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Linkage #8 – Random is as random does

r3dux | June 23, 2011
  • What links insects, prime numbers, image-tiling and web design? Why not find out… It’s clever stuff =D
  • The art and programming behind Tron: Evolution (also, eMacs!) is pretty beautiful, especially if you like particle effects, as I do. The first Tron gave us Ken Perlin’s Perlin Noise technique, check it out to see where we’ve gone from there.
  • The Typing of the Dead was the only type-to-shoot game I’d seen with that particular mechanism, until I saw this online typing-based shoot-em-up called Z-Type. Certainly sticks it to Mavis Beacon =P
  • Fancy randomly teleporting around the world in Google Streetview? Then you’ll want to know about GlobeGenie. It’s kinda cool, and unlike Jumper, you don’t have to have been there first…

  • How a wok works, explains, well… you get the idea. If you think you already know, you might be surprised to find out just how wrong you are – or at least I was.
  • Resource Acquisition Is Initialisation (RAII) (wikipedia) is a clever way of programming interfaces to data/files/objects which puts all the initialisation and clean-up code in the constructors and destructors – but you have to be careful that your constructor can’t fail, or if it does, it’s handled properly. Still, it kinda appeals to me as an elegant method of doing things.
  • Sometimes it’s useful to be able to automatically reformat code, and knowing some of the online beautifiers in this article could definitely save you time. Also, for clearing up blocks of text there’s CleanText.org.
  • You can enhance flavours by diluting them with water? ORLY? Seems pretty counter-intuitive, but apparently so.
  • Hammer + wall + lots of nails + talent + time = unique & spiffy artwork. I don’t know if I’d have the patience for that, but hats off to the guy, it looks great. More Marcus Levine art at his site.
  • There’s a lot of great time-lapse landscape sequences out there, but this guy has to make some of the very best: The Mountain.
  • You know those things where you stare at a black and white image for 30 seconds, then look away and you can still see the imprint for the next 30? Well, this is a kind-of a strobe version of that. You don’t see an image, instead the entire room swims like you’re underwater or something. Not for people with epilepsy, but something you might want to do once just for the experience.

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Design, Dilute, Flavour, Hammer, Image-Tiling, Nail, RAII, Time-Lapse, Tron, Typing, Wok, Z-Type
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Linkage #7: Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

r3dux | July 2, 2010
  • Paint with liquid fire! And flash! Really rather fun… Flame painter, Fluid painter, Fluid AND Fire Painter!
  • Found: 90% of the Universe – hiding in plain sight. Well, ultraviolet sight. Surely this means the search for dark matter is effectively over?
  • Coke bottles are going square… Rather neat IMHO.
  • Ten things you didn’t know about comets is a bad astronomy article, and in my case was about 80% correct :)
  • Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon – now in chiptune flavour! I downloaded this months ago and only got around to listening to it yesterday – and it was actually rather good!
  • Know what a shebang is in linux scripting? I didn’t, even though I’d been using them for years…
  • The 50 Greatest Samples in Hip-Hop History – this might take you some time to get through – but it’s some really good shizzle, my bizzle! Each of the 50 samples has the original song, along with a modern day song it was used in. PHaT!
  • Keeping on a musical bent, Captain Obvious is a music blog with loads, and loads of neat music and mp3 mixtapes – it’s good, good stuff…
  • If you’ve written some absurdly simple code, say for example: 0.1 + 0.2 and got a really unexpected result: 0.30000000000000004 – you need to read this floating point guide…
  • TechRadar‘s article on Sixty Tips for XP, Vista and Windows 7 has some super handy yet little known gems to make life more pleasant in your Windows pit of hell ;)
  • NASA’s new toy – the SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) has opened its eyes and started staring at the sun: and it’s beautiful…

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Chiptunes, Coke, Comets, Dark Matter, Fire, Flame, Floating Point, Fluid, Hip-Hop, Mix-Tapes, Painting, Pink Floyd, Solar, Tips
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Linkage #6: The Tangled Webs We Weave

r3dux | February 28, 2010
  • Rules of Thumb is a site all about user-contributed rules to use as a guide for things, covering everything from winning at Blackjack (Assume that any unseen card is an 8.) to knowing if you’re being followed (Make a right turn, and then make another right turn. If they’re still back there after the third right turn, you’ve got a problem.) to… well, you get the idea!

