Tronix Paintings
Check out these great tronix paintings, now hanging at Progressive Grounds in Bernal Heights:
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From MLK to the Hubble Deep Field
On Martin Luther King Day, I decided to take Sebastian Schmieg’s Search By Image, Recursively project, and start with a seed image of MLK from Wikipedia.
After about a thousand images we arrive at the Hubble Deep Field. Interesting to compare to Sebastian’s project, where he very quickly arrives at the Deep Field when starting with a transparent image.
I took the code that Sebastian Schmieg made available on his Search by Image page and wrapped it in a loop. The modified code can be found here.
Update:
Here is the full 9 minute video. After crawling about 8500 images, the algorithm stopped after it couldn’t find any new related images. We skip the broken images, which leaves us with about 7000 frames:
And here it is with a soundtrack, as suggested by Aaron.
-raj
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Making Dosas!
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Meet Milo!
Milo is our neighbor’s dog… He has grown up to look just like Zara!
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Rollicking robots
From Science Made Stupid. At the time, before Rule 34, this was a hilarious joke. Now it’s hard not to take seriously…
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Occupy Bernal Heights
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Kids Love Petabytes
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And this is why we cyclists should not be allowed to dress ourselves
More racing from the weekend! This time at the Singlespeed Cyclocross World Championships in Golden Gate Park. The only rule in this race is that you have to ride a bike with only one gear and aside from that there are no other rules. It was super fun, ridiculous and crazy!
Here’s the awesome quadcopter video of the event
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Zara at the Archive
Jason Scott (@textfiles) was at the archive.org office last week and took some great pics of Zara, working hard!
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Books
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What a cyclocross race looks like from above
This video was shot by an RC multipcopter at a race I did 2 weekends ago and is pretty awesome!
I noticed it hovering in the air that day and wondered what it was doing there. When I’m at a race, all I see is dust, dirt and gravel, so it’s pretty neat to see what it all looks like from above.
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This is what she gets for running the stop sign
may
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Voyage to the Moon – 19th Century Spacecraft
Sometimes, for fun, I like to browse the illustration archives at the Library of Congress, which is a veritable treasure trove. I found the lovely one above while poking through the Tissandier Collection which contains images documenting “the early history of aeronautics with an emphasis on balloon flight.” There’s no information on the artist though which is unfortunate, but apparently he or she thought we’d get to the moon by bike! (which I kind of like :)
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Pirate Scribblebeard’s Treasure
Kidoodle Apps presents: Pirate Scribblebeard’s Treasure! from Kidoodle Apps on Vimeo.
My super talented friends Michaelangelo and Karen (and their equally talented son Oscar) just made a really fun drawing app for kids! I don’t have any kids…but I sometimes behave like one, and I have to say that my inner 6 yr old approves! I am going to give it my nephews since my brother’s iPad is, for the most part, a very expensive (but compact) kid’s toy (that is all they ever use it for). I especially like the “email” feature that makes it easy for kids to send their drawings to their parents (except I am going to set up the app so my nephew’s drawings come to me :).
You can find out more about the app over here and you can get it at the iTunes store over here!
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Dimple of Tears
mang has been posting build pics of the Dimple of Tears, under construction for this year’s Balsa Man. It was cut on a Lasersaur, and is a homage to David Best’s 2001 Temple of Tears.
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Apple T-shirts and Memories
I was thinking about Apple today, and thought I would dig through some old Apple stuff. Internally, Apple extensively documented the company’s achievements by printing T-shirts. There is a T-shirt made for every team, every product, and every conference. Here are a few that I managed to save:
The Journey Begins
Every new employee gets a “The journey begins” shirt when they join the company as part of the new employee orientation. This shirt is from 2000, shortly after the switch to the single-color logo. I really like how understated this shirt is compared to other Apple shirts, and I’m glad I managed to hang on to it.
Mac OS X Launch
Apple launched Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) on March 24, 2001, and of course there was a T-shirt. Actually, there were several. Another version was given out at the employee launch party at Hanger One in Moffett Field. If I remember right, marketing thought it would be a good idea to set up a casino night or something. A strange way to celebrate something so great. However, Apple rented out Hanger One! A lot of the OS X t-shirts had a giant candy-colored X on the front. Apple liked to call the new Aqua theme “lick-able”.
Here is higher-quality OS X shirt I got sometime later:
WWDC 2001
Of course, every WWDC came with all kinds of swag. This was my favorite: a Steve-style mock turtleneck from WWDC 2001 for staff. Apple gave black leather jackets out to attendees with a blue X on the back, which were pretty tacky, especially compared to these awesome mock turtlenecks.
Back then, WWDC was still held in San Jose. Speakers were briefed by marketing about what to wear, and one of the rules was “no sneakers”. One of my coworkers got up on stage to speak, wearing her staff shirt, but without any shoes. A marketing person noticed immediately, leaned over to our VP, and exclaimed “she’s not wearing any shoes!” He calmly replied, “you said no sneakers“.
WWDC 2002
Here is a speaker shirt from WWDC 2002. Not nearly as awesome as the mock turtleneck!
