Category: Blog

“Hey Pete, You wouldn’t happen to have ancestors in Denmark would you? Also, in what ways has improvement of tools used at Pixar over the years made your life easier, and in what ways harder?

Ja, my mom’s family hails from Denmark! Technology is a great inspiration to us creatively. Getting new software is like getting new toys — you immediately think, “What can I do with this?” And then our stories challenge the software folks to break new ground as well. As John likes to say, “The art challenges the technology, and technology inspires the art.””

Pete Docter on Interviewly (and therefore Reddit).

Telepresence is invading the business world.

Microsoft is working on a headset for Xbox, as well as Sony.

Google Wear is coming too.

Three amazing illustrators who are really future designers too:

1. Chris Foss. Amazing work on the Jodorowsky Dune, Alien, Flash Gordon and AI. AND the Joy of Sex. Insane.
2. Kunio Okawara. Gundam.
3. Shōji Kawamori. AIBO, Transformers and Macross.

Charlie Stross smashing The Singularity.

More good talks selected by Phil Gyford.

Charlie Stross smashing interstellar travel.

“Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents almost all crashes, and eliminates data races.”

A file based CMS called Kirby. Not cheap!

Behind the scenes of the “Looking Back” Facebook videos. An interesting blend of cloud engineering and graphic design.

“I’m just finishing my first novel to be written 100% inside Scrivener, but about the past four wouldn’t have worked properly without it.”

Charlie Stross uses Scrivener. I discovered this via two of my favourite sites of the moment: 1) the setup and 2) interviewly – both the future of editorial in my opinion. One is all based around that need to know about the tools that people use, and the other about skinning IAmA into a more readable format.

When asked about coding in the british classroom:

“Python or Scheme instead of BBC BASIC. Also: focus on updating the maths curriculum to support it, e.g. with boolean algebra, set theory, number bases, and so on.”

Great tutorial on rendering large terrains – with the meta lesson of making solutions often making new problems that are impossible to anticipate until you get deep into a problem.

“Studio Music provides an insight into the creative process of visual
practitioners, through the music that they listen to whilst working.”

Pete and I first became friends through a mutual love of music, particularly bass.

The Kinect v2 is slowly becoming more open, I’m sure there will be a rush of plucking of low hanging fruit as there was previously, but I wonder if Microsoft have learnt their lesson a little too well? Custom ports are hard to deal with.

“A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center(sic) has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.”

ofxOculusRift is coming along. github.com/obviousjim/ofx…

The Weight of Mountains, via Kottke.

Colour naming at Lyst.

How Spritz lets you read at 1000 words a minute.

SimpleCV is simple computer vision for Python.

“Beautifully simple and elegant GLSL music video” via Robbie Tilton.

Fong Qi Wei makes Time in Motion.

Hacking, Prototyping & Smart Citizens – a talk I was part of.

A guide to getting a job at Nintendo.

Inspiration for Eyes Wide Shut?

The P1 sounds amazing.

All RGB colours in one image.

You can count to 1023 with just two hands of digits if you use Finger Binary.

Wolfram Language. The power!

Sticky Light. Via Pete Mackenzie.

Under the Hood: Building and open-sourcing flint. From Facebook.

VideoCircuits, a great resource on video art and the joy of glitch.

Explaining Science to an eleven year old. FlameChallenge.org.

A new game from Jonathan Blow – “The Witness“. Mmmm puzzles.

“The Mongols fought the Crusaders and the Samurais AT THE SAME TIME”

I love AskReddit. Two events that took place simultaneously. Via kottke.

My first baby steps in R – a correlation matrix plot of my image feature parameters. Now how do I interpret this… pic.twitter.com/guOLNZXnxK

— Mario Klingemann (@quasimondo) December 31, 2013

H20 is what the cool kids are on now according to the comments.

Yummy analysis of the top 100,000 movies on IMDB.

The man who made Catan. I remember playing Settlers on the Amiga – I’ve yet to experience the board game.
sabotagetimes.com/life/5-more-of-historys-greatest-magic-tricks-explained

Survive the Apocalypse for $137,000.