  • Because E = Mc² (i.e. mass is energy), a spinning object must have more mass than a non-spinning object. And it does… Only we were wrong about how much more mass it has. By a factor of 100 million trillion…. This also has the side-effect of breaking the General Theory of Relativity. Whoops!
  • Cryptome recently got taken off the net (but is now back) for publishing the Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook, or in other words, what Microsoft will reveal to the police about you, if they’re as much as asked. Read the handbook here, or more about the entire leak ==> smackdown here.
  • A list of the 100 best free & online documentaries. I’ve got to own up and say I’ve only ever seen a couple of these, but some of them look really interesting so I’m definitely gonna try and watch some more when I’ve got the time.
  • How to spell commonly misspelled words. Currently, due to the nature of the classes I’m teaching, I end up having to type committee (double everything), necessary (one c, two s‘s), and receive (reverse the i before e) a lot. IMHO it’s essential reading.
  • Some good reasons to stop linking to Wikipedia as much. I grudgingly (because it’s more work for me) agree with his reasoning on the matter. Oh wells, ignorance was bliss… (discovered whilst reading this – credit where it’s due).
  • Ever want to clean up large swathes of ASCII text so that it’s nicely formatted automagically? cleantext.org to the rescue…
  • What the hell’s the deal with the economy? Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay aims to put you straight without putting you to sleep. Definitely on my wishlist.

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Documentaries, Economy, Formatting, Physics, Rules, Spelling, Text, Wikipedia
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Linkage #5: Only the Good Stuff

r3dux | February 5, 2010
  • The PS3 has finally been hacked. And it only took 3 years, 2 months, and 11 days…
  • Go-OO is a faster and better version of Open Office? ORLY? Could be worth a shot… Update: It turns out the version of OO that ships with Ubuntu actually includes the Go-OO patches, so if you’re on Ubuntu you’ve been using Go-OO all along. Ubuntu FTW! Obsolete: Use LibreOffice instead.
  • Nuclear fusion edges closer to the point where it can create more usable energy than it takes to sustain a reaction. Also, uses frickn’ laser beams of such power that they could boil 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a single second. Repect!
  • What the hell do all these ROM codes mean? Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (U) [T-Fre.67_Skaiboy][o1].smc, anyone? Know thine GoodCodes. (BTW: Original region: USA, Translation (deprecated) into French by Skaiboy, Translation version 0.67, Rom is Overdump #1 (so has more data than required to play the game, so the game could be 3.3MB, but the cartridge has had all 4MB of it dumped)).
  • 1001 Rules for my Unborn Son – I don’t agree with a bunch of them, but some are bang on the money.
  • Are you defecient in Vitamin D? Probably. And probably so am I…
  • Spray-on liquid glass is about to take off in a big, BIG way…
  • Live longer through Calorie Restriction? Maybe.. This Times Online article by (2005 “Food And Drink Writer of the Year”) Giles Coren is a great read, and made me laugh out loud more than a few times :)
  • The two prevalent (and opposing) economic theories; Free Market Economy (Friedrich von Hayek) Vs. Keynesian Economics i.e. government steered (John Maynard Keynes) as explained via the medium of rap. No, really. It’s actually a good laugh, and worth it for the moustaches alone, so if you learn anything – bonus! ;)

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Calorie Restriction, Economics, Fusion, Linkage, Open Office, PS3, ROMs, Vitamins
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Linkage #4 – Further Adventures in Random

r3dux | January 18, 2010
  • Sugru is new silicon-based putty which will adhere to just about anything, and can handle temperatures between -60C and 180C. I wouldn’t start slapping it around willy-nilly like the site’s suggesting because a.) It looks duff b.) Just no, alright?, but it’s gotta be useful stuff to have around…
  • How responsive is your ISPs DNS? You might find that some (free) third-party DNS servers resolve your queries quicker, and hence speed up your browsing experience. Find out for sure with the platform-independent DNS checking tool namebench – it only takes a couple of minutes to run the scan, and I think I got about a 30% look-up speed improvement by changing my DNS servers to the ones namebench recommended.
  • Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. So now you know. Not that I particularly feel I need to learn yet another programming language, but it’s interesting to see what can be done quickly and easily with it, and you could always translate any bits of functionality you liked into your language of choice…
  • Ubuntu doesn’t ship with a system-wide graphic equaliser. So here is a system-wide graphics equaliser for Ubuntu. Can’t really argue with that, can you?
  • XBox Live Arcade is changing to be more like the PS3 Home service, apparently. Looks interesting.
  • Gravity could be caused not by mass, but by information, if this fella’s right: First article. Second article. (articles are well explained for us non-rocket-scientists, so don’t be afraid ;) )
  • If you’re interested in graphics, eurogamer has a spiffy-ass article on anti-aliasing with some great before/after shots and discussion of different methods strengths and weaknesses.
  • MakeUseOf.com has absolutely stacks of great tips, tricks and useful knowledge about all sorts of things. I’ve signed up to the daily newsletter, and wouldn’t want to go back to life without it – they really do have some very useful articles. If anything, I’d say the only downside to the newsletter is that you’ll want to spend some time reading and experimenting with things every day, which can turn out to be a bit of a time-vampire. Truly excellent stuff.

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Anti-Aliasing, DNS, Equaliser, Equalizer, Graphic, Gravity, Linkage, MakeUseOf, Processing, XBLA
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