Notes about software

October 23, 2022 permalink

Area 5150 — mindbending IBM 8088 demo

Another from the recent boggling demoscene demos, here’s a bonkers one pulling off tricks on vintage IBM 8088 PC hardware that the 16-color CGA graphics adapter shouldn’t be capable of doing. Remember this is a computer setup from circa 1981!

My favorite part of these kind of demos is when the audience goes wild (well, relatively) for the breakdancing elephant animation, even more than for the psuedo-3D graphics and psychedelic color scanline gimmicks.

 

July 25, 2010 permalink

Artoolkit in Quartz Composer

Augmented Reality without programming in 5 minutes

I can vouch that this works, and it’s pretty straightforward once you manage to grab and build the two or three additional Quartz Composer plugins successfully. I had to fold in a newer version of the ARToolkit libs, and I swapped out the pattern bitmap used to recognize the AR target to match one I already had on hand – the default sample1 and sample2 patterns weren’t working for me for some reason. Apart from that, Quartz Composer’s a lot of fun to use, almost like building eyecandy demos with patch cables and effects pedals, and it’s already on your system if you have Xcode.

(Via Make)

January 18, 2010 permalink

MS Paint Album Art Recreations

Album art recreated quickly for the Windows 3.1 era:

The drawings in this collection were made by various users in a discussion forum on the website www.foreverdoomed.com. Using MS Paint, and other rudimentary computer drawing programs, users attempted to recreate their favorite album covers and let others on the forum guess the band and title from the artwork. […] Some gave themselves a limit of five minutes to recreate the most recognizable essentials.

I sort of like these. I’d forgotten the subtle charm of MSPaint’s spraycan, though I’d always envied MacPaint’s patterns.

(Via Coudal Partners)

September 17, 2009 permalink

The Stanford Frankencamera to Help Further the

The Stanford Frankencamera

To help further the field of computational photography, a team at Stanford is working on a homebrewed, open source digital camera that they can sell at-cost to other academics in the field. Right now it’s pretty big and clunky-looking, but a camera that can be extended with the latest image processing techniques coming out of the labs would be very sexy indeed. There’s a recent press release that’s worth reading about the team, along with a video and an animation or two to explain the project.

Those that want to tinker with their existing store-bought cameras might want to check out the firmware hacks that are floating around out there, like the excellent CHDK software (GPL’ed, I think) that runs on most modern Canon digital point-and-shoot and dSLR cameras. With a little bit of elbow grease and some free tools you can add a lot of professional(ish) features and scripting support to your low-end camera.

(Via John Nack)

June 21, 2009 permalink

New TOR Clients from Iranian IP Space

From “Dramatic Increase in the Number of TOR Clients from Iran”, an O’Reilly Radar interview with the executive director of the TOR anonymizing onion router, software definitely made for times like these. Hopefully the new users know to keep their transmissions encrypted, especially given the likelihood that their government is keeping an eye on all outbound Internet traffic.

May 27, 2009 permalink

Real Time Object Recognition on a Mobile Device

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUUxGvDqok4

Real-Time Object Recognition on a Mobile Device. I’ve seen this done for product lookups like books and boxes of cereal at the store, but hadn’t considered the accessibility implications. Not a bad idea, assuming that it produces valid information most of the time. Also seems like it would be limited to objects of a specific scale?

Pagination