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 It's the only way to be sure. Games, computers, cartoons. |
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Optimistically world-weary since 1994. |
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It's the only way to be sure. Games, computers, cartoons. |
Part of
PhotoRant.Com
Optimistically world-weary since 1994. |
The pictures show a recent bargain toy -- a 7-inch Pandigital Novel eReader (aka "PDN," or "WPDN" to specify the white variant), re-flashed to expose its Android underpinnings and updated to Android 2.1 "Eclair." I managed to pick this one up during a recent clearance at the nearby chain store Kohl's for a tidy $59 (apparently, a few folks even managed to get a $20-off deal -- an Android tablet for $40!). Even at the more-usual price of $199 the Novel is no iPad, but at that price you could by three or four of them (or at the discount, a dozen or more!) for the price of a single iPad (Addendum: Apparently they sold 440,000 PDN's in 2010). So here's a quick review of my experience thus far:
Pandigital are known as much for their digital picture frames as for their e-Readers, and the Novel kind of feels less like a slowed-down computer and more like a turbocharged picture frame. This suits its designated purpose: as a full-color eReader. Not a game machine, or a media center, though in fact it's quite capable of playing YouTube videos or being a music player if the mood should strike you to use it that way. But really the CPU wasn't designed for rapid-fire screen updates. It's a device built around a slower, simpler, long-attention-span sort of experience.
I've got several different devices on hand for comparison, including current iPhone, iPad, a couple of new and old Android phones, and various other small computers, MIDs, readers, and so forth. Given this environment, these are the things that stand out about the Novel:
So what's it good for?
Principally, it's good for its chartered design tasks: reading eBooks and light web browsing. For these, it's excellent. By stripping-away the default Pandigital/Barnes&Noble skin (re-flashing doesn't delete these features, but simply makes them companion apps within the Android Home screen), the full range of Android apps can be seen and tried. I've found that the combination of wi-fi and Google books, Aldiko, & Kindle apps, along with Google Reader and the Skyfire browser, makes it more capable that any other reader save high-end tablets like the iPad or Galaxy Tab.
Sometime it's hard to just let something be what it is, so I added a bunch of features to the Spice Of Life sketch. The OpenGL part is little changed, but the "built with Processing" part got expanded to make it simpler and self-explaining for users/players.
A nice thing about Processing is that sketches can usually be easily re-factored as web-browser applets. Having some issues with this one, sadly (and only on some computers), so I can't just post a playable applet on botzilla (yet).
Here's a video instead -- rather than a help screen, you'll see that SoL tries to guess what you're doing. This is a direct capture, though you can't see the mouse cursor.
Download (revised) file -- this is a zip of the entire sketch, ready-to-roll as a Processing project.
Speaking of painting and computers, I've been working off and on on "JokerPaint," a little let's-beat-images-senseless sort of toy made using Processing and with a lot of the heavy pixel lifting being done via chains of filters that I've made using the GLSL framework in Andrés Colubri's GLGraphics library. I expect that at some point I'll post it to OpenProcessing.
The image above was generated from the photo in this recent post. Unlike most paint-like image processes, JokerPaint's imaging is continuous and real-time -- never static. It's constantly revising and touching-up and I just picked a frame at random for this still picture.
Color study shot for Rift: Planes of Telara
Earlier this week we were privileged to have painter & storyteller James Gurney visit the art department at Trion, both to have him speak with us and also for us to get a chance to show him our game. He's best-know to the public for the Dinotopia books (favorites at our house for many years -- See See & I were also lucky enough to see the Dinotopia show at the Norton Museum in Palm Beach a few months back), and known to a lot of artists for his blog and several art technique books, including the new Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter.
We got the chance to look at some advance copies of the book and also hear him talk a little bit about (among many other things!) how the brain processes color and luminance separately -- which of course reminded me of this old post on the Black and White Brain. It's exciting to me to see someone as accomplished as Gurney coming at the same ideas from a different direction and for different purpose.
It's been several years now where I find that some of the biggest sources of information for my work in computer-graphic coloring and shading come not from computer scientists or even other people doing similar work -- instead, they come from painters. Not just realist painters, either. Gradations, highlighting, punctuation, contrast, shape -- increasingly I think of shading as a sort of painting-without-drawing.
Sadly, the Botzilla Name has been hijacked -- repeatedly -- so the name I'm using for this little project is KID (botzilla): Kevin's Illmatic Distraction. Or idiotic. Or intrepid. Or infantile. Indescribable. idk.
No lasers or grenade launchers yet but at least I finally got a little time clear to get this little platform working in a predictable way, with the controller managing DC motors rather than servos or steppers. Truthfully I'm not at all sure that something so typically mechanical is part of my goal. I'm now thinking about using flexible kevlar strips to push bits around, like twistable tendons on a flexible stalk. Motorized rubber bands?
