ksymeon

One of the best flash games I've ever seen and played is Flow , a simple yet addictive ameoba-platform-adventure... Eat, Dive and Evolve. Brilliant!

For those of you who haven't seen it, please take a look at the Google SketchUp . It is just incredible! Go through the tutorials, build your model, then make sure that you check the "Shadows" functionality along with the integration with Google Earth! The interface is one of the most user-friendly and intuitive UIs I have ever seen in a 3D modeller. You can draw your dream home in minutes. Then put it on Google Earth, and play with the Sun's position in the sky based on Day of the Year and time. It is such a treat! Now you can find out if your favourite english pub, will have the sun in the garden on a Sunday afternoon... If the Sun will come out of the clouds, that is...

When you run out of disk space, double your disks' capacity This has been my belief for years and when the other day I got the "Disk Full" message, I immediatelly placed an order for two 300Gb Maxtors and an SATA controller. It took me a few days to sort it out - one of them was faulty and had to go back. At last the replacement arrived today and I happilly took the screwdriver and added the disk to the stack of Hard Disks in my computer's box. I now have 1 TeraByte of storage on my main PC alone!!! If you include the NAS, plus the capacity of the laptops then my total quota is over 1.3 Tera... I took a breath to contemplate this milestone... One TeraByte . One trillion bytes. Eight trillion bits. This is equivalent to 403 million printed pages! I remember when we used to have 320Kb floppies, or even tapes. The term "MegaByte" was just an amazing thought! Nobody had that! I remember my first hard disk was a 40Mb IDE - and I had waited for months to get that....

For years now I knew of a bug in this little utility I had written ages ago. "Akatanomasto" ("one that cannot be named" in Greek) was this little sticky-notes utility I wrote back in 1999. I think it was the summer of 1999 when I had this idea of floating notes on the desktop with the unusual twist of being able to send the little notes across the network, "stick them up" electronically on somebody else's desktop. Soon after, the little application developed a minor bug. You couldn't type a hyphen ("-"). You could paste a hyphen and you could type a hyphen using the minus key on the numeric keypad, but you couldn't type one using the Underscore/Hyphen key on a normal keyboard. An initial investigation did not shine any light to the bug and I didn't bother that much to be honest. Who would discover? The spring of 2000 found me being very busy with a job change, a move to a different country etc. The little utility was abandoned eve...

Here's how to make a 3D picture viewable with red-blue glasses. For this example we will assume that the left eye has the red filter and the right eye has the blue filter. Using your digital camera take two pictures from two different spots; place the camera at the same height (use of a tripod highly recommended) and take the first picture of your subject. Now move the camera one or two inches to the right, focus at your subject again and take the second picture. Imagine that you are taking two pictures from the viewpoint of each one of your eyes; the first picture is the left eye, the second picture is the right eye (see picture below). Open the two pictures in Photoshop. Go to the first picture (the left eye one) open the channels window and click on the Red Channel (Ctrl-1). Select all (Ctrl-A) and copy to clipboard (Ctrl-C). Go to the second picture (right eye), select the red channel (Ctrl-1) and paste the copied image (Ctrl-V). Without changing the selected channel click on t...

It took almost six weeks since I moved to my new flat, but my desk and chair have been finally delivered today. My life has a new meaning now... :-) No more lying or kneeling on the floor. I'm so happy I may actually publish my 3D picture making technique some time soon.

I was visiting byteburg today, in anticipation of something new, a new post, a new story, a new link. I found this link to Kai's article for edge.org. As I read it I was gradually realising how right he is! The executive summary says it all:          "Make plans and take pictures"