Lucas Dul loves to repair old typewriters and other gizmos. But this is one of the cooler builds he did. He took an old portable B&W TV and converted it into a PC! He even got the old CRT in the device working with the setup. Head over to the link to read more about how he did it.
As a kid, I LOVED catching the latest Knight Rider episode each week. Besides the episodes with KARR, one of my other favorites as a kid was the episode that featured Michael’s evil twin Garth and Goliath: a giant semi with the same protective shell as KITT.
I love visiting locations where my favorite films and TV shows were filmed, and it turns out someone found the filming location for the Goliath episodes. How cool is that?
Want to outsource your work? Consider out-horsing your work instead!
Some clever folks in Iceland created a giant keyboard and let a few of their Icelandic horses play on it.
You can even get them to write your out-of-office email response as well.
Hekla frá Þorkellshóli generated my most recent out of office email for me. High quality!
Yunchul Kim created this kinetic sculpture which looks like some sort of segmented alien robot. It’s on display at the 59th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy through Nov 27 2022.
Chess, like all pursuits, continues to evolve and change over time. Apparently a lot of the chess kids these days are learning new Hypermodernism chess techniques. A school of chess that emerged after World War I. It featured challenges to the chess ideas of central European masters, including Wilhelm Steinitz‘s approach to the centre and the rules established by Siegbert Tarrasch.
The Kings Indian Defense is one of these new openings. Popular in the early 2000’s, it’s popularity has recently been reigned back in by the likes of Vladimir Kramnik who scored excellent results against it, so much so that even Kasparov gave up the opening.
Anyway, if you want to play against modern chess kids, it’s good to know what they’re using these days.
AI is increasing at ever fast rates and in all conceivable parts of our lives. We have commercially viable AI driving cars, AI that can identify pictures and elements in pictures, teach robots how to run/walk/jump and navigate, language bots that can write news and informational articles that are indistinguishable from real writers, comprehend and explain jokes, and even generate art.
Ai-Da is an AI enhanced robot created by Aidan Meller that generates art. It uses its cameras to observe, and then generate a variety of art based on what it sees. You can see her work on her instagram channel.
It appears that Ai-Da is likely just a camera, image filters much like you’d find in Photoshop, and a computer controlled limb to generate art using her robotic arm. The creators seem to also enjoy putting words into her mouth. Lots of them – even to the point of giving a Ted talk. It can come off a bit pretentious, and I even feels like there is a touch of deliberate misleading going on. Folks that don’t understand there is ‘someone behind the curtain’ pulling the strings and putting the words in her mouth might believe it’s the AI’s opinion – which it really isn’t.
Still, it’s an interesting accomplishment – I just wish the creators would be a bit more honest about what they’re doing and no try to convince people the AI itself is coming up with the words and that her artwork is more a product of well-known image algorithms as opposed to intelligence – let alone consciousness.
Ore no Ryomi was one of the earliest cooking games that I ever saw for the PC. David Galindo was inspired years ago by a Japanese import game on a demo disk that came in Playstation Magazine. That game was called Ore no Ryouri (developed by Argent for the PS1) but it never saw release in the US despite being hugely popular in Japan. Galindo made a fan PC game using much more hand-drawn sprites and much more simplified play and released it into the wild as shareware.
Fast forward to today, and there are countless cooking games of all sorts out there – and it’s a very popular genre. But Ore no Ryomi is still one of my favorites. I recommend going and downloading a copy from Vertigo Gaming. It’s freeware, so you have nothing to lose – and it’s a lot of fun!
Fast forward again, and I recently discovered that the calm background soundtrack in Ore no Ryomi 2 is actually the ‘Neighborhood 4’ track from The Sims.
Freya Holmér discusses the math of Bezier curves.
This is a greatly simplified intro to Minecraft technology – but a decent intro to some of the problems and solutions used in the Minecraft engine.
Back in the day, people learned programming by typing in BASIC programs from books and magazines. Besides the books that came with my TSR-80, if there was one book that got my programming bug off the ground, it had to be this one: Basic Fun with Adventure Games. A book I bought for $0.75 at an school book sale when I was around 5th grade.
What made this book so amazing is that it not only contains a full text adventure game you can type in, but it also teaches you how to write your own adventure game – from concept to implementation. I remember being blown away at how good this book was. Even today it holds up to teach the requirements and skills needed to program your first game. It certainly worked well enough for me as a 10-12 year old to completely write my own game about finding the deed to a castle after your rich uncle died. Highly recommend checking it out.
It was the most amazing 75 cents I spent in my entire childhood and still holds a special place in my heart. My copy still sits on my bookshelf next to the college programming textbooks.
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