My real interest in this is trying to get at the idea that embodiment, input, and and output are all the same. When someone turns to look at you, not only does that change their collection of immediate stimuli, but the way that they look also has an expressive effect that's transmitted. Should the sound and speed of a motor be considered an expressive part of a robot's presence (how else would people sell Harley Davidsons?)? The idea of separable inputs and outputs, as we have in formal systems like computers, seems to me to be an artificial construct, unlike the nature of being in the world.
Current parts manifest:
Still looking for the right camera, and brooding over whether to switch my old XP machine (go Pentium II!) over to Ubuntu.
Going for two separate processors because it just seems more natural to me, a bit analogous to the distinction of dorsal and ventral nervous systems.
A few busy weeks coming up!
On the heels of Contact, I'm heading to Madrid in a few weeks to visit See See and to scout around the shows of PHotoEspaña (suggestion of "must see" shows greatly appreciated), followed by a zip up to the much-overphotographed Guggenheim in Bilbao and whats sure to be entirely too much fantastic food.
Isaac's birthday and graduation from Middle School are also approaching, even earlier -- and then as soon as I'm back from Spain, he's in for three weeks of rock n' roll camp while we also deal with Siggraph, California Extreme, Oshkosh (maybe), Gamefest, and yeah, the girl on the far right of the photo above is carrying an NVISION bag, where I'll be speaking about the future of real-time character animation and rendering (with special guests -- some incredible NVIDIA partners).
It’s been a couple of years now since I wrote this entry on
digital Black and White conversions. I’m still using a variation of
the Caponigro conversion described there. What prompted me here was a
combination of events, including reconciling the many scripts and actions I
had on several different Photoshop-equipped computers, each of which had
diverged from ts brethren; meeting Bob Carnie at Elevator Digital in Toronto,
thanks to Dinesh;
this
APUG thread, which also included more info from Bob; and the latest
edition of Digital Photo
Pro magazine, which has run B&W articles as its cover story quite a
lot over the last year or two, and this one was no exception. What
surprised me was that DPP were freshly touting the old Gorman/Holbert
method (aka the Gorman
Method).
I've tried the Gorman method a few times in the past, stored actions for it
like many other people have no doubt, and... it puzzles me. It puzzles me because:
As an Action the method makes sense to some degree -- I can imagine applying it to whole directories of pictures at a time. What it lacks in control it might make up for in volume, though you could say that about any Photoshop/Bridge/Lightroom action.
There's also the proof pudding -- Gorman's published shots. They genuinely look great, but... is it really the conversion, or the practiced studio photographer? If he really uses this method, my guess is that he's learned how to nail his desired B&W results time after time by rigid adherence until it has become very natural to use and light for this scheme.
Bob likes Lab too, according to the APUG thread. I'm still scratching my head, though I suppose that the same "use what works for you" logic could be behind his comments (and I have no argument with that line of reasoning, believe me). It's also true that using a combination of all three colors, regardless of just what that composition might be, has the potential to give you really smooth and gorgeous floating-point-precision gradients even without resorting to Dark Side trickery like HDR.
Still, I like the Caponigro
method, and have adjusted it slightly since the previous entry. I don't
try to put the color toning into the same operation, and I put all the
adjustments into a folder, so I can turn them of and on as a group (or fade
them by adjusting the opacity of the entire layer group at once).
I've also added a blank layer I label "burn" to the folder, and set its blend mode to "multiply." Anything I paint into this layer will essentially burn-down (darken) the corresponding areas of the final B&W image, and it too can ave varying opacity in case I get a little too heavy-handed wit the brush (which happens a fair bit). The illustration shows a complete "Modified Caponigro Method" folder.
What about that undisplayed "Layer 2" above the folder?
It's the result of my very favorite Photoshop key commands, a trick I've only heard verbally described as "The Move." It's "ctrl-option-shift-E" and does in one step what the Gorman method does in two -- it merges all visible layers into a new layer at the top of the stack (in the Gorman method, this is done by creating a blank layer and then running "merge visible" on that layer -- exactly the same result).
That "Layer 2" is just such a layer, which has then been hidden for later use (as we'll see).
A problem with (pre-CS4) Photoshop is that it doesn't let you specify arbitrary blend operations (or filters) on a folder. So the only way to use those sorts of effects are to do a "move," create that new layer, and then execute whatever on that layers pixels. That's what the Gorman method does for its high-pass layer, and how I use it will be described below.
These "merged" layers are great, but do remember -- if you edit any of the underlying Hue, Curves, etc layers, those changes will not automatically appear in the merged layer. Instead, you'll need to hide or delete the old merge and make a new one (clicking the little visibility icons then makes A/B comparisons pretty easy too, btw).
