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Month: October 2022

Armed Portland Protesters

Armed Portland Protesters

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It doesn’t get a lot of press, but Portland protest groups are much more routinely armed and open carrying firearms and assault rifles.

This is not a picture of the Proud Boys (who also bring weapons), but local Portland protesters part of Antifa:

In July 2024, BLM protesters showed up in a residential neighborhood equipped with assault rifles loaded with large capacity magazines – despite the fact Measure 114 had passed banning large capacity magazines in any public space.

Unfortunately, more and more armed people are showing up at these events – which took a deadly turn when protest confrontations have turned to shootings in 2022:

Google keyboard with one row of keys

Google keyboard with one row of keys

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Google Japan has a history of fun keyboard concepts to question common methods of computer input. The latest concept, the Gboard Stick Version, places every key into one giant row.

Google Japan actually prototyped the 5.25 foot long keyboard but many of the detailed use cases for the one-row keyboard are clearly jokes: from using it to measure your kid’s height and get items dropped behind the couch, to using it as a walking stick.

Google will not mass-produce or be selling it but they did release GitHub files with open source firmware, circuit diagrams, and design drawings to build the keyboard yourself.

The GitHub page is careful to note that “this is not an officially supported Google product.” Too bad, I think it would be pretty fun.

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3,200 Megapixels: World’s Largest Camera

3,200 Megapixels: World’s Largest Camera

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The LSST Camera is roughly the size of a small car and weighs three tons. It features a five-foot wide front lens and a 3,200-megapixel sensor that will be cooled to -100 degrees Celsius to reduce noise.

The camera will eventually live atop the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile where it will be tasked with observing the night sky for a decade.

Light will be reflected through a set of mirrors, the largest of which is 27 feet wide. When operational, the 3.2 gigapixel detector will capture 15 terabytes of data per night over its 10-year survey as it investigates 37 billion stars and galaxies.

The large aperture, wide-field optical camera is capable of viewing light from the near ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths and is made up of 189 charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors arranged in a total of 21, three-by-three square arrays mounted on platforms called rafts.

Not only is the sensor the world’s largest, but the lens fits that description too at 1.57-meters (five feet) across, it’s already been recognized as the biggest optic in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records.

For some reason, it reminds me of the famous Wonkavision camera.

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Spray-on dress

Spray-on dress

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Coperni at the Paris fashion showed off a spray-on dress that uses synthetic fibers suspended in a quick drying/evaporating polymer solution.

While some people are calling it “fashion history” others point out there’s really not a lot of new tech or ideas here. Fiber infused spray-on coats like this have existed for decades and painted body costumes have been around a long time. This is very much like how paper has been made by interlacing and drying wood fibers into a solid sheet. It is an interesting development to see at something as high-class as Paris Fashion week. Supposedly the dress could be re-used, but I wonder how easily one could get in/out of it without tearing it. I would guess they might even be able to repair tears with just a spray touch-up to fill the gaps with new fiber.

Or you could go the exact other direction: Dissolvable dresses.

And then there are clothes that become transparent based on your increasing heart rate.

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GreaseWeazle

GreaseWeazle

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Have you wanted to read and write data off your old 5.25″ floppy disks with a modern computer? Or how about reading/writing floppies for Apple II, Amiga, ST, or a host of other systems? Or maybe even hooking up a 8″ floppy? It is possible!

There are solutions out there, but they can easily run $100 or more. I, however, picked up the GreaseWeazle and read some of my old 5.25″ disks. Best yet, it only cost $31 Canadian and is one of the more capable solutions. You can supposedly even use your old DOS floppy drive to read/write images for other platforms.
If you’re interested in seeing it at work on some unusual formats, this fellow gives a walkthrough of using Greaseweazle to read 3″ Amstrad disks. Pretty darn cool.