WWDC 2003
2003 was the year WWDC went from a mid-size software developer conference in San Jose to something completely different. In 2003, Apple moved WWDC from San Jose to Moscone Center West in SF, and announced new hardware, the G5, at the conference. Moscone West was just finishing construction, and the Moscone people promised that a robot billboard would be operational by then, slowly gliding around the outside of the building. Sadly, the robot billboard never came to be.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the tag is cut off from this shirt. By 2003, a huge percentage of my wardrobe consisted of Apple T-shirts. Since I hated looking like an Apple billboard (or looking like I was STAFF anywhere I went), I wore the t-shirts inside out. This annoyed one of my coworkers, and she would sneak up behind me and cut the tags off my shirts.
QuickTime Live
QuickTime Live was my favorite Apple conference. It ran until 2003, when it was it was folded into WWDC. QT Live was a ton of work for my team, but it was also a blast. It was held the Beverly Hilton in LA, which set it apart from most Apple events. The “Develop. Produce. Deliver.” slogan dates this T-shirt to the 2001 conference I think (which was postponed until Feb 2002). Apple had started using short three-word slogans after the “Rip. Mix. Burn.” campaign in 2001.
We had been working hard on MPEG-4 support in QuickTime, and were pretty burned out. MPEG-LA wanted to charge broadcast license fees in addition to the codec license fees for MPEG-4 streams, so Apple very publicly pulled back the launch and successfully got MPEG-LA to not charge broadcast fees for MPEG-4.
2002 wasn’t as surreal as the previous year. Bob and Joe came to see me, and we stayed up way too late. Then I went, sleep-deprived, into David Lynch’s keynote, where he showed a preview of Rabbits. I was totally not prepared for that. Lynch said he shot a lot of this on his front lawn at night, until his neighbors called the cops.
MacWorld Keynote 2005
I worked the keynote in 2005, helping to seat people in the VIP section or something. Engineers usually didn’t get to go to a keynote, so it was kind of neat to be there. Also, we had been working incredibly hard on H.264 and 4-way video conferencing in iChat AV 3, which Steve demoed during the keynote. It got a huge reaction from the crowd, which was nice to hear.
I think these were the embroidered dayglo shirts they had us wear:
Trade Shows
Apple generally prefers its own conferences and expos over huge trade shows like Comdex and CES. However, after QuickTime Live ended, NAB in Las Vegas became an important conference for QT and pro video announcements.
Although I disliked Vegas, it was usually a blast. We usually had an announcement we were working on, so it was always nice to be done with a big project, and I liked driving out to Las Vegas with Peliom. We went through China Lake once to see a friend and got stuck in mountain snow in the middle of a California summer. My foodie coworkers would take me out for great food and try and teach me about wine tasting.
Another trade show we went to was IBC in Amsterdam, which was over-the-top ridiculous. I only went once, immediately after a trip to Burning Man. I had been working on both the Ambience Ambulance and the TikiCrawler, and for some reason I went straight from the playa to Amsterdam. Also, my brother came along. And a bunch of old friends were hanging out in Prague, so they came to see us too. I remember sitting exhausted in the sushi restaurant in our hotel, listening to a very large Elvis impersonator yell at the Dutch waitress who didn’t speak english, because she didn’t know what a “California roll” was. IBC was a trip.
For trade shows, we got higher-quality shirts!
The first Apple Store opening
Apple opened its first store in Palo Alto in October 2001. They gave these shirts to people who showed up on opening day. Lines outside Apple stores are commonplace now, but at the time, the blocks-long line was pretty ridiculous.
WWDC Beer Bash shirts
During WWDC, Apple holds a beer bash on campus for external developers. They issue these bright-colored shirts to employees to help developers find the right people to talk to.
Berkeley Labs
Not an Apple shirt, but Peliom might like this.. A LBL sweatshirt from the mid 90′s!
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Fog Satellite Timelapse
images come from one of many archives of the western region GOES geosynchronous weather sat … example image http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goeswest-lzw/san_francisco/vis/1108091900G11I01.tif
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BART Protest Photos
Cryptome has posted some BART cellphone shutdown protest pics from the Civic Center station.
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The most ridiculous lede burial ever (well, probably not…)
On paragraph number twenty-one out of the twenty-five total of Sellafield Mox nuclear fuel plant to close, the Guardian (UK):
Industry experts noted, however, that the government has an interest in continuing to insist that Mox is still viable. If ministers admitted that Mox was not viable, the government would be forced to acknowledge that the hundreds of millions of pounds worth of plutonium that are stored [at Sellafield] would have to be recognised as a liability on government balance sheets. However the pretence that another Mox plant may be built allows the plutonium to be reckoned a zero-value asset.
…
[Labour MP Jamie Reed, whose ... constituency includes Sellafield] said: “It is now absolutely essential that the new Mox plant is brought forward as quickly as possible. The market for Mox fuel exists and is growing, our plutonium disposition strategy relies upon such a facility and the industry requires it.”
Ooooooops!
(emphasis added, also ta enenews.com)
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For A & T
A few drops of spring water,
pre-dawn, on parched skin;
Clear skies and shorebirds
for this rafted sailor,
not far from home.
24 July 2011
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