Robot Art
Kirsten Anderson over at Right Some Good has posted some great art by fellow artist Brian Despain. His work has the sort of tone I love (a la steampunk/Myst) and features another geek fav – robots! What more could you ask for. I’d hang this on my wall.
Perhaps I should check into that…
Meanwhile, check out Brian Despain’s website .
Strung out on science fiction.
Being a dork, I love all things sci fi – be it movies, books or technology. Browsing my newly-subscribed RSS feed, I read about the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, an interview with the horned-rim glasses guy from Heroes, a article lamenting the USA’s lack of futuristic vision when it comes to architecture, robots and maglev trains, and a review of fuels used in all the great sci-fi franchises. (Did you know the Battlestar Galactica takes Tylium in its tanks?)
This site definitely satiates my need for all things geek.
Thanks, Lifehacker !
The Road Ahead
Thanks to Jeff Pepper over at 2719Hyperion for sharing this clip from the 1958 Disneyland “Magic Highway USA”. You can read more background from his earlier posts here and here. Apparently, we aren’t as advanced as predicted. It would be cool to have my car wash and refuel itself.. I really hate stopping at the gas station.
Thinking of Switching (again)
In my office I have a PC & a Mac G5. Even though I do most of my work on the Mac, I just can’t give up my PC for gaming and Quicken. But with the new Intel-based Macs, and Parallels , I can run Windows XP as a 2nd OS on the Mac (forget about Vista… I don’t want to run that POS).
So this video seems appropriate for my current opinion of the ole’ Microsoft.
SeatQuest Visual Ticket Finder
If you love shows and concerts, this is the best tool for finding tickets. It’s a visual map of the venue with available seats indicated as blue dots. Just find your seat and click buy.
This is the biggest pain I find with “other” ticket sites; I have to find the seating chart which is usually not very clear as to where the seats actually are.
The program is still in beta, but I hope to see it continue to develop. It’ll be my first choice for finding tickets.
The Dragon Queen and The Wanderer
Wanderer of Space, Vargo Statten, 1950 Scion / Planet Stories, Summer 1941, Love Romances
I just finished reading Worlds of Tomorrow – The Amazing Universe of Science Fiction Art by Forrest J Ackerman. I picked it up at Half Price Books a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been trying to learn more about design and art from the 1800′s up through the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s, especially involving predictions of the future.There are several magazines that were published in 30′s, 40′s and 50′s that featured science fiction shorts by sci fi greats like Isaac Asimov, H.G. Wells, and Robert Heinlein. They had titles like Wonder Stories Quarterly, Amazing Stories, and Startling Stories. The cover art was just as fantastic as the stories within. Worlds of Tomorrow features these covers and includes narrative about the history of the culture and writers that envisioned them.
If your a sci fi fan or a fan of sci fi art; or even if you are just looking for a good laugh, check out this book.
I shared these two because half-naked women were a staple of many of these covers. I just thought it was interesting to see half naked men for a change. I’m just not sure how practical a g-string would be for wandering space, or riding dragons. And how about the name “Dragon Queen”?
DCI 2007 Highlights
Just a few of my photos taken at this year’s Drum Corps Championships in Pasadena, CA. You can see them all, including scores, here.
I made this with animoto, the best slideshow generator out there. You can upload your own photos or import them from photo sharing sites like flickr. You can also upload your own music you pick from their library. animoto then generates the video complete with effects. The free service is limited to 30 second videos, but you can create full-length videos for $3 each or $30 unlimited for a year.
Where Do I Sign Up?
I want one of these… remember Tom Cruise manipulating graphics in The Minority Report?
The Paleo-Future is Here (or not)
There’s a certain class of design I’ve always been attracted to; I find it fascinating to see how the past saw the future, either the one that has come and gone, or is still yet to be (or not to be). My favorite sci fi reads are those heavy with scientific speculation on the big questions… faster-than-light travel, moving stars, encountering bewilderingly advanced species. But I also enjoy classic sci fi like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. More than just the plots, I love to see how the greatest scientific imaginations of their time saw the future. It often comes out as a mix of new ideas blended with now outdated ones; like a man traveling home from work in his self-driving car only to be greeted by his wife who meets him at the door with a cocktail, a back rub and dinner on the table.