Items you’ll need:

  • GreaseWeazle by Decromancer – the plug-in USB board that makes it all possible. Plug in 3.5″, 5.25″ and 8″ drives and read/write the flux data for hordes of different formats.
  • Floppy drive – any 5.25″, 3.5″ or 8″ floppy that uses the Shugart interface. This is almost all old PC drives. Even better, GreaseWeazle can use these older DOS drives to read and write Apple, Amiga, ST, and a host of other formats.
  • Floppy disk cable – CablesOnline has a universal floppy cable Item # FF-002 for $9.99
  • Power supply with Molex connectors for the floppy drive. Either using a PC power supply with a Molex connector, or a stand-alone power supply with Molex connector
  • USB A to B cable (commonly known as a “USB printer cable”) to connect the GreaseWeazle to your PC

Setup:

Your floppy drive won’t show up in a command prompt like they did back in the old DOS days or like modern USB plug-in 3.5″ drives. Instead, you have to load and write whole images to the drive in one go. This means you need to work with floppy disk images.

  1. Set up your physical floppy drive to be used with GreaseWeazle.
    1. Attach the power cable to a power supply
    2. Attach the data cable to the floppy drive and the GreaseWeazle
  2. Follow the instructions on GreaseWeazle setup and software setup guide.
  3. Plug in the GreaseWeazle to your computer’s USB port
  4. Install and run GreaseWeazle GUI to format a disk, read a disk image, write a disk image, etc. Again, this only works on whole disk images. You can’t browse at a command prompt or read/write individual files/directories.

Optional but helpful tools:

  1. WinImage is a great tool for creating and converting disk image formats.
  2. Use the HxCFloppyEmulator to examine and covert the raw disk images to anything you need.

Resource Links:

USB-C iPhone

USB-C iPhone

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Apple is going to have to change the charger for its iPhones in the EU starting fall 2024. The European Parliament overwhelming passed a single charging port rule that will require all phones to use USB-C for chargers. Maybe now we can bring some sanity to Apple’s less than stellar cables.

If you can’t wait that long, perhaps you can do what Restore Technique does – modify his iPhone to use USB-C. Definitely NOT for the faint of heart as it involves some serious micro-surgery skills. Not only does it charge, but it also works with iTunes. Amazing work.

This video sort of puts a solid nail in any complaints Apple might claim that changing the port isn’t possible or would present serious issues.

McBroken

McBroken

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Why is the ice cream machine always broken at McDonalds? Isn’t there a way to find out if it’s broke before I go? Yes – rashiq came up with McBroken to tell you.

Projection mapping your dinner

Projection mapping your dinner

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Le Petit Chef brings projection mapping to your plate! I first ran into projection mapped dinners when I was at Inamo in London. One of the best aspects of Inamo wasn’t so much the projection mapping on the plate that showed their different dishes – but the fact you could order more food, drink refills, and even hail a cab and see a livestream of the front door cam to know when it arrived – all from the interface and without having to call over a waiter. Just make your selection on the simple table interface and a runner would bring you whatever you wanted. THAT was a fabulous dining experience.

AI illistrated book get unprecedented copyright

AI illistrated book get unprecedented copyright

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Earlier this year, the US Copyright Office ruled against awarding copyrights to AI systems themselves. “The courts have been consistent in finding that non-human expression is ineligible for copyright protection,” the Office reasoned in February, citing previous cases involving attempts to copyright based on “divine inspiration,” as well as that time someone tried to secure copyright protection for a monkey selfie.

In the face of this, New York-based artist Kris Kashtanova claims to be the first known artist to receive a US copyright registration for Zayra of the Dawn, a graphic novel featuring latent diffusion AI-assisted artwork.

“I was open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page. It wasn’t altered in any other way. Just the way you saw it here,” Kashtanova wrote in an announcement posted to Instagram last week. “I tried to make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI. I registered it as visual arts work. My certificate is in the mail and I got the number and a confirmation today that it was approved.” Kashtanova also noted that they first got the idea to show that artists “do own copyright when we make something using AI” from a “friend lawyer.”

The industry starts taking sides

On September 21, Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the company would no longer accept AI-generative artwork into its catalogue, citing concerns over copyright legality and privacy. “There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery”

Or embrace it!

Even more interesting is that there is now a whole website for comic books created by generated AI artwork.

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