Friday, August 25, 2006

Links!

Here are links from all kinds of oddball categories for your Friday reading pleasure.

First off, from Sirius, a link to "Dodorango." What? Here's a description:
Hikaru dorodango are balls of mud, molded by hand into perfect spheres, dried, and polished to an unbelievable luster. The process is simple, but the result makes it seem like alchemy.

It's a very sophisticated version of making mud pies, really, and it sounds incredibly methodical and peaceful. And the pictures of the final product will blow your mind--they're absolutely beautiful. Here's a link to a website with plenty of information.

Kieron Gillen wrote a terrific article about Shodan that originally appeared in the UK version of PC Gamer last month. It's linked over at his blog now, and if you missed it originally, you can read it here.

Microsoft has a new training video--done by David Brent (Ricky Gervais). Funny? Of course it's funny. It's not Free Love on the Free Love Freeway, which might be the funniest thing I've ever seen on television, but it's still top quality, and you can see it here.

I've linked to this music video before, but Vahur Teller sent it to me this week, and it's so charming and happy that I'm going to link to it again. If you have a son, this little song will do all kinds of strange (but good) things to your insides.

I can't even figure out what this song is called--"JCBsong," maybe--but here's the link.

Finally, Frank Regan send it a link to new 3D display technology developed by Philips that doesn't require special viewing glasses. The difference between this and Sharp's 3D tech is that Sharp projects the image from only two angles, while Philips does it from nine. Here's a description:
A new line of 3-D televisions by Philips uses the familiar trick of sending slightly different images to the left and right eyes -- mimicking our stereoscopic view of the real world. But where old-fashioned 3-D movies rely on the special glasses to block images meant for the other eye, Philips' WOWvx technology places tiny lenses over each of the millions of red, green and blue sub pixels that make up an LCD or plasma screen. The lenses cause each sub pixel to project light at one of nine angles fanning out in front of the display.

It gets better.
One nearly ready-made source of content is modern video games, which actually generate three-dimensional objects internally, then flatten the images into 2-D representations for standard monitors. Philips has developed hardware and software that can extract the original depth information from the game engine and use it to create 3-D images on a WOWvx display.

This display is in production, and I've e-mailed about what must be the insanely expensive price, because we all have a prurient interest. Like I've written several times, though, 3D is the next big thing, and it will be realistically available at the consumer level much sooner than we ever expected.

The full article is here.

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