Life of Andrew » Links

Full of Piss and Vinegar

Andrew — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:23:54 +0000

I don’t usually pay much attention to the big NZ political blogs. At best, the usual suspects are occasionally insightful, but more often they suffer from varying degrees of simple minded egotism and/or outright vileness. However, like the million monkeys writing Shakespeare that they as a group resemble, every so often someone hits one out of the park:

It’s hard work at the best of times for political parties to attract good candidates. But it’s doubly so for the two main parties, because all the smaller parties are so quick to secure the urine-drinking bank-robbing identity-thieves, leaving National and Labour only the boring and sensible candidates to choose from.

Apart from the woman-bothering expense-rorting ones, those who end up in Parliament for the Nats or Labour often lack colour, but that’s probably because they’re not drinking their own piss…

The rest of it is well worth reading as well.

This election is going to be like the Rugby World Cup – pretty much a foregone conclusion but the also-rans will provide much entertainment.

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Remote Controlled F16 with Camera

Andrew — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 08:55:45 +0000

Forget the Air Swimmers of the last post, now I want one of these:

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Air Swimmers

Andrew — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:19:02 +0000

I have to make a choice sometime soon – do I get an iPhone4 now or do I wait for the (unannounced, possibly mythical) iPhone5?

It turns out that what I really want is one of these:

Not sure I can get work to spring for one though.

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iPhone SLR Mount

Andrew — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 23:17:10 +0000

Finally! The convenience of a massive digital SLR lens combined with the image quality of a tiny cell phone sensor, without all that tedious having-a-convenient-tripod-mounting-system that bigger cameras have.

Presenting the Photojojo iPhone SLR Mount:

Glass Microbiology

Andrew — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:35:36 +0000

This is Enterobacteria Phage T4. More accurately, it is an amazing glass sculpture of the Phage T4 made by a group of glass blowers in the UK that specialise in such things.

Of all human endeavours, I think glassblowing might be the one I find the most astounding. There are a whole bunch of other works in the Glass Microbiology gallery which are well worth checking out. It looks you can even buy some of the works should you want give somebody AIDS for Christmas.

My Little Modified Pony

Have you ever heard about the floating world of Furlqump?

Andrew — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 00:21:02 +0000

I haven’t been doing anything terribly exciting lately, which means no blog entries. But there is a lack of whimsy in the world, so I am posting this link:

Read the rest of the story…

Augmented Reality for the Colour Blind

Andrew — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 08:15:44 +0000

Modern cell phones are ridiculously powerful little devices. Now that we are all carrying around general purpose computers with sophisticated sensors and ubiquitous connectivity in our pockets, a whole new world of human/machine interaction has opened up.

Apparently the iPhone has already made a bit of a splash with the partially-sighted community due to its ability to speak useful information about its location, and now somebody has taken it a step further: Augmented Reality For Colour Blindness.

I belong to the 10% of (especially masculine) men who suffer from colour blindness. I say suffer from, but most of the time it makes very little difference that certain shades of light green are indistinguishable from yellow except for one area – video games. I find games that ask you to match things based on colours very difficult, and occasionally other software uses colours in a way that people more colour-blind than myself must find very frustrating.

Using a cell phone to shift the colours in whatever the camera is looking at is a brilliant idea. I would go further and suggest that video card makers start adding similar functionality into the software they supply with the cards. A “colour-blind” mode for desktop computers (not just a high-contrast colour scheme, but some type of shader applied to the whole screen) would make life easier for many people.

Augmented Reality (for people who don’t read Spanish)

Robots, Robots, Robots

Andrew — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:01:11 +0000

I really like what people have been doing with robotics in the last few years. Now that powerful CPUs are cheap and wireless communications ubiquitous, whole new areas are opening up for hobbyists to explore. Sure, someday those robots will undoubtedly rise up and destroy humanity, but until then why build a single robot when you can build 32:

(view at youtube)

I love how the knights’ horses thrash their forelegs while they are moving – genius! There is a little more information at the Monster Chess Site. I hope they have a good supply of batteries.

Bonus robot video:

(view at youtube)

Pacman

Andrew — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:00:34 +0000

Remember kids – winners don’t do drugs.

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The Wellington Podcast

Andrew — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:16:48 +0000

Bevan McCabe, raconteur and man-about-town, is producing a podcast about this fair city. The first episode has just been released and it turned out rather well.

There is more information at the associated Wellington Podcast Blog, but the daring amongst you can just downloaded it directly (16Mb mp3), or subscribe to the Wellington Podcast using iTunes.

Wellington