Bag of Beans

Article on building your own DIY studio lighting rig. A nice alternative to expensive lighting systems for amateur photographers.

A flexible lighting system is something that I have wanted to play with for a while, but like everything else in photography it seems to be a fairly expensive area to get into, at least when you consider the relative simplicity of a light-bulb.

Thankfully there are a number of cheap and widely-available or easily-made items that can provide most of the same functionality at a small fraction of the price. For under US$75, this article will show you how to put together a flexible and robust lighting system that is both useful and relatively easy on the hip pocket.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

This blog has a great collection of optical illusions. Check out this fantastic piece of sidewalk chalk art:

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

This site has a nice collection of historical photos from the early days of computers.

• Link (via reddit)

Ever wonder what happens when you open up a huge underground cavity beneath a lake?

Early in the morning on November 21, 1980, twelve men decided to abandon their oil drilling rig on the suspicion that it was beginning to collapse beneath them. They had been probing for oil under the floor of Lake Peigneur when their drill suddenly seized up at about 1,230 feet below the muddy surface, and they were unable free it. In their attempts to work the drill loose, which is normally fairly easy at that shallow depth, the men heard a series of loud pops, just before the rig tilted precariously towards the water.

• Link (via MetaFilter)

Alex Papadimoulis has posted a truly stunning code excerpt to The Daily WTF. It was originally from a routine used to convert a byte array to hexadecimal. I guess if your boss insists on using Lines of Code as a performance metric, this is one way to be “productive.”

You may have guessed by the title, but today’s example is from one of the more complex realms of mathematics and computer science: hexadecimal. Today’s example is actually the sixth post of its kind. David H’s former colleague now holds the “hex” prize for using no less than 5,000 lines to convert a byte array to hexadecimal, something which could normally be done with a single line of Java code …

WTF indeed.

• Link

Gamasutra has a great article on how to enter rapid prototyping mode. Each game was developed by one grad student in under a week.

We lay it all out here. Through the following tips, tricks, and examples, we will discuss the methods that worked and those that didn’t. We will show you how to slip into a rapid prototyping state of mind, how to set up an effective team, and where to start if you’ve thought about making something new, but weren’t sure how. We hope these well-tested guidelines come in useful for you and your next project, big or small!

Very interesting read.

• Link (via Coding Horror)
• Experimental Gameplay Project

Infoverse has an entertaining proposal to replace the decimal numbering system with the octal system. They’ve come up with new set of digits and a new system for time-measurement.

do you think our conventional decimal number system is perfect? if not…this is for you: a new octal_based mathematics_system for the information age.

• Link (via Digg)

Brad Isaac has a great little howto on binding your own books.

If you like ebooks but don’t like reading them on your computer screen, this How-to post is for you. I’ll show you a quick and dirty book binding technique you can use to turn your ebook into a real book with about 5 minutes worth of effort. In fact, this is so easy, you might end up self-publishing your own books on demand for profit. If that’s the case, you owe me a copy.

This process involves just a few basic steps, no sewing, or doing mini-binds (otherwise called signatures). The most time consuming part of this process is just waiting for glue to dry.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Spark Fun Electronics has a put up a great howto on building a huge wall clock in their office. From MAKE: Blog:

Spark Fun Electronics writes - “Why? Well, why not? We had the new LED Light Bars burning a hole in our pocket, so we decided to build a clock. Not just any clock - but a very large 24″ tall, 12 foot wide, clock with GPS current time and accuracy down to 100ns. The clock turned into a huge undertaking. But at least we get to annoy Eric as the huge thing ticks over above his desk…”

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

This article explains why current CDs are not taking full advantage of their digital medium, and in fact are sounding worse and worse.

Then, one day we awoke to a new technology. It was called “digital recording.” Wow, now with a dynamic range of over 90 dB, our recordings could almost rival a live performance. Well, in theory. However, the music industry had other ideas.

Rather than use this new technology to take advantage of it’s wide dynamic range, the music industry went in the opposite direction. They decided that louder is better. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a race to see whose CD was the loudest. The only way to make CDs louder was to keep compressing the signal more and more. That’s where we are today. Everyone’s trying to make their CD sound louder than everyone else’s. The term that is used for this process is called, hot. Yes, most of today’s music is recorded hot. The net result, noise with a beat.