Recently, I've been experimenting with using these merge B&W layers to manipulate color images:
Here are some pics: the first is an un-modified original, followed by two possible B&W conversions, and then the color result of applying those conversions back to the original color image. In the first, darker one, I liked the somewhat bad-color-printing appearance it had. In the second, which also washed-out a lot of the detail in the freckles, the color becomes very soft, looking almost like hand coloring. The last in this group uses the same brght luminance source, but the effect is faded back by reducing the luminance layer's opacity.
As long as we're in Photoshop, it's hard to resist trying near-useless tricks, too. Here's a completely negative luminance applied to the original colors, and its inverse (which gives positive luminance to negative colors).
These samples use a different blend mode: the "lighter color" mode. The result (which looks best, IMO, when slightly faded back) gives slight variations in the overall color saturation according to the overall luminance -- another rather film-like effect and one I really like.
Finally, why not blend components of techniques for something new? The pics below show the high-pass layer from the Gorman technique, applied via "overlay" to the original color image.
So what about video games?I would be remiss not to mention that all of these methods, except for the high-pass filter, can be executed in a single unified pass in hardware shaders, thus also making them appropriate for using in video games (the high-pass filter would require an additional render-to-texture pass). If you've been paying attention to John Nack's blog, you may also know that such effects will eventually be available in real time for Photoshop and Flash via "Pixel Bender" shaders.
As a departure from the usual photorant, today's entry is on the game EVE Online. Specifically, it's about how to play by going against the usual guidance for new players: instead of taking it slow and learning the ropes in the safety of the center Empire area, to move as quickly as possible into the lawless and higher-powered realms of 0.0 space.
I'm writing this for (new) EVE players, so I'm not really going to explain terms or basic game info, though I'll insert links along the way to wikis and so forth.
Despite what you may have heard, 0.0 space is not an ongoing death-to-all-comers destruction derby. In fact, a lot of 0.0 space is pretty quiet, populated by players performing the usual EVE chores: killing rat pirates, mining ore, or sitting docked in a station selling and processing the results of those activities.
Borders are the dangerous regions in EVE. The borders of Empire space itself (security 0.4 to 0.1) are often camped by player pirates who want to avoid CONCORD but also avoid the tougher opponents they might encounter in 0.0.
Gates from Empire Space into 0.0 space are often guarded too. What's often not apparent to new players is that the gates aren't so much guarded against players from Empire as they are being guarded against other players from 0.0, who may be trying to flank a border within 0.0 space; or to blockade transports and freighters that may be trying to move goods back and forth from sources and markets in 0.0 and Empire.
"Borders within 0.0?" you may ask. Do yourself a favor, and get some maps. Get a copy of the Ombey PDF maps, which can guide you from system to system, and a current copy of the EVE Political JPEG Map, which will show you the layout of alliances within 0.0 space.
Systems that are along borders -- especially borders to areas marked "contested" -- will inevitably be the ones most closely guarded.
So how to get past them?As cheaply as possible. By that, I mean: make sure that if you get blown up it will cost you the bare minimum, so you can be cloned and zoom right on back again with minimum ISK loss. Don't bring in anything expensive, and be aware that you will lose any fight in 0.0 at first. Your only defense is to run like crazy. That means you should use a rookie ship (if you get podded you'll get another for free), a shuttle, or even blast around in just a pod. All of them are quick, small enough that they may be hard to target by battleships and the like, and easily replaced.
You can also use an alt character to do exploration for you -- have the alt run around into various systems, check them out, and if the alt survives, log it off, jump back to the main character and follow. Losing the alt -- repeatedly -- is usually close to free for a new player.
The best time to try the run into 0.0? Just before or just after daily EVE downtime. Just before, people in 0.0 will be busy docking-up and packaging or setting up transactions. Just after downtime, the population will be low. My first successful run from Empire to deep within the Stain region was done right at the beginning of the day -- I crossed most of it in the first two or three minutes. Within five or ten minutes, the dangerous and more hardcore 0.0 players were starting to appear.
To make the run, do not use autopilot. Pick a destination and fly it manually. In systems that are empty, warp to zero. If the next system is occupied, warp to a planet or moon (add planets to your overview), then warp to a gate. Beware of the straight-line path between gates in occupied unknown 0.0 systems, as there may be someone who has placed a bubble along that line specifically to snare inter-gate warpers. Use a planet to come in from the side.
If go don't think you can get through, warp back and forth between planets until you run out of capacitor and get stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere. This is the safest place for you to be, away from any celestial body. Make a bookmark of your new safe spot, and then log off. Come back later and re-assess the situation. Are the people who were blocking you before still blocking you? Rinse and repeat.
Where are you going? Hopefully, somewhere where the local rules are "NRDS." That is, "not red, don't shoot." These are increasingly rare. The usual alternative rule is NBSI: "not blue, shoot it." Assuming you have no special standings, you will be neither red (hostile) or blue (friendly) to any existing corporation or alliance of corporations. If you can make it to an NRDS area, you should generally be safe from other players.
