Odd. I showed my laser pointer controlled multiplayer missle command at PyCon in March:

http://blog.insightvr.com/?p=12

Posted source for it too...

Note that mine also does not have limited missiles, but it does have chain reactions.

I believe that the argument being made by the makers of such devices (when they bother to make one at all) is that injecting hydrogen gas into air intake aids more complete combustion thus increasing efficiency and reducing emissions. Clearly they are wasting energy to crack water and then burn it, so they must be claiming a pretty incredible increase in efficiency for the hydrogen + gasoline combustion.

oh man... must have neo cube...

Johnny Justice is a jerk, so what?

This officer is in clear violation of the law. Why on earth shouldn't the police be hold themselves to the same standards they enforce on everyone else?

The failure to do so is the motivating force behind disrespect of the police. Cops would do themselves a real favor by being professional at all times.

It seems to me that athletes could use this as a live high, exercise low routine. If supplemental oxygen gives you the ability to continue a workout at a higher intensity then there could be a training benefit. Not sure if the peppermint would help...

I noticed this about two weeks ago when Makezine and Engadget linked to my blog. Suddenly I got pingbacks from 25 articles that all were very similar. I followed them and found that there are many blogs out there that are simply ripping off Engadget and a few that are ripping off Make. They have zero original content and seem to be completely automated. I have no idea how they get enough clicks to make any money, but I guess you don't have to make much if you are fully automated.

I know nothing about this lawsuit but I have purchased super-cheap HDMI and DVI-HDMI cables from Blue Jeans Cable and they work like a charm. I tell everyone that asks to get their cables from BJC.

I think that many many companies have similar multitouch displays. At PyCon a few weeks ago Enthought demoed their multi-touch screens that can take up to 40 touch inputs at the same time. Their displays look very similar to the Lumin display. Their target market seems to be scientific visualization, including easily manipulating 3d visualizations. Very cool stuff.

For about four years I flew to Canada regularly. Air Canada is by far the worst airline that I've ever used. There are several reasons for this.

The first is customer service. There is none. They are rude from the moment you enter the terminal until you get off your flight.

Second is the equipment. The have a very unique mixture of aircraft. I fly regularly and I've been on at least three planes with Air Canada that I've never even seen anywhere else. All were more uncomfortable than the average plane. The worst, a BAE model that had an extremely worn interior that looked like it was from 1969 (orange paisley in 2004?) was easily the loudest plane that I've ever been on. Perhaps the slowest as well. I dreaded Montreal to Boston because of this aircraft. The noise canceling headphones, they do nothing!

Finally, they are completely inflexible. More than once I would arrive at the airport several hours early and ask to fly standby on an earlier flight. My request was always denied. Not because the planes were full. In fact they would tell me that the planes had plenty of room. It was because of my class of ticket. Even though I had purchased a fully refundable ticket they claimed that I could not use that ticket to fly standby on an earlier flight. There wasn't even an option to pay $50 to do so. Flying standby was simply impossible.

I'm not even going to mention the frequent breakdowns, missed connections, or other headaches that I experienced with Air Canada.

US airlines (especially post 9-11) are no joy to fly with. Air Canada is orders of magnitude worse than the major US carriers.

Has bear spray been considered as an option? Might actually be more effective in certain circumstances. Relevant article and research:
http://www.sltrib.com//ci_8699976

Somebody wrote a master's thesis on this? Wow.

I was messing with PySight on my Mac a few months ago and wrote a filter that does this with video from the iSight camera. It looks for pixels that change and figures out what the background is. So if you fire it up while sitting in front of your computer you appear until you start to move. Then parts of you disappear as you reveal the background. New people walking into the room never appear unless they hold still for a while and are detected as background.

Xn,

Y r ls jrnlst, crrct? nd y'r pstng n prtty gky st, n? Mny f yr rdrs hv dgrs tht rqrd thm t s th trm "bggng th qstn" prprly. wld thnk tht t f cnsdrtn fr th dmgrphcs f yr rdrshp nd th fct tht y s th wrd "rprtr" n qts n ths stry tht y wld tk th cr t s th trm "rss th qstn" f tht s n fct wht y mn t sy.

I don't think that "begs the question" means what you think it means...

BluHeron,

I can't tell from your image what the scale is. How far away is the drilling from the work?

I'm well aware of the landscape. My grandfather was an owner of Fort Ranch on Promontory Point and we went out pretty frequently. I've also spent 18 months working at the Thiokol plant. So I know how "pristine" the environment is.

While I certainly think that Spiral Jetty is worth preserving, I also think that it is pretty durable given that it is a pile of rocks that is frequently under water. I doubt anyone is looking to actively harm it.

If you've ever flown into SLC airport and looked out the window then you've seen that much of the area surrounding the Great Salt Lake is already in use as evaporation ponds and who knows what else. You'll certainly see some weird colors of water when looking down from a plane.

