Arita Japan was likely the first place porcelain was found in Japan. Since then, it’s become the center of Japanese Porcelain. They make some amazingly intricate and delicate porcelain. Arita Porcelain Labs turns out some amazing items.
Here’s a movie about their work:
Tokyo Weekender also did an article on the labs and some other porcelain makers in the area.
Mausimus came up with a really clever conversion of old 2D Sierra adventure games to 3D using a 2.5D camera style (used in modern games like Little Nightmares or It Takes Two) and a voxel engine to keep things blocky and aliased. I think this is really excellent idea – probably the best ‘modernization’ of this style of old game.
He also has some other interesting code projects such as shaderglass.
I keep a drawer full of USB drives – a number of which are used for rescue boot purposes. I recently learned about 2 new alternatives to burning ISO images to separate USB sticks.
Ventoy
Ventoy is a free tool to create a bootable USB drive that boots to a menu and lets you boot from any ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files you have copied to the USB drive.
IODD bootable Virtual CD/DVD/Blu-ray Drives
http://iodd.kr/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/3.png
IODD makes two devices that provide a similar functionality via a detachable USB 3.0 drive. The IODD 2531 and IODD 2541 are hardware devices that allow you to copy ISO images as well as virtual drive images like VHD and VMDK, RMD, and even virtual floppy IMA images. You can select the image, plug it in, and then when you boot from the USB device it exposes that image to the system.
The IODD devices are fairly cheap at around $50 and are a pure hardware solution.
Craft Computing also covers a number of other boot-selecting USB devices:
David Berglas has been performing a card trick for decades that has been known as the Holy Grail of magic tricks. No, it’s not his famous trick of vanishing a grand piano in a crowded ballroom while the pianist was playing it:
His most amazing trick is a type of ACAAN: Any Card At Any Number. ACAAN tricks consist of a spectator who is asked to name any card in a deck — let’s say the nine of clubs. Another is asked to name any number between one and 52 — let’s say 31. The cards are dealt face up, one by one. The 31st card revealed is, of course, the nine of clubs and the audience is astounded.
There are dozens of ways to achieve this affect, but Berglas does something nobody else has been able to do. For decades he has performed this trick by placing the cards on a table and he didn’t handle them again until after the revelation. All other known techniques require the magician to touch the deck in some way. This trick is so stupendous and so flawless that it seems to demonstrate the seemingly impossible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UqnSmzV-5w
Berglas has revealed almost all of his tricks except this one. He even claims that he doesn’t even think he can teach it since it would be like trying to teach someone how to improvise in jazz. It’s a reminder of just how wonderful and full of surprise the world can be.
Update: if you want to see some possible solutions, The Common Magician gives a really good discussion on techniques.
Sublimotion is a fascinating restaurant experience located in Sant Josep de sa Talaia in Ibiza, Spain. As of 2015, the restaurant is considered the most expensive in the world with an average price of around USD $2,300 per person.
What makes it so expensive? First, it is only open from June 1 until Sept 30 with only 2 seating’s of 12 guests per night – making reservations very exclusive. Second, 2-star Michelin chef Paco Roncero utilizes molecular gastronomy in the 20 course tasting meal. And finally, you get a fully immersive VR/Projection mapped experience with actors, laser light shows, DJ’s, virtual reality experiences, and actors.
Give this a look to see what the experience is like:
This isn’t the first restaurant with similar experiences.
Ultraviolet Restaurant in Shanghai was very similar but slightly more playful/experimental feel. Some have accused Sublimotion of having copied their original concept since there are some clear similarities.
There are also lots of other restaurants and dining experiences adding projection mapping to their menus as well. A few years back, I went to Inamo in London that had projection mapped dining surfaces as well as the ability to pay your bill, order more drinks, and even order a cab from the table.
Belgian artists Filip Sterckx and Antoon Beeck, who work under the collective name Skullmapping, to create the interactive eating experience called Le Petite Chef.
If you’ve ever wanted to try out dialup connections for retro purposes, you might think you need a land phone line to do it. You could use a full-fledged telephone line simulator, but those are expensive and actually overkill. Instead, you can use certain voice over IP (VOIP) adapters to generate the dial tone you need. They can be found on eBay for about thirty bucks. Spend about fifteen minutes configuring it and any pair of modems will be able to connect through it. Even better, you could use IP forwarding to make the dialup-to-VOIP work with anyone else in the world via modem-over-TCP/IP.
Which VOIP devices can do this?
Cathode Ray Dude shows you how with a full write up here or watch this video:
If you want to manually make your own device that creates a simulated dial tone, you can check out this write-up that I did previously.
Two pretty cool museums to visit if you are ever in Kent UK.
First the one of the largest private collections of vintage microcomputers in the UK: The Micro Museum in Ramsgate.
This Museum is (Not) Obsolete is right next door and contains TONS of amazing vintage electronics – most of which still works! Working telephone switching hubs, scopes, and lots of crazy modern rebuilds done by Look Mum No Computer.
16 exhibits in on 6 foot box brings museums to the masses
Adventures through some interactive art pieces.
Ryoji Ikeda exhibit at 180 Strand (another video here and review here)
Notional waves Cuppetelli/Mendoza
Behaviors in Light by JNZNBRK (I wonder if it could be even cooler if the pieces moved and formed different patterns and shadows…)
Plane White by Carina Ow (parts list):
Glass portals
Crypto currencies have been collapsing as markets turn south. No matter which side of the argument you fall (Crypto currencies are the future or it is all just a pyramid scheme), I have been surprised by the responses on the crypto currency forums. There seems to be a large population of the crypto currency owners that lack very basic financial literacy – and that is somewhat frightening considering people were being encouraged (and have) mortgaged homes, put life savings, and highly leverage debt to go all in on crypto purchases. Purchases that have dropped anywhere from 60% for Bitcoin to 100% for various stable coins that have gone to zero.
An example of a real lack of literacy was reading forums about the collapse of the Celsius Network that halted all withdrawals, sale of coins, and is now in debt restructuring. Most users have now lost everything. Very few people on the site realized they had signed their digital coins over to the platform and that their deposits were being used to secure highly speculative financial loans from Celsius. This despite the fact these policies were clearly stated on the site.
Even more telling is that a twitter and crypto advocate otteroooo had been sounding the alarm of growing insolvency issues at Celsius for weeks before the freeze and collapse – but was almost universally attacked and yelled down by crypto supporters calling it lies, FUD, and much worse. This thread was describing exactly what was going on and yet users were in complete denial and universally attacked him. Even after Celcius froze their assets and went into debt restructuring, most respondents on the Celsius reddit forum denied it was happening, didn’t understand the implications, and were still in complete denial and attacking people that were sounding the alarm. Even when one of the pinned posts on the front page was a 1-800 suicide prevention hotline.
Sadly, this was all very preventable and it’s not like this is new. I believe crypto is now having their very own 1929 market crash – a crash that is demonstrating the same brutal consequences as that original crash. These kind of bank runs are exactly why the FDIC was set up to both guarantee customer’s funds but also ensure the bank was not over-leveraged.
One can only hope the crypto world has learned a valuable lesson about the real dangers of unregulated markets and that many promises of stablecoins and crypto being stores of value independent of the market have been conclusively proven false. It’s just sad that now many of these forums are posting suicide prevention hotlines for real people losing everything.