Treaties is not a good idea, seeing as the ones we currently have out there right now have proved to be both biased and mostly innefective (Laws are not suggestions, and selective application of a law is illegal)… but I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest another one. World War 2 games, movies, books are a dime a dozen these days, it seems I can barely walk through a day without getting hit upside the head by some sort of reference to the war.
I’ll admit, I dug into it for a while, Saving Private Ryan was awe inspiring, the games were fun while they lasted, and the wealth of history that goes into the fact that it was the last major war that defined modern technological innovation in warfare is all great. But it’s getting ridiculous. A friend and myself were having a conversation about WWII culture in video games the other day, and watching this review of Medal of Honor by the infamous Yahtzee seemed to sum up a lot of that conversation nicely.
We need a new Non-Proliferation Treaty, against all these damn products based around WWII. Continue reading “WWII-NPT”
Jay Burlage is an architecture in Traverse City, Michigan who has developed a home brew version of motion timelapse. He uses a computer-controlled astronomy tripod which can move at steady rate over several hours. This same technique was used in Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth (sometimes in combination with some masking). Jay uses it here at the start of a hot balloon race.
Continue reading “MiLapse Motion Timelapse”
An Israeli start-up has created a way to store a whole lot of data on optical discs using fluorescence.
The TeraDisc looks like a regular CD, except it’s chartreuse and see-through. Mempile says its disc will start off able to store 600GB to 700GB and in a year will be able to write 1TB worth of data. There are two physical layers of plastic, but 200 virtual layers on the one-sided disc. That means 250 hours of high-definition content or 300,000 digital photos. HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc can currently hold about 50GB of data on dual-layer discs.
The TeraDisc gets its green/yellow hue from the molecules used to store the data. A red laser writes the disc by focusing on a particular point, causing a chemical reaction so that the fluorescent molecules change state. The laser reads the disc by looking for the presence or absence of fluorescence.
Continue reading “TeraDisc: Next-Gen Disc Storage”
In the first Asian Cup an Iraqi team entered since the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, the multiethnic team have come out as champions, defeating Saudi Arabi 1-0! Throughout Saddam’s reign various players had reported abuse by the regime, including torture allegations as punishment for the teams faliures.Regardless of the punishment, results were never achieved, making today the first time Iraq has ever won the Asian Cup in it’s history.
So a friend of my linked me to this video which teaches you how to use different command lines in a google search to find free downloads of whatever files you want. This is a faster alternative to using Limewire or even some bittorrent links. Thinking this pretty neat, I went and checked out his site and he had since made a tool for music searching in particular. And here is a video on how to use it.
Continue reading “JimmyR.com and Making Google Work for YOU”
About a week ago I’d gone down to DC’s famed 9:30 club to watch a performance by The National. While the show was all well and good, the starting band Talkdemonic pulled off a set that really trumped everything that came after it. The band is composed of multi-instrumentalist Kevin O’Conner and Lisa Molinaro. The live set features O’Conner meshing untraditional drumbeats with the samples of instruments on his laptop, as Molinaro accompanies on the viola, adding a rich texture to O’Conner’s mix of Post-Rock, Folk and Hip-Hop. I just picked up their album Beat Romantic, and am thoroughly enjoying it. It was a testament to the strength of the set the duo pulled off, that Matt Berninger, vocalist of the National, stood on the balcony throughout the show, with a massive smile plastered on his face. My only complaint so far is that many of the songs don’t seem to conclude themselves. Which is too bad, as that seems to be the only thing that keeps this album from carving a name for itself. I’ll defiantly be keeping an eye out on these guys, hopefully by their next album they’ll feel comfortable enough to expand their songs to more epic soundscapes, rather then what the album presents, tracks that feel more like individual snippets of great songs more then anything else.
Anyways, to give you a better idea of the band, here are a couple of videos from their live set after the bump:
Continue reading “Talkdemonic”
As far as standard day to day use of a computer goes, without the games, the operating system I’ve preferred to use over the past few years has been Ubuntu. The system runs faster then any other OS on a standard computer, and once you figure out how to maintain it, it pretty much runs itself. One thing I’ve always loved about Ubuntu is its extensive use of the Debian Apt-Get system. For those of you unfamiliar with it, you essentially upgrade your entire OS, including most of the software and drivers on it using two simple command line gestures:
Continue reading “Finding Ways to Almost Love Windows Again: File Hippo and Driver Detective”
The Darkness (360, ps3) comes out this weekend. The game was built around an awesome comic, developed by the team who did the Chronicles of Riddick game (which the 14 people out there who bought it would testify was fantastic) and features the voice of Mike Patton. This trailer sold me on the sound effects alone… could have done without the crap marketing graphics though.