I also love to explore design from yesteryear looking forward. Interestingly, this often comes back to Disney’s Imagineering. But thanks to great finds like Paleo-Future, I can finally get my fill of this odd attraction. And what an apt name for something I’ve been unable to easily define.
So here’s to the Paleo-Future and the future that never was! And to commemorate the occasion, here’s a great sample, “Transportation Exhibits at the New York World’s Fair (1964)”
It’s Easier Than You Think
One Man’s Blog has written an enlightening post about how easy it easy to crack passwords. I never realized how much a difference a single letter (and using upper and lower case) can make.
Here’s a table from his post reflecting how much (or little) time it takes to crack your password. It looks like I’ll start using 7 character passwords with both upper and lower case characters. And I’d definitely think twice about using a pin number for anything!
And if you use 14 characters, only Q would have the time to crack it.
| Password Length | All Characters | Only Lowercase |
|---|---|---|
| 3 characters 4 characters 5 characters 6 characters 7 characters 8 characters 9 characters 10 characters 11 characters 12 characters 13 characters 14 characters |
0.86 seconds 1.36 minutes 2.15 hours 8.51 days 2.21 years 2.10 centuries 20 millennia 1,899 millennia 180,365 millennia 17,184,705 millennia 1,627,797,068 millennia 154,640,721,434 millennia |
0.02 seconds .046 seconds 11.9 seconds 5.15 minutes 2.23 hours 2.42 days 2.07 months 4.48 years 1.16 centuries 3.03 millennia 78.7 millennia 2,046 millennia |
I encourage you to read the entire post, but he makes one very important point:
If you use the same username and/or password for several different sites, (like most of us), you’re at greater risk, because a hacker won’t try for your bank account first (since it’s probably the most secure). Instead, he’ll try to hack your info from say, an e-card account. And since your browser’s cache will contain info about the sites you visit (you can prevent this), he’ll have a convenient way to find out that you have an e-card account. Since this type of site might be easier to hack, he can use a brute force attack to obtain your username/password. And once he has it, chances are he’ll be able to use the same username and password for your credit card and bank accounts.
So you might want to revisit your passwords; I know I am.
Thanks One Man’s Blog and Lifehacker.
RocketDock (you’ll always be…)
If, like me, you’re a Mac and PC user, then you’ll probably love RocketDock. It’s a freeware (!) Mac OSX dock for Windows (including Vista). Here’s are just a few of the features (from their website):
- Minimize windows to the dock
- Real-time window previews in Vista
- Running application indicators
- Simple drag-n-drop interface
- Multi-monitor support
- Supports alpha-blended PNG and ICO icons
- Icons zoom and transition smoothly
So if you’re a tweak freak like me or just like trying out new fangled widgets, check it out.
Springfield, USA
If you’re a fan of The Simpsons (as I am), you have to check this out. It’s a map of Springfield complete with Evergreen Terrace. It’s best viewed on flickr, so you can see all the notes. You can view a much larger version on flickr as well.
Guide to Springfield – The Simpsons
Originally uploaded by Dan_Cameron.
Online Desktop?
In me never ending search for a solution that will keep my contacts up to date on my laptop pc, my home pc and my Mac, I stumbled across a very cool Web 2.0 site. DesktopTwo is a web-based app package that looks and acts like your personal desktop; complete with email, address book, rss reader, instant messenger, file browser and 1GB FREE (for now) storage.
I haven’t yet decided if it’s any kind of solution for what I was searching, but it’s always nice to find an example of great design and origina ideas. I know there have been other similar attempts, but I don’t think any have been this successful or nice looking.
My first HDR
I’ve been trying for some time now to get around to making an HDR image. I first learned of HDR when I started following Arnold Pouteau’s work on flickr. He’s posted alot of amazing HDR images of NYC.
If you’ve never heard of HDR (High Dynamic Range), it involves combining 3 different exposures of the same scene into one enhanced image. I used Photomatix which makes it easy.
Now that I’ve figured it out, I hope to do more with HDR.
For Music Lovers
One invaluable find for a music lover is Pandora. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. It allows you to specify a favorite band/artist as a starting point, and plays music in the same genre. It learns your tastes and is a great way to learn about new artists; especially if like me, you have a knack for for non-mainstream music.