In any case, it isn't clear from the post or the pdf how close this will be to Spiral Jetty or what the impact would be. Spiral Jetty is actually underwater much of the time as the level of the lake rises and falls due to not having any outlets.

All that is clear is that they plan to drill from barges. Unless they're drilling right on top of the spiral then I'm not sure how they'd harm this particular pile of rocks.

While in Brazil I decorated my guitar case with currency. The money had a half life of about a month so a bill that would buy a week's groceries in January would be small change by June. I managed to cover quite a bit of the back of the case and wrap all the way around the side without using the same bill more than twice.

While there I also found a sidewalk that was pretty solidly covered in old coins pressed into the cement.

The strangest/best pizza I've ever had was from Pizza Fone in Campinas, Brazil. It was "pizza com frango, milho, e catupiry" which is pizza with shredded chicken, corn, and a brazilian cream cheese.

I lived across the hall from one of the Clover guys (Randy) for two years. He's very bright and an excellent Ultimate player to boot. They've been working on the coffee idea for a long time now. I'm glad it has taken off. Couldn't have happened to nicer people.

I have already collect sufficient corrugated plastic election signs to build a Darth Vader Tie-Fighter for my son for Halloween this year. It will be big enough to cover him from head to waist and include working LEDs for lasers. I built him a life-sized Thomas the Tank Engine with working wheels out of cardboard for Halloween a few years ago. He enjoyed it so much that I decided to use the more durable plastic for this project. I do need to pick up some rivets though...

Flyingdutchman,

You don't get it. The persistent image is from a standard projector, not a laser. The laser is simply used as a fancy mouse for input to the drawing program.

The GRL Laser Graffiti project is what inspired my Halloween driveway game this year:
http://www.kulturblog.com/2007/11/marshie-attacks-halloween-interactive-driveway-activity/

What a shame that they frakked it up by not simply cutting off the corners. This is made even worse by the fact that they made put a logo in the upper left, thus defeating those that would have cut the corners off themselves.

I think it is entirely possible that this poster is itself the work of cylons.

In the spirit of self-promotion I'll mention that a crappy projector such as this might be perfect for people wanting to replicate my halloween projectors and lasers project on the cheap:

http://www.kulturblog.com/2007/11/marshie-attacks-halloween-interactive-driveway-activity/

I spent $600 on a projector and while it is OK for presentations, it isn't amazing for movies.

This is a local story and I submitted it a few days ago, only to be ignored.

Both the driver and the cop display an amazing amount of bad attitude in the video. Neither one is the good guy here, but the cop seems to go out of his way to be unreasonable and escalate the situation at every turn. He's supposed to be the professional in this situation. A few calm sentences from him explaining that signing the ticket isn't an admission of guilt would have gone a long way towards avoiding confrontation.

The driver is clearly clueless, expecting that the cop has asked him to get out of the car in order to talk to him, not to get shot and fall into traffic. The cop has no intention of having a conversation. Notice how quickly he pulls the taser out once he has the guy out of the car.

Clearly both parties behaved badly and there are simple ways to avoid getting a beat down from the police that the victim here clearly ignores, but from the video this officer was looking for any excuse to put this driver in a world of hurt.

Looking back at All Your Base it strikes me that it is an early example of Web 2.0 style collaboration. The various slides in the video were photoshopped by various gamers and then assembled for the video.

MB,

I spent 8 years as a consultant in IBM Global Sevices, most of that in the wireless practice. One of my co-workers in the practice did the WAP site for Delta. He did a post-mortem at a get together we had in San Diego in 2000 or early 2001 during which he related the above information. That enough detail for you?

A colleague worked on a WAP site for a major US airline. His application referenced whatever database held the actual reason for delays rather than the sanitized version that the public was usually given by crew members.

The airline quickly found that this led to situations in which a passenger would inform those around him of the fact that his phone claimed that the real reason for the delay was not what they were being told. Even more annoying to the crew, the passenger would announce the actual duration of the delay, which would often be several times what the crew had announced.

Interestingly the airline had no plans to change the application. It expected crew members to be honest.

The take home message for me was that the airline admitted to this developer that the crew regularly lies about the reason for and duration of delays in order to keep passengers calm.

Mold it into plastic gadgets? Why not think big? How about making shingles with this as the top layer?

How long until somebody posts and instructable for putting a blue-ray laser in one of these?

Mark,

You're probably not reading here anymore, but if you are it just occurred to me that television was invented by a Mormon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth) so perhaps anytime anyone mentions Romney you could bring up Philo T Farnsworth.

Alternatively you could bring up Under the Banner of Heaven each time someone mentions TV, right?

