Cow’s Blog

June 14th, 2008

Two fantastic visualisations of emotion today which may serve as inspiration for some of art, writing or perhaps even webpage designs.

We Feel Fine

We Feel Fine scours the internet for human feelings every ten minutes. According to their website, they use sources “including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google”. They then analysewhat is written in the blogs for “I feel” or “I am feeling” and do further analysis/crawling around the website to pick up information on the type of feeling which is being felt as well as the age and geographical location of the author.

The applet on the website then generates a “emotion cloud”. Try it out.

Getty Images Moodstream

Moodstream is a visual brainstorming tool. Choose from 6 presets or select your own from various parameters such as happy/sad, calm/lively, humourous/serious, nostalgic/contemporary, warm/cool. The applet finds music, images and videos and combines them to deliver that image. It’s designed to be a take you in inspired and unexpected directions.

• Cool Stuff , Internet
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June 13th, 2008

If you guys haven’t seen this video of Johnny Lee’s Wii Remote hacks, it’ll blow you away. What he has done is taken an inexpensive $40 (or £30) Wii Remote and hacked it to do some extraordinary things. In order to track the position of the Wii remote, there is an infrared sensor on the top. Your Wii sensor bar emits beams of infrared light which the remote picks up and uses to track where it is. (find out how I took the following photo)

Anyway, he hacked it so it could be connected as a computer and would work in reverse: the wii remote is laid stationary (like a webcam) and then it tracks the movement of an infrared dot.

There is a fantastic interactive whiteboard built on the cheap and I think the headtracking program is just stunning.

Electronic Arts have released a game called Boomblox for the Wii which uses this head tracking technology.

• Cool Stuff , Games
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June 6th, 2008

Bomomo is a unique and very original technique to create a work of art. It’s hard to describe it - just give it a try! It uses <canvas> so works fantastically in Firefox and reportedly fairly well, in Safari and Opera 9.5 too. It’s been described as an “interesting mix of Spirograph, Etch-a-Sketch, and MS Paint”.

See an example of a Bomomo drawing.

• Asides , Cool Stuff
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May 28th, 2008

Many technology enthusiasts recently have really got into “do it yourself” projects. I came across Instructables.com and WikiHow which both contain a whole range of tutorials and projects. Lots of cool things to make or do when you have a few hours to spare!

• Asides , Cool Stuff
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April 4th, 2008

Personas for Firefox is a really nice extension for Firefox which adds lightweight theming without having to restart your browser.

I’ve been using it several months now and it’s really nice so I really recommend having a look. There are a dozen Foxkeh themes which are pretty cute too.

Personas was recently updated so the theme could be dynamic web content. People have started to play around with this feature: for example theming the browser with a live webcam from Germany.

Find out how to create your own Personas. The team hope to release the final version of Personas in time for Firefox 3.

• Cool Stuff , Downloads , Firefox , User Interface
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April 3rd, 2008

Tory MP for Henley and Mayor of London candidate Boris Johnson is set to release a single called “Is Fatboy Slim a DJ?”. The producers of the single say that the single will be released sometime after the election for Mayor of London (1st May). A video is currently in production but you can listen to a snippet from the dance mix on the Borisborisboris.com website.

I met Boris last year and he is a really lovely person. He talked about his career in politics and many of the controversies he’s been in. and I was also lucky enough to ask him a few questions about education & young people and get an autograph. I wish Boris the best in the Mayor for London elections next month and in hitting the number 1!

If you’re a fellow Boris fan, I strongly recommend reading his biography!

• Cool Stuff , Politics , UK
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March 30th, 2008

The Google Mail Trend Visualiser is pretty cool. It’s a Python script which connects to your Gmail account using IMAP and then produces some pretty graphs, tables and distributions on information such as who is emailing you, subject lines, mailing lists and so on.

Check out the example output for the Enron e-mail dataset and if you’re interested, have a look at the getting started guide. I’ve tried installing this but so far no luck… I get “ImportError: No module named utils” but I’m running Python 2.3 on Windows… your mileage may vary.

