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TV Is Broken
I turn to that, Beatrix approves, and we watch. Then, a few minutes later, a commercial comes on. The volume difference is jarring to say the least. I would safely guess it is fifty percent louder than the show. I hurriedly reach for the remote and turn it down…
“Why did you turn the movie off, Daddy?”, Beatrix worriedly asks, as if she has done something wrong and is being punished by having her entertainment interrupted. She thinks that’s what I was doing by rushing for the remote.
“I didn’t turn it off, honey. This is just a commercial. I was turning the volume down because it was so loud. Shrek will come back on in a few minutes” I say.
“Did it break?”, she asks. It does sometimes happen at home that Flash or Silverlight implode, interrupt her show, and I have to fix it.
“No. It’s just a commercial.”
“What’s a commercial?”, she asks.
”It is like little shows where they tell you about other shows and toys and snacks.”, I explain.
“Why?”
“Well the TV people think you might like to know about this stuff.”
“This is boring! I want to watch Shrek.”
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Smithsonian turns to 3D
A new effort under way at the world’s largest museum and research institution could eventually mean more of its 137 million objects will be publicly available, even if just via 3D digital models.
via Smithsonian turns to 3D to bring collection to the world | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.
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VALA 2012 Encore
I presented an encore of my VALA2012 presentation to librarians in Perth as well, at Curtin University. Here’s a recording of that particular presentation, where you can better see some of the slide effects and design choices that I talked about previously. The audio isn’t fabulous, but is serviceable and the video came out quite well.
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Visigoths Unite!
I re-tweeted Roy Tennant to try and bring some more eyeballs to this exceptional blog post by Nicolas Morin, entitled Engineers Crashing Our Gates, but had to follow it up here. So much goodness to be mined from this post!
I was lucky enough to interview Jason Chen via email about his new ebook startup Storybundle. He had some interesting things to say about the ebook market. Unsurprisingly, as a new ebook startup, he didn’t even consider libraries at first.
As to whether or not this is good for libraries, at the current time I hadn’t even considered libraries, so I’m going to aim for personal use for the first few bundles and see where things go from there. It depends heavily on the author, because the promo is a limited time thing, and making a sale to a library becomes a forever thing.
Lumus’ OE-31 optical engine = wearable displays
And yet more from the wearable display front…the way that modern gadget production works seems to be very much a sort of punctuated equilibrium. There are ideas, then a breakthrough in sensor production and pricing causes an explosion of forms, which then settle down into a few winners (see: eReaders in 2010, Tablets in 2011, etc). I am very curious where this particular explosion is going to take us.
Autodesk 123D – Free 3D Modeling Software
Autodesk provides a free 3D modeling tool, complete with straightforward export options for most 3D printers and lasercutters. Windows only for now, although an OS X version appears to be on the way.
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Printing Muscle
In a small clean room tucked into the back of San Diego–based startup Organovo, Chirag Khatiwala is building a thin layer of human skeletal muscle. He inserts a cartridge of specially prepared muscle cells into a 3-D printer, which then deposits them in uniform, closely spaced lines in a petri dish. This arrangement allows the cells to grow and interact until they form working muscle tissue that is nearly indistinguishable from something removed from a human subject.
But these little flying video and audio recorders, paired with powerful data analysis tools, make previously unthinkable levels of surveillance possible, even easy. Before the Internet, tracking someones reading and shopping activities would have been nearly impossible without a private detective.