Pyros,

You'd probably find the Mormon Transhumanist Association (http://transfigurism.org/) interesting. It is made up of Mormons that think the tech singularity will be the starting point for resurrection, immortality, and other religious concepts. They are obviously a very small minority amongst Mormons (most of whom have no idea about singularity) but they seem to be thinking along the same lines you are.

You could always roll your own laser controlled video game and play from a mile away:
http://www.kulturblog.com/2007/11/marshie-attacks-halloween-interactive-driveway-activity/

"The reason I mentioned Under the Banner of Heaven here is because it is one of the most interesting books I've ever read, and I always bring it up when the topics of Mormons come up."

It can be interesting (and it certainly is) without being accurate scholarship. Seriously though, you post on Romney and feel compelled to include a link to Under the Banner of Heaven? How much do you think Romney has to do with two brothers that left the Mormon church and murdered their sister-in-law? A lot? Are you a journalist or what? Do you bring up Into the Wild everytime somebody mentions Alaska? Do you feel a compulsion to share Into Thin Air each time someone tells you that they went on a hike?

Mark,

I've looked and can't find it. My recollection is that after his initial angry response (which is easy to find) that he admitted to some dramatic license and to some of the sources he used being weak but that he stuck to he main thesis. He certainly didn't denounce his book. If I do happen to find a reference I'll let you know.

However you are pretty comical for bringing it up here. You post an article on Romney and you feel the urge to mention that you've read Krakauer's book? Does that make you an expert on Mormons? Certainly there are better sources for learning about Mormonism, warts and all than this book.

Mark,

Since you decided to bring Under the Banner of Heaven up for almost no apparent reason (other than that it makes you an expert on all things Mormon, right?) I'll take the opportunity to point out that even Krakauer has backed away from many of its inaccurate claims. A look at some of the inaccuracies can be found here.

Krakauer has done a lot of good though in the Las Vegas and St. George areas with the young men that have been kicked out of polygamist groups. I'm impressed that he has taken action and applaud him.

Personally I'm a Mormon that isn't going to vote for Romney or anyone from his party, but I find the overt bigotry that his candidacy has stirred up to be highly entertaining. Imagine if the same level of overt bigotry were aimed at either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama. Instead the media approaches the "Mormon question" as if it were deserving of merit, thus endorsing the bigotry.

Lummels,

Thanks! I'm a bit shocked that a horn in a pumpkin gets attention and the somewhat unique thing I cobbled together has been ignored so far. How many houses have you trick or treated at that have an eight foot tall video game back projected out of the garage? How many doors do you knock on where they hand you a real laser that is in an laser rifle housing and tell you to shoot stuff to blow it up in order to get candy?

Sorry if I sound bitter, but the horn in a pumpkin is ticking me off.

Mark,

You posted that 5 minute supremely obvious hack and haven't posted my interactive driveway game? What gives?

In college I used to comb local thrift stores for old Apple ][ monitors that I would then rewire such that they could be connected to a stereo and the signal would go through the coils at the back of the CRT. It was very "reactive" to the music and I made a few for friends, one was an old school Mac. Good luck doing that with todays LCD displays.

Try Dublin Dr Pepper for Dr Pepper made with cane sugar. HFCS should be a scandal simply for economic reasons, not to mention taste and health reasons, I don't know why it isn't.

I've always thought that someone would eventually build small wireless speakers (not headphones) into a bike helmet so that you can hear your music without disturbing others while still being able to hear traffic.

This idea is as old as pressurization. In fact carbonated beverages already do this. The perfect Coke is one from Mexico in a glass bottle that is cooled to the point where when sealed it is all liquid but when you open it the decompression cools it enough to cause tiny bits of Coke ice to form in it.

As for taking this effect to the next level and actually using it to chill a warm can or bottle of soda, there was a guy in my dorm in 1992 that was working on prototypes for this. The challenge is to find a way to build it into the can for a reasonable price.

One very cool aspect of the Canons is that for quite a while they've made an API available for the top of the line PowerShots that allow them to be controled via USB. So you can set up the camera to say, monitor its preview stream for motion and then take a high rez shot.

I'm surprised somebody hasn't hacked up a software version of this that will run off a tablet pc, or better yet, an iPod touch/iPhone.

Probably not the best choice of name. The very similar name Syncrete was that moniker of an expensive fiasco in Utah:

In an attempt to improve the interstate, UDOT resurfaced a section of I-15 near Salt Lake City with a synthetic cement called syncrete (1989-1990). Syncrete proved to be less than the superior surface it was advertised to be, and the freeway surface began crumbling shortly after the project's completion. In the end the UDOT tore out the syncrete and admitted that the experiment had been a failure.

Anybody know if there is a car-mount model that will play DIVX discs or that integrates nicely with iPod? Our current car player has RCA inputs that I can hook to an iPod, but that solution is a bit messy.