Tim Jacobs created a really cool business card. It’s a fully functional midi stylophone. What an awesome way to make a business card.
He has tons of other projects on his website – including having made his own simple video game console that runs on an oscilloscope as well as programming Tetris, Pacman, and Mario in assembly language. Amazing.
I’ve already written about how movie houses are often giving up on greenscreen and using giant LED displays along with game engines (like Unity) to control what is displayed based on camera movement. It gives much more realistic lighting, better sight lines, no green-screen removal artifacts, and a host of other benefits.
Orbital Studios is one of the houses doing this kind of work. They have some good videos on their website.
They’re definitely still defining these production environments and using some interesting things like Quasar lighting to create light zones around the actors:
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
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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:
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.
Penk Chen created a nifty little computer with a round display. Even more cool, he made the project completely open source – including the 3D printable parts . Just gather up the right parts and give it a go:
I was always a big fan of Manny Calavera’s computer in Grim Fandango. Maybe this is an opportunity for me to make one.
Dinner Party is a VR movie experience that tells the story of Barney and Betty Hill, an American couple who claimed they were abducted by extraterrestrials in a rural portion of the state of New Hampshire from September 19 to 20, 1961. It was the first widely publicized report of an alien abduction in the United States. Their story was adapted into a best-selling 1966 book The Interrupted Journey and a 1975 television film The UFO Incident.
Now, it’s been turned into a VR movie experience. You start by going into a real world 1960’s era dining room set, sit at the table, don your VR goggles, and watch the experience in 360 around you.
Trailer:
Information about how they created the experience:
DALL·E 2 is a pretty astounding new natural language AI system that can create realistic images and art from simple written descriptions. It can also combine concepts, attributes, and styles – all by simply typing in what you want in text.
Below (and on the website) are some examples of what the AI generated from the simple text description.
1. “An astronaut riding a horse in a photorealistic style”
2. “A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art”
3. “Teddy bears shopping for groceries in the style of ukyo-e”
A decent video that covers the state of recent AI developments. It presents capabilities a bit more advanced than the ground-level truth, but it’s a good summary. This video doesn’t even touch on some of the more interesting/frightening deep-fake technologies that can create nearly undetectable faces, facial animations, and chat, forum, and news writing bots (GPT-3).
I do not, however, like the recent trend of this sort of AI coverage that claims there is any ‘consciousness’ to these systems. Even after thousands of years we still don’t even know what makes us conscious, or if that is even a real thing. Despite our advancements, we don’t even have a good definition of life. AI systems are all run on standard Turing based computers operating on nets of what usually break down to linear regression models. Yes, they achieve really amazing feats but technical achievement doesn’t indicate consciousness or intelligence. Your pocket calculator can calculate values better and faster than the best person in the world, but nobody would say their calculator was conscious because it exhibits abilities better than a human’s. Even a single cell found on Mars would be considered ‘life’ – despite the fact it might not be capable of doing more than moving a bit, ingesting minerals from dirt, and splitting.
I have no doubt that AI based systems will be able to match human behaviors so well that they will be indistinguishable from living humans on all fronts: speaking, writing, singing, movement, making art, etc. However, that is not the same as arguing for consciousness or having life – a nut that we haven’t even cracked in the thousands of years we have tried to understand it in ourselves.