Are you slapping together that next big startup idea pitch reel? Want to become a streamer or Youtube star? At some point, you’re going to need some background music to fill dead spaces, set the tone, etc. But how does one avoid a dreaded DMCA takedown?
While there are lots of online shops that will sell you royalty-free music, I usually find myself running off to find the amazing amounts of free stuff out there – like this.
Mitxela decided to make his own game console. He built the whole thing: the hardware, bios, sound, and even games (in assembly language no less). It uses an oscilloscope to generate the output.
What a guy. Read more about it here.
The new style of jump starters that use rechargeable battery packs are amazing – but not created equal. It’s worth doing your homework first.
A reminder that things are only as secure as the absolute weakest link – and that is often the doors themselves.
Land lines are getting hard to find these days. Almost as hard to find as old modems.
Back when I was a kid, I wanted to play a network game between two computers in my own house. I achieved this by hooking the modems up in a daisy chain. One modem plugged into the phone line like normal. On the ‘out’ port of the modem, I ran another line from it to the IN line of the 2nd modem. I then had the 2nd modem call our home phone number – which caused our phone to ring, the other modem picked up, and they made their normal connection sounds and connected! I could then unplug modem 1 from the phone line and the computers stayed in contact without issue.
At the time, I thought I needed a dialtone generator or line generator. Little did I know, I could have done it with a simple 9 volt battery and the right sized resistor. Skip along to 8:25 to see how to wire them together.
Nova is an “untethered VR motion simulator,” making virtual reality games and training programs feel more real by rotating in any direction. Their 5.9 foot diameter sphere, which has been compared to a “human-sized hamster ball,” weighs about 1,100 lbs and simulate vehicles of all sorts by being able to move 360 degrees in any direction.
These units are too expensive for the home gaming market, the company leases each Nova unit with ongoing maintenance and upgrades, at a cost of $150,000 US Dollars per year. Eight360 is working with defense forces, mining and forestry industries, where vehicles cost millions of dollars, accidents are a very big deal and training needs to encompass tilt angles.
Scaffolding used to be done a completely different way. With guys like Fred Dibnah.
Once you’re up at the top, you still have to build the plank scaffolding.
A recent Meetup event I went to featured Alexis Menard talking about development for foldable devices.
Check out some current and future developments in the world of VR.
Epic Games and Unreal Engine helped to develop the amazing virtual environments used in The Mandalorian.
As I have reviewed before, this is not done with greenscreens – but instead are projected backgrounds that are rendered realtime based on camera position. This solves almost all the visual problems created when using greenscreens.
As this highlight reel shows, their technique of combining projected, camera-tracked CG environments with live actors and props can be used for all levels of production, not just blockbusters.
I suspect we’re going to see some very interesting applications soon.