• Link (via Digg)

This page has a nice pair of before and after videos demonstrating the fake tilt shift effect, but applied to videos.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

Cockeyed.com has a disturbing story where a guy tears up a credit card application he received in the mail into smallish pieces, tapes it all back togther, and then fills it in. He even changes his return address to his parent’s home, and sends it back to the credit card company. Amazingly, the application is accepted and they send him a new credit card!

On the Chase Website about protecting your identity, I learned that I should tear up financial solicitations that I am not interested in.

This was bad news. Maybe my card would never come.

I also checked the Federal Trade Commission website on protecting your identity.

They suggested that I “tear or shred” credit applications and other forms before discarding them.

…

Things worked out just fine for me, I got my card, and I’m happy. But for you, you might be worried right now. Every credit card application you get is now like a villain from a suspense thriller. If you don’t figure out how to completely destroy it, it may come back to terrorize you in the sequel.

• Link (via reddit)

This is a useful little utility for Windows that helps you simply resize windows.

Sizer is a freeware utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact, predefined size. This is extremely useful when designing web pages, as it allows you to see how the page will look when viewed at a smaller size. The utility is also handy when compiling screen-shots for documentation, using Sizer allows you to easily maintain the same window size across screen grabs.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

This is a cool optical illusion you can download, print out and construct yourself. The dragon appears to move its head to follow the observer. Check out the video to see the illusion in action. If you put it together yourself, close one eye and move your head around to see the effect. Wild.

How does it work? If we move around when viewing a solid object, our brain knows how the object we are looking at should behave. However the dragon gives us the wrong clues, because we mis-interpret what its shape is. We assume that the nose of the dragon is pointing out towards us, but in fact the dragon’s head is concave.

• Link (via Digg)

Vertigo Software has a nice howto on setting up a Subversion version-control repository under Windows.

• Link (via Digg)
• Here’s the article that was the basis of the howto.
• SVN 1-Click Setup may also help simplify the process.

Jeremy Stanley has created a short video of a hard drive operating without its cover on.

• Link (via Digg)

This article argues that Minesweeper belongs to the class of NP-Complete problems (see “Complexity Classes P and NP” in Wikipedia to brush up on P and NP).

My result in the Mathematical Intelligencer states that a decision problem which I like to call “the Minesweeper Consistency Problem” and which is exactly equivalent to the problem of playing the minesweeper game, is yet another one of these NP-complete problems.

For the current discussion, it suffices that the problem of simply detecting which squares are or are not mines is equivalent to the Minesweeper Consistency Problem, and the fact that it is NP-complete means, for Minesweeper fans, that their favourite game can be seen as being right at the cutting edge of mathematical research. There are two possible viewpoints one might take on this.

The more “sober” viewpoint is that the NP-completeness of Minesweeper shows that Minesweeper really is a rather good game. The fact that it is NP-complete means that it is very difficult to spot when it is possible to clear a square safely in full knowledge that that square is clear, and when some guessing is required. In fact, even if you are told in advance that guessing is not required, it may still be difficult to decide what squares to clear. In some sense, when you play the game you cannot be expected to do much better than the hundreds of very good mathematicians who have worked on the P=NP? question for many many years.

• Link (via reddit)

A useful cheat sheet to make sure you have backup copies of your del.icio.us bookmarks.

Del.icio.us remains the grand-daddy of all the Social Bookmarking Services. It was bought out by Yahoo but, it remains slow and has many outages. Here are ways to backup your bookmarks for this 24×7 world.

• Link (via lifehack.org)

Happy Pi day! “Written in the USA date format, March 14 is an unofficial celebration for Pi Day derived from the common three-digit approximation for the number Ï€: 3.14.”

• Digg it.

This is a short review of a thermoplastic you can easily sculpt for your own plastic parts.

For those who don’t know, Shapelock is a polymer (plastic) similar to polypropylene except that it has a very low temperature softening point. The idea is that you heat some water to around 160 degrees F and dump some of the pellets into the water to soften them to a moldable state. After molding, you then allow the plastic to cool and it once again takes-on its hard form. The label likens Shapelock to “modeling clay on steroids” and that’s a pretty good analogy.

• Link (via Digg)
• MAKE also has a videocast about this product here.