Author: Joel

Yay PiPhone! £90! By David Braben!

iBeacon is going to shake things up in the local interaction space.

FPV for Occulus.

Seems like RiseVision is a good open source digital signage application. Does it work with Raspberry Pi? Via Sam Chada.

I’ve managed to avoid getting addicted to Coffee. The Aeropress is a lovely way of making it. How it was invented.

Interesting startup that aims to recognise everything.

JSFeat is a library for doing computer vision with JavaScript.

SimpleCV is a library for doing computer vision with Python.

Image processing on the cloud using OpenCV and Node.js.

I can’t wait to get WebRTC going for multiple camera Computer Vision in the cloud.

Burst of notes by me:

If you want to do non incremental change you have to use the tools of tomorrow. Big data with computer vision is it. Clothes matching apps are just the start. Guardian today. Most of the public can only handle little ideas incremental. Technologists reject too. Intel and Motorola rejected it. Programmers rejected it too. Object orientated that weren’t object orientated in the 90’s. C++ isn’t. The cache of labels. Designer jeans guitar hero syndrome. Humans hate learning curves. Marketing hate even more. Not just themselves. My difficulty with Nike is that they want an idea that is already perfectly tested. Cave person would be satisfied. Something that in our genes that makes it interesting. Would the bike be accepted if it was invented today. Regular world is a low pass filter. iPad doesn’t have a help or an undo. 5 % idea tools. 85% care about other opinions. 1% inner idea tools if you combine too. Human universal things – hardly have to be marketed if you want to make money. The ghost – the stuff that’s here in the dark. We are hallucinating  the whole time. Size illusion with thumbs at double distance. Seems the same size. What the ghost knows and the dream is seeing is the mix. What is in our ghost is important! Normal means almost asleep. And we don’t even think we are. E.g. you can just dick around with Linux all day – it’s just a bunch of bad ideas, but it feels useful. Reading and writing is hard. Model based science. Democracy. Equal rights. Perspective drawing. Progress! Only 18th century did progress get invented. Are hard things. Ford made engines. Leonard’s couldn’t. Ford innovator. Leonardo inventor. Mostly knowledge dominates IQ. Issac Newton changed the context of how humans think. A new way of thinking. Unimaginable amount comes from Newton Silicon Valley. Present is least important time we live in! Now is just a construction. That’s how USA got built. We don’t need a king. Screw the present. The past opens up. Let’s us look at more history and also new present. Sample past to make vision to combust to make new things. Problem solving is what we are built to do. Problem finding is what you want to do. Finding good problems. Wayne Gretzky did this. 30 year Wayne Gretzky curve. Put the puck 30 years out. It’s just something that would be cool or important to have. In 1968 thought laptop and pad computers were inevitable. Because it’s 30 years out. What would that be 10-15 years out? Hmmm. How do we get hardware and software for a new kind of thing. You can get that by paying. Moores law in reverse, double every year from now for cost. Alto was that machine. That cost in the future.  80,000 machine in 1983. UI in experiments. Need to do 100,000 of experiments to get good UI. Didn’t need to optimise. Drink beer and experiment. Didn’t save code!

“The United States Air Force (USAF) is taking flying lessons from geese and spiny lobsters. This may seem like the mother of all bureaucratic errors, but there’s actually some pretty solid science behind it. In exploiting a phenomenon known as “vortex surfing,” the USAF has found that by having C-17 cargo planes flying in formation, it can reduce fuel consumption by up to ten percent.”

“Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room,” said Tony Short, a quantum physicist at Bristol. “Entanglement builds up between the state of the coffee cup and the state of the room.”

What happens when Vine starts streaming live?

How Twitter uses Scala. 

A treasure trove of high resolution images from NASA’s vision of the future in the 1970’s. I’d like a t shirt of some of these please. Surely there should be an app for that?

Micro robots FTW from SRI International and DARPA, via Kottke.

Loads of visual programming languages, via Kyle.

Five common usage mistakes by David Foster Wallace.

Chuck for real time music.

The future of storytelling? I always wanted to make a whale that vomited rainbows. For reals!

Rachel’s terms for working would be great for lots of freelancers and the like. Useful education for clients too.

A new language to make image processing fast. Halide.

The new world of Hardware Startups.

The latest fun with Python.

“The works in the show are the result of a computer algorithm written by Lund. By analysing and categorizing a wide range of artworks, by the most successful contemporary artists, a set of instructions were generated explaining, step by step, how to make the most successful works of art. The artist then simply made the work following the instructions. In The Fear of Missing Out, important categories from the art world such as authenticity, artistry, talent, and creativity are questioned. The title also refers to the urge to be a part of a transparent information society made up of an overarching digital network.”

Fear of Missing Out by Jonas Lund via Honor Harger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiUSGJDEk7Q

Mind = blown. I love videogame’s potential to alter perception.

Here comes Dash from Amazon. Real world / Internet will continue to blur, if you have the credit.

Folding satellites and receiver/transmitter balloons.

“He is sitting in front of these white shoji screens which, along with the florescent lighting, make his freshly-shaven face look pale and cratered. “It’s a really good feeling,” he says, stuffed up and swallowing in pain. “There is nothing standing between me and my goals.””

Twitch is exploding. Is this the future of television?

“I’m going to break all the stereotypes. I’m not going to be polite. I’m not going to be bashful. I’m just going to say, fuck it, I’m Canadian. This game is Canadian. Deal with it.”

Videogaming is maturing to a new level of artistic intent.

Jaunt is making the gear that will create the next kind of cinema.

Cloak is an app helps you avoid people.

“This was created in dedication to the photographer Vivian Maier, a street photographer from the 1950s – 1990s. vivian’s work was discovered at an auction here in Chicago where she resided most of her life. her discovered work includes over 100,000 mostly medium format negatives (90% of her work), thousands of prints, and countless undeveloped rolls of film.”

Why do we do things? To live beyond our lifetime? Would Vivian have been happy about this? Should we respect her right to be forgotten?

De-making Zelda. I used to use images for logic and other things while I worked at UVA. It’s a great technique.

Turns out CIA isn’t better at predicting the future than members of the public – in some cases substantially worse. I think it’s time for us to seriously think about the future of our intelligence agencies – most of their work should be public – Ted Barnett thinks so too.