I just discovered another cool service called Musicovery, which does much of the same thing but has a very cool interface that allows you to visualize similar artists in a map-like layout.
UFO Photoshop Contest
Worth1000.com has some great Photoshop contests. A recent one was for UFOs, and I think this is one of the best. It as a bit of a Myst feel, which has some fantastic art. Check out the rest of the contest entries; and if you don’t already, check back at Worth1000.com for other great Photoshop contests.
To the Stars
I look forward to the day when we step off our little blue sphere and begin to live in space. Of course, this won’t happen in my lifetime, but maybe in my grandchildren’s lifetime.
NASA has a series of artist’s renderings of space colony concepts from studies conducted at Ames in the 70′s. Being a Sci Fi dork, I find these fascinating; I’m always fascinated by ideas about the future as seen from our past.
Hear me Now and Listen to me Later
I’ve found a very cool interactive listening service at pandora.com, where you can build your own radio stations simply by suggesting an artist. I suggested BT, and they began playing similar music. As you listen, you guide them by indicating whether you like what you hear or not. And they don’t just suggest music by genre; for any song, you can click “why did you play this song?”, and it’ll tell you why. Here’s an example of why they played “Greece 2000″ for me recently:
Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features trippy soundscapes, prevalent use of groove and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.
Very cool, very cool indeed…
Don’t Try This at Home, Kids
Or apparently, for $30, you can. Flickr user tesla1000 has posted a series of home made Tesla coils. Woudn’t you love to greet your friends with this for your next party?
More than likely, they’d be afraid to come too close to your house.
They’d be smart.
Finally, A Smart Fuel!
It seems they’ve finally found something useful for all the BS in the world. No, really!
Scientists in New Zealand how made biodiesel using algae floating on sewage ponds. The company claims to be producing 1 million litres of fuel by the end of the year!
Now, if we can just build windmills to capture all the hot air coming out of Washington…
What If?
What if I could put Nancy Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Hasselhoff, and LaToya Jackson in a White House sanctioned music video? Oh, wait, it’s been done!
Frackin’ Awesome!
Ok, you sci fi geeks will know what I mean by “frackin’ awesome”. It looks like Sci Fi is creating a mini-series prequel to Battlestar Galactica based on the creation of the Cylons on Caprica.
I know, I know those of you who haven’t seen it are thinking “you mean that cheesey show from the late 70′s?”; but believe me, the reincarnation of the show is enthralling. It even won the network’s first Peabody Award.
I must admit that I watch Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, and even the new Dr. Who. The writing is predictable and seems juvenile at times; I find myself predicting the next line often and feel like I need to be a hyper active teenager addicted to Doom and Quake to be in the target audience. But I do stick to it, waiting for that 1 in 3 episode when I’ll get to see some above-average special effects and maybe be surprised by the story line.
But Galactica is nothing like anything else on Sci Fi… I rarely am able to predict dialogue and am usually so entranced by the show that I don’t even think about such things.
So if you haven’t seen it, you should at least check it out. And if you happen to get addicted to the show, be sure to check out the mini-series when it comes out!
Extra Greasey Monkey
If you’re not using Greasemonkey and Firefox, you should be! Well, maybe you shouldn’t be; but for a geek like me, it’s the coolest thing since CSS…
Greasemonkey is a plugin for Firefox that allows you to add your own scripts. For example, while del.icio.us is also an extremely cool site, I’ve always thought the site design was pretty basic. Greasemonkey allows me to install my own script that changes the CSS (layout, font, color, etc) for the site when I view it.
I found the script to do this on another awesome site called userscripts.org, which is nothing but user-submitted scripts. Ahhh… OpenSource, I love thee…
By the way, I’ve abandoned traditional bookmarking completely and have converted all my old bookmarks to del.icio.us. It’s a free service that allows you to “tag” a website and save it for later. You can explore others’ tags and you can even integrate your del.icio.us tags/bookmarks into your site (like I have… see the link above).
Ok, so I know that some of you are yawning right now, but you those of you who think MicroCenter is a toy store should definitely check these out!
Will Wright’s Spores
If you’re a big sim geek like me, then you’ve heard of Will Wright. He’s the genius behind SimCity and The Sims. Here’s a video of him demonstrating his latest invention, possibly the coolest Sim game yet… you can take it to the galactic level!