• Cool Stuff , Google
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March 6th, 2008

Has anyone ever noticed how telephones have 123 on the top row whilst calculators have 123 on the bottom row?

According to How Stuff Works, the calculator layout with 123 at the bottom actually came first.

One theory was that touch tone telephone  engineers reversed the layout deliberately so data entry professionals, who were used to the calculator layout, would take a greater amount of time to enter the numbers. This was necessary as the tone recognition in old telephones wasn’t fast enough!

• Cool Stuff , Maths , Science
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July 12th, 2007

I recently got a Nintendo Wii console, which is super-duper amazing. I must admit I do get the reaction of "OMG you bought the only console with crap processing power, graphics and lack of HD output", but the main thing is it is what any games console should be: fun. (see comic at bottom of post)

Sensor Bar

I had some problems getting the position of the wiimote to be sensed correctly but I quickly realised that was due to the fault of background light. It seems that the sensor bar emits infrared light which the Wiimote picks up and "triangulates" to measure change in position, etc.

Anyway, if none of you believe me: here’s a picture of the Wii Sensor Bar with Infrared: 

Infrared Photography

For those of you who aren’t trained in physics - light comes in electromagnetic waves. The visible light we see has a wavelength of between 400nm and 700nm. When the wavelength is longer than red (which has a wavelength of 700nm), it is infrared.

We can’t see infrared because it is beyond the spectrum our eyes can perceive, but we feel it as heat. TV remote controls use infrared.

Camera CCDs

Digital cameras have "Charged Couple Devices". These are designed to pick up light and to convert it into a series of 1s and 0s, so we can view them on a computer. The problem is that CCDs are generally made with a wavelength range of about 350nm to 1000nm so they will pick up infrared (heat), which can give strange photos as our eyes don’t percieve this part of the spectrum.

To get around this, camera manufacturers put filters to block out infrared light. Because mobile phone cameras tend to be of a poor quality and are very compact, they only have a thin film of filter, meaning it will pick up infrared. This is one of the reasons why photos taken on mobile phones are inferior to real digital cameras.

However, we can harness this problem with mobile phones and take images in infrared. If you put a phone cam in front of a TV remote control and press some buttons, you should see a succession of rapid flashing. The same happens with the Wii sensor bar allowing you to take an image of the infrared emitted from the bar.

Clever, eh? 

Wii Comic 

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

• Cool Stuff , Games
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January 22nd, 2007

The Coffee Replacement MP3 file is a sound file which claims to "keep you in an energizing state giving you a ‘caffeine’ energetic boost". There is an explanation to how it works; and it does sound pretty new age to me. I’m not sure if there is actually any scientific proof of how it works. According to the website:

When the brain is given a stimulus, through the ears, eyes or other senses, it emits an electrical charge in response, called a Cortical Evoked Response. These electrical responses travel throughout the brain to become what you "see and hear". This activity can be measured using sensitive electrodes attached to the scalp.

When the brain is presented with a rhythmic stimulus, such as a drum beat for example, the rhythm is reproduced in the brain in the form of these electrical impulses. If the rhythm becomes fast and consistent enough, it can start to resemble the natural internal rhythms of the brain, called brainwaves. When this happens, the brain responds by synchronizing its own electric cycles to the same rhythm.

See the theory page. 

Brainwave Generator

You can make your own brainwave sounds using the BrainWave Generator. It comes with built in brainwaves such as creativity increase, meditation, headache control and sleep induction.

If you want, you can also generate your own brainwaves - you can add things such as background sounds (I used the Yes No Yes sound from Even Stephens) and customize all kinds of parameters such as frequency and type of wave.

From the programme, you can then export your brainwaves as a WAV file. The website does make some pretty silly claims such as that it can help you quit smoking or drinking. I’m certainly not a big believer in solutions such as this but, regardless, it’s a bit of fun.

Disclaimer from Website

The following people should not use brain entrainment:

• People subject to any forms of seizures or epilepsy
• People using pacemakers
• People suffering from cardiac arrhythmia or other heart disorders
• People taking stimulants, psychoactive drugs, or tranquilizers

Take note…

Via Download Squad.

• Cool Stuff , Downloads , Science
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