Duck Goes Moo!

Also, Human Tetris!

The energy we use to move about is rather inefficiently applied. Researchers at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia have come up with a way to harvest this lost energy and store it in rechargeable batteries.

“People are an excellent source of portable power–an average-sized person stores as much energy in fat as a 1,000 kg battery,” Donelan said. “People recharge their ‘body batteries’ with food and, lucky for us, there is about as much useful energy in a 35-gram granola bar as in a 3.5 kg lithium-ion battery.”

from news.com

I thought this was pretty cool.

My parents bought me a Lego Mindstorms set and I’ve been letting it collect dust, unfortunately. I’ve just been so busy with my other hobbies, work and friends that I haven’t had the time to geek out completely. I need to start making cool things like this, though I may need to set up in the basement because every time I try to build something the cats “help” me.

There was an episode of Futurama where Bender uses his metal body to brew beer, the whole thing treated pretty much like a pregnancy.

Someone actually made a Bender Brewer.

http://www.asciimation.co.nz/bender/index.html

Rumor has is Netflix may soon be able to deliver movies directly to your TV via the internet:

The company wants to strike deals with electronics companies that will let it send movies straight to TV screens over the Internet. Its first partnership, announced Wednesday night, is with the South Korean manufacturer LG Electronics to stream movies and other programming to LG’s high-definition televisions.

The partnership will extend a novel feature from Netflix, announced a year ago, that allows paying subscribers to watch any of 6,000 movies and television shows on its Web site free. But that service can be accessed only with a personal computer.

from nytimes.com

I use the “Watch Now” feature on Netflix all the time and it works great, though I could just buy an overhead projector and attach it to my computer or even directly to my TV already, so I am not sure if Netflix needs to make any deals or partnerships. Still, if it works flawlessly and I don’t have to buy any equipment that is too expensive then it might be a good deal.

“We hope that not only the city of Vienna but other cities will see the merits of using renewable energy for street lighting to cut emissions,” Christina Werner said. “Someday soon solar trees could well be the main form of street lighting in Europe.”

from renewableenergyaccess.com

Watch this whole video; you won’t be disappointed. This guy has got me inspired to perhaps get back into 3D game development. I actually tried to get started on testing this system out today, but my laptop’s bluetooth card is not compatible, so I may have to get me a dongle.

I already have some awesome ideas, like making a virtual chess game where you can move your head all around to see the board like it was actually there. One of the main problems I have had with using a 3D chess board on a computer is that it is hard to see the board and pieces properly because the pieces tended to block the view of other pieces, plus depth perception is a bit off. This is part of the reason that Gary Kasparov wore 3D glasses when playing against X3D Fritz. With a setup like the one in the video above, Kasparov could of just leaned left and right to get a better view of the board.

Pretty neat stuff. It’s got me a bit excited and I can’t wait to see what others are going to do with it. Perhaps Nintendo will come out with official equipment for this and some cool games to go along with it.

I am actually going to try this.

Tycho and Gabe have long railed against game reviewing magazines and sites as corrupt and deceitful. I thought this comic perfectly summed up where the source of the wrongness comes from.

That and Morgan Webb. I can’t stand her. I remember when X-Play used to just review the games and THAT WAS IT! No stupid idiotic banter, no dumb-ass skits that only children could think are funny, and no “‘tude”.

I’ve posted about this again, but I miss the old ZDNetTV. It used to be a station for geeks and the issues that really matter. It was a station that didn’t infantilize their viewers by hiding anything “too technical” or “weird computer mumbo-jumbo our marketing people can’t understand”.

FEH!!!

Outlook just lost the last six months of my emails. It occasionally decides to “compact” the current emails I have, which generally has no problems; not this time. I think I might be able to recover them, but I am not certain. Feh!

My drawing tablet broke last night and today, in another act that proves I should not be allowed to have a credit card, I ordered an expensive new one without bargain hunting or checking any reviews:

Intuos3 6×8 Graphic Tablet

I got my previous tablet about five years ago in the bargain bin at Best Buy for about $50. I never used it much until about a year ago when I started doing comics. The detection on it was absolutely terrible, much like tying to sign your name on one of those computerized signature thingies at certain stores.

Hopefully this new tablet that I got will be almost as accurate as drawing with a fountain pen on bristol board. It has a far higher pressure sensitivity and also can sense how tilted the drawing pen is, which is something that my graphics programs are capable of utilizing.

At least I didn’t order what I really wanted:

http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/

WANT!!!

I recently learned how to encode video into FLV format and load it into a flash animation. It’s surprisingly easy and I wish I had given it a try a long time ago.

This is all making me think about making a “Choose Your Own Adventure” game, much like “7th Guest” or “Voyeur” from the old days of gaming.

The idea I had was to treat it like the person playing the game was an invisible agent who could choose the actions of the people in the game.

For example, you enter a room where two people are talking. You can then click on one of the people and then another object or person to have them do some sort of action. The people or items that would be actionable would flash white when rolled over and a selected object or person would glow (this would be handled by placing “invisible” buttons on a layer above the movieclips).

The whole point of the game would just be to explore all the odd interactions recorded into the game, but there would be several plot lines that could be followed if desired.

Of course, I already have way too many projects going right now, but if I get a good group of people I am sure it could be fun.

I’ll probably just do a simple prototype for this and post it online for people to play, when I get to it.

Howdy, y’all. As I posted earlier I recently closed my business to work full-time with one of my clients. One thing I still have as a legacy of Coffee-Walk Studios is a dedicated Linux server.

I really should now just stop paying the monthly charges… but I kinda like having the control one has when you own the whole server and I do not look forward to having to deal with a hosting company and having my access limited to cPanel and the like.

So, is anyone out there looking for some cheap hosting? I won’t charge very much, as I am just looking for enough money to make keeping the server too extravagant.

Yes, you heard right, there are going to be new elements in HTML 5. This is pretty neat as there haven’t been any new ones in a while, plus this will probably shake up the SEO industry with whole new superstitions about what elements in what sequence and frequency are best for getting you ranked high in the Google.

Many of the new elements seem to be div tags with new names for different puposes, but they’ve also added an HTML structure for “Dialogs”, “DataGrids”, and “Audio”.

More Here