A travelogue to nowhere: July 2011

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

A Cricketers' Sword-stick

I made this swordstick months ago and forgot about it. The blade is sharpened 10mm steel plate (VERY HARD TO LIFT) and is cut back to a pin that runs right through to the end of the handle, so it is sturdy. It fits loosely in the batpiece (made that word up) which was split and then routed out for the insert. Put together with contact glue. There is a pin that keeps the blade from sliding out of the handle, and the white perspex just hides the ugly wood. The pin and a white line are all that is visibly wrong from the outside, it really is quite convincing.

It is beginning to rust already, as i ground off the Galv while grinding it.

CRT style Scanlines improve 2D animation.

The 'scan lines' formed by screen cycling from frame to frame seems to help differentiate the pixels.
Scanlines were a characteristic of CRT computer screens, but were not part of how pixel orientated plasma screens operate, therefore were not only removed, but not possible.

A man has invented a chip that artificially (and adjust-ably) inserts scanlines back into the image.

Note that this is only really useful for 2d games and nostalgia trips.

http://retro.nintendolife.com/news/2011/04/feature_the_slg3000_and_the_glorious_return_of_scanlines

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Web Page

Seal. The man. The seal. The soldier.

Googling Seal will give you the most pleasing montage on the internet. Mr Gappy, all the real seals staring glumly at him (with the occasional clubbing) and the odd scary picture of heavily armed Navy Seals.

Three Seals

One and Three chairs. (Kosuth)

Facebook Just loves that cheery smile.

Everyone just loves that cheery smile.

Even

Batman

yes.

Batman

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Bitties and Byttes

After reading Cory Archangels explanation of compression I decided to have a deeper look.

As a regular destroyer of data, mangler of images, battler of video formatting (NNNNNNNNNNNGHAAARGH!!!!!) i found all of this helpful and interesting.

(92% annotated and mangled from wikipedia or dvdhq. Badly referenced. No cred. The other 8% is likely me getting it wrong. )

BITS/BYTES

A bit (binary digit) is the basic unit of information in computers. Bits exist in one of two possible distinct states. These may be the two stable states of a flip-flop, two positions of an electrical switch, two distinct voltage or current levels allowed by a circuit, two distinct levels of light intensity, two directions of magnetization or polarization, 0 or 1, black and white/on-off

There are several units of information which are defined as multiples of bits, such as byte (8 bits), kilobit (either 1000 or 210 = 1024 bits),megabyte (either 8000000 or 8×220 = 8388608bits), etc.

A BYTE consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer.

The size of 8bits was used as it was convenient for displaying 26 alphabetic characters (only uppercase), 10 Numerical digits, and from 11 to 25 special graphic symbols.

The askii language could work with 7 bits, for instance, however 8 is divisible into two parts etc if needed. ie: More efficient, and leaves the option to work in 4bit bytes if needed.

These four-bit quantities were called nibbles, in homage to the then-common 8-bit bytes

In computer architecture, 16-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are at most 16 bits (2 octets) wide.