Regardless, things change. It's important in 0.0 to have allies as quickly as possible (more on that below).
Make your destination somewhere that has a station that has medical services (which you can identify either from the Ombey maps or the in-game map view). When you dock (be careful -- some stations may not let in non-friendlies), change your clone to that location. You are now in 0.0 space, and can't be easily expelled.
Now what?
You can't rat. Even the smallest 0.0 rats will probably blow you up quite handily. Your first priority should be to get into a local corporation and alliance, if at all possible. They may give you guidance on how to work your way up their own speciality path -- PvP, industry, etc.
If you can't do that immediately, your next plan should be salvaging -- that is, looting -- from the wrecks of rats destroyed by other players (and on occasion, from the wrecks of other players). The wrecks in 0.0 will have much more valuable stuff than the wrecks you might find in Empire. Be careful here, as some players may get torqued at you and until your skills and resources are up, you won't have much ability to retaliate if they decide to pop you. Better to be on "Local" channel, be friendly, ask permission. If this is your course, learn the "salvaging" skill and learn to use a destroyer -- they tend to have a large cargo bay and if you learn to use "salvager" units you can mount a lot of them (a destroyer is not much of a combat ship in 0.0).
Finally, you can mine. The minerals you will get in 0.0 are worth much more than what you can find in Empire. Be careful in the local asteroid fields, as the rats can appear suddenly and may be quite strong compared to you. Learn trade skills, so that you can set up sell-orders for the minerals you find.
And of course, learn the learning skills as quickly as possible, as they'll have ongoing effect on the speed with which you acquire all other skills.
Skill you should have before you go: Infomorph Psychology. You should really be able to clone jump. This can be invaluable when you first arrive. Get a jump clone in Empire before you leave, and once it's moved, you'll be able to move back and forth to Empire once a day freely. This is important to new players because the availability of rookie-level skill books in 0.0 is close to nil. Jump to Empire, buy all the books you can (especially learning skills), start to train each one just for a minute -- now they are "inside" your character, and you can keep studying the skill even after you jump back to 0.0.
You can also jump back and forth if you're having a rough go in 0.0 -- go back to Empire, do some rookie missions, build up what you need to get into a 0.0 corp. If you need a corp that's tolerant, try JMHF.
This post is long enough! Good luck, and fly safe -- or not.
In my blog draining from yesterday: Kristopher Stallworth of Bakersfield found a poster of Gursky's "99 Cent Store" hanging in -- where else? -- a 99 Cent Store, and Conscientious has the shot.
When Gursky was here at SFMOMA a couple of years back, he commented that he had met the CEO of K-Mart, who also had a (probably "real" and pricey) print of "99 Cent Store" in his office. It was left ambiguous as to whether the exec felt that the photo criticized or glorified its subject... a little less ambiguous in Stallworth's discovery?
I reminds me too of the days of ancient Pixar, before Toy Story, when advertisers would repeatedly approach the studio with what they considered their Big Idea: they had seen Luxo Jr. Their quick-reacting repitilian brains had smelled food and would Pixar please do another spot just like the one that Pixar had done for the Luxo company, only for product XYZ? They simply couldn't imagine that the film had been made for any reason other than to sell more lamps.
(I actually have no idea if it had any actual effect on the sales of real-world Luxo lamps, but that was not remotely the film's intent -- the only intent was to entertain, using Pixar's then-new pre-RenderMan renderer)
This idea of wrongly-perceived purpose opens a narrow window on a problem that seems inherent with any sort of mass media -- its existence automatically valorizes any subject, even when the intent of the maker may be to condemn (a situation not inherent in Gursky -- he is usually rather deliberate in his neutrality, at least when speaking about his images). Thus "anti-gangster" films like Scarface are idolized by gangsta wanna-be's, proliferating celphone videos of misogynist "honor killings" promote more of the same, books of war photos become promoted to politely-fascinating coffee-table items, or used as images not to prevent war but to foment and celebrate it. One man's horror made into another's grand circus.
Always the old twisting knot of intent and effect. Natchwey has said he feels compelled to make the very best photos he can, with every aesthetic tool he can muster, out of respect for the people he photographs and their situations. Salgado does the same thing and gets criticized for "aesthetic anaesthesia," that somehow presenting his subjects in a compelling way wraps them up in Too Much Art. How much is too much? Does less reduce the value to the subject? The more you wriggle, the tighter the knot gets. Andreas? Ed? Henri?
We got the first copy back from the printer today, and it's available from Amazon if you're not going to Siggraph in San Diego this week.
Here it comes! GPU Gems III will indeed be available at Siggraph 2007.
This is the first year in a while that I won't be bogged-down with meetings and official Siggraph duties -- I'll be free to get some actual research done!
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