Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Digital Camera on a Drill
A little video spin art for your Saturday night enjoyment.
(Via Quipsologies)
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RIP Steve Kordek, pinball pioneer
Steve Kordek, the guy who revolutionized the world of pinball by introducing a machine with the now-familiar electromechanical flippers at the bottom of the playfield (imagine: a player can somewhat control the game!), passed away this week at the age of 100. His 6-decade career started off with remarkable serendipity. From the NY Times obit:
On a visit to his hometown in 1937, he was walking down a street without an umbrella when a torrential rain forced him to step into the lobby of a building he was passing. It was the Genco company. A receptionist asked if he was looking for a job.
“I had never seen a pin game before in my life,” Mr. Kordek told The Chicago Tribune in 2009. For 45 cents an hour, he was soon doing soldering on the company’s production line. …
Mr. Kordek never got tired of the clang, clack and buzz of pinball. “I had more fun in this business than anyone could believe,” he told The Tribune.
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Sesame Seed Braile Burgers
To advertise their new accessibility-friendly menus, the South African arm of the Wimpy fast food chain delivers burgers to blind users with a special twist: the sesame seeds on the bun spell out a message in braille! While it might be viewed as a marketing gimmick, it’s nice to see a fast food place making efforts to be inclusive, and the recipients in the video certainly seem amused. (a narrated version of the video is also available for the visually impaired)
PS: what’s up with both the Popeye’s and Wimpy fast food chains completely ignoring their namesake cartoon characters in their branding?
PPS: evidently the Wimpy UK mascot, a weird little guy in a Beefeater outfit, got his own platforming game back in the early 1980s! Thanks, Wikipedia rabbit hole.
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This May Be the Most Important Proposition
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: “At the time, no one knew what was coming.” From the first page of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (translated by Jay Rubin). His earlier books that I’ve read have been wonderful dream factories, but I’ve seen this one scoring some negative reviews. I don’t know what’s coming over the next 925 pages, but I have hope that it’ll be good.
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What Sumerians Can Teach Us About Data
Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information.
From What the Sumerians can teach us about data, a blog post noting that the predecessor of writing was the depiction of data, a concept that helped establish the hierarchical systems of power in the early city-states. (I like his comparison between the data-protecting curses inscribed on the cuneiform tablets and the FBI WARNING notices on VHS!) -
Dr Suess Mulberry Street Perseverance
The manuscript was rejected by 27 publishers. Dr. Seuss was about to burn it when a classmate from Dartmouth, who was new to the children’s book business, bought it. By the time it was published, in 1937, the author was 33.
On the 75th anniversary of the publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Dr. Suess’s first children’s book. Persevere, creative types!
Quote from the NY Times article Mulberry Street May Fade, but ‘Mulberry Street’ Shines On, which investigates the real-life eponymous street in Springfield, Mass., for evidence that the city shaped Suess’s creative works.
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Pieterjan Grandry Gif Player
I like Pieterjan Grandry’s gif player, a novel way to play back your favorite short-form animations on your wall (it’s basically an updated, electric version of a phenakistoscope, but the use is certainly fun, and the wooden box looks nice!).
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Bell Labs Hamlet from 1885
Seen above is a green disc, wax on brass, with an early recording of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy, that likely hasn’t been heard in over 125 years. Created by Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory in the late 19th Century and sent to the Smithsonian for archiving as they were created, the paranoid Bell failed to provide a playback mechanism for these discs, for fear that his competitors would appropriate his innovations.
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories are working on recovering these early audio recordings with a system called IRENE/3D that creates 3D optical scans of the old record-like discs:
Using methods derived from our work on instrumentation for particle physics we have investigated the problem of audio reconstruction from mechanical recordings. The idea was to acquire digital maps of the surface of the media, without contact, and then apply image analysis methods to recover the audio data and reduce noise.
The nifty thing about this form of hands-off scanning is that it can accommodate many types of otherwise mechanically incompatible media, from discs made of metal or glass to wax cylinders (quick, someone set this up to scan the Lazarus bowl!!). The 18-second snippet of Hamlet audio from the green disc above (maybe the voice of Bell himself?) has been posted on YouTube, or you can download more examples from the project in WAV and MP3 format.
(Via PhysOrg)
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Maniac Tentacle Mindbenders: How ScummVM’s unpaid coders kept adventure gaming alive
Nice write-up by Ars Technica on the ScummVM project’s history and developers. Hard to believe it’s been around for over 10 years already! (also, I hadn’t heard that they had a brief-lived controversial build that supported Eric Chahi’s Another World, one of the best games of all time…)
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Prince of Persia C64
I was very happy to have gotten this far. I had the Kid, the Prince of Persia, running and jumping on my screen. I was able to control it and perform all the normal actions. And it felt right. Timing, speed, animations. Of course it was spot on, it was using the original code written by Jordan Mechner, lifted from its Apple II grave and brought back to life, with a new purpose.
At this point I was sure I could do this. It would only be a matter of months. Oh boy, was I wrong.
From the Prince of Persia C64 Development Blog, in which the author writes with excellent detail about his recent hobby attempt to reverse engineer and port the classic computer game to the Commodore64 (warning: lots of posts about pixels, sprites and assembly language debugging – your entertainment value may vary). The original Apple ][ source code for PoP had long ago been lost, but the game’s creator coincidentally posted a handy excerpt of the game’s design documentation as a PDF on his blog, and many other ports existed, so…why not try recreate the original code?
Bonus: Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner has collated his original design notes and journals into a nice 300-page ebook. Neat! I’d love to have a whole series of these for classic games.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)