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"DAController is a wrapper class for use with the proCONTROLL joystick library written by Christian Riekoff for Processing. It encapsulates the two analog sticks and all the buttons found on a typical dual analog controller." Ooh.
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"We'll know we're doing it right when half of the pages are ugly."
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"RACER is an analogue recreation of a coputer racing game in the style of the classic WipeOut. It consists of a modified vintage arcade machine, a RC model car with a wireless camera, an a self-constructed racetrack/game level made entirely from cardboard." Brilliant.
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"It fools the government into thinking Local Development Agencies (LDAs) attract young creative people in “the regions”, and it fails to support the local young talent who probably prefer hanging out with their laptop in a place with perfect coffee. After all that’s how the Royal Society was created… I’ve been up and down the UK and those innovation spaces have the worst coffee in the universe. Just saying."
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"Herzog Zwei was a lot of fun, but I have to say the other inspiration for Dune II was the Mac software interface. The whole design/interface dynamics of mouse clicking and selecting desktop items got me thinking, ‘Why not allow the same inside the game environment? Why not a context-sensitive playfield? To hell with all these hot keys, to hell with keyboard as the primary means of manipulating the game!" Brett Sperry, of Westwood, on the making of Dune II. Via Offworld.
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"Changing the Game (order via Amazon or B&N) is a fast-paced tour of the many ways in which games, already an influential part of millions of people’s lives, have become a profoundly important part of the business world. From connecting with customers, to attracting and training employees, to developing new products and spurring innovation, games have introduced a new level of fun and engagement to the workplace.
Changing the Game introduces you to the ways in which games are being used to enhance productivity at Microsoft, increase profits at Burger King, and raise employee loyalty at Sun Microsystems, among other remarkable examples. It is proof that work not only can be fun–it should be." I shall have to check this out.
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"As a result, vendors here are more likely to decline to sell you something than to cough up any of their increasingly precious coins in change. I've tried to buy a 2-peso candy bar with a 5-peso note only to be refused, suggesting that the 2-peso sale is worth less to the vendor than the 1-peso coin he would be forced to give me in change." They're running out of coins in Argentina, and it makes for a seriously odd situation – and a reminder of the differences between value and worth.
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"The artist Keith Tyson is offering 5,000 Guardian readers the opportunity to own a free downloadable artwork by him. The costs you'll have to bear are those of printing out the work on A3 photographic paper – and framing, if you so choose… You will be asked to enter your geographical location – which forms part of the unique title of each print."
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"The media would have us believe that those with the best ability in Parkour require and condition to bodies of hypermasculine levels, and the first notions of this concept seem quite logical. However, it is known to any traceur that the spectacle of the masculinized body is not in necessary relation to one’s ability of movement. Mass media tries to paint another picture with a careful selection of handsome, muscular men as traceurs… At its simplest, the hypermasculine spectacle is an easier sell to masses. However, our problem does not end at the body. It is not only the body that is masculinized, though, as we see the same pattern occurring to the discipline itself." Interesting article on Parkour and gender; specifically, the hyper-masculinisation of the art by the media.
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"Over three years ago I set a goal for myself. That goal was to have a max level character for every class in the game… Tonight, at long last, I’ve finally achieved my goal." Blimey.
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Lots of suggestions for simple but yummy puddings here. Will need to check this list out again.
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"If you need to perform data analysis, provide graphics for your users in your webapp, or produce high quality plots I encourage you to investigate the combination of ruby, GSL and GNUPlot." Looks good. I should probably give this a poke some time; could come in handy.
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"Feed cake to the cat for a megaburp; use the owl to block bullets." Lovely: you control the fat cat *and* the owl; the owl makes a path for the cat. It's slightly bulletty in places, and juggling two controls is tricky, but still quite laidback. A lovely, lovely flash shmup. The artwork and music helps, too.
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"So much joyful digital stuff is only a pleasure because it's hugely convenient; quick, free, indoors, no heavy lifting. That's enabled lovely little thoughts to get out there. But as 'digital natives' get more interested in the real world; embedding in it, augmenting it, connecting it, weaponising it, arduinoing it, printing it out, then those thoughts/things need to get better. And we might all need to acquire some analogue native skills." Yes. I am slighty frustrated by the attitude that you can make anything physical with an Arduino and some other stuff. It's the "other stuff" that's the important bit.
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"Our tireless multi-touch team is pleased to announce another bit of software meant to make your prototyping life a bit easier, via support for using a wiimote with our flash API to quickly turn any TV or projection surface into a multi-touch environment" Nice, simple, hacky.
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The comments thread on this is pretty epic, and I'm really not wading into that one. Suffice to say: it's quite a while before somebody mentions the word "criticism", and it's not in the main body of the article at all. That's the important word, to my mind.
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"Of all the adverts I’ve seen this year, I think this (late entry) surprised me the most. Not because of the concept – the hilarious coincidence that sometimes people who are not famous share names with people who are famous has been used before – or the clumsy copy. It surprised me because I actually know the person in the photograph. And she really is called Julia Roberts." So do I. She really is, you know.
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Lovely article about the White House cinema, the first occupant of which was Eisenhower. I came upon this post-"If Gamers Ran The World" if only to find out who the first film-literate (ie: willing to have it inside the White House) president was. The article is a gem.
Swings and readouts
07 November 2007
My colleague Lars has just bought an Epson R-D1. If you’re not aware of it, it’s a digital rangefinder (roughly modelled on a Voigtlander) that takes Leica M Bayonet lenses, is hard to find, and noticeable cheaper than a Leica M8.
It’s obviously a niche camera: M lenses aren’t common nor cheap, the rangefinder is hardly a mass-market camera paradigm these days, and it’s largely manual – aperture priority, manual focus.
One thing that really caught my eye – and that I initially dismissed as ersatz Japanese retro-fetishery – was the readout on the top. Which looks like this:
To explain: the largest hand, pointing straight up, indicates how many exposures are left on the current memory card. As you can see, the scale is logarithmic – 500+ is the maximum, and as it counts down, the number of remaining exposures is measured more accurately.
The E-F gauge at the bottom measures not fuel, but battery power.
The left-hand gauge indicates white balance – either auto or one of several presets.
Finally, the right-hand dial represents the image quality: Raw, High, or Normal.
Once you know what it means, it’s a wonderfully clear interface: your eye can scan it very quickly. It’s also hypnotic watching it update. To alter the image quality, for instance, you hold the image quality lever with your right hand and move the selection knob (positioned where the film-rewind would be on a Leica) with your left. As the quality alters (and the rightmost needle flicks to the appropriate setting), the exposures-remaining needle swings around to reflect the new maximum number of pictures.
You can’t always see the benefits of analogue readouts in still photographs; this one is a case in point. Once it starts moving – and you start having a reason to check that readout – their clarity becomes immediately obvious.
So whilst I may have thought this kitsch to start with… it turns out to be one of my favourite features on the camera.
(As for that manual “film advance” lever… I’ll write about that in another post. It’s something I found similarly kitschy to begin with, but understood in the end.)