Batch Glitch Animation with Free Software

Here's how I made a 20mb GIF that is impossible to upload to most free image hosting services. This is using 10.6.8 on an old MacBook Pro but nothing here is platform specific. At the end of the day, you're just treating a sequence of image files as text and round-tripping animation.

Export video as an image stream.
I used MPEGStreamclip and saved a big folder of JPEGs. File>Export to other format. Select 'Image Sequence' from the drop down menu. The problem with this software is that you need to pay extra to extract DVD video frames, otherwise it's free. At this point I also made a reference version of the folder (copy/paste in Finder).

Use a text editor to do folder-wide find/replace commands
My favorite text editor on OSX is the free Smultron clone Fraise, but that actually crashed when I tried to do a find/replace on ~400 files all roughly 500K in size. Thankfully there is another program out there called MassReplaceIt that does this quite well. For a person comfortable with a command line text editor this would also be pretty easy to do, but then the screenshots wouldn't look as pretty:

Turn it into a GIF, or some other video file. 
I like this option because you don't have to deal with more image artifacts but you could go straight to any video format with the right tools. Did it with GIFfun.

TL;DR
MPEGStreamclip, MassReplaceIt, GIFfun—in that order.

Analog to Digital

http://venturebeat.com/2009/06/12/analog-is-dead-long-live-digital-tv/

Repper is a fun 2 or 3 minutes of your online time

Repper Studios


found via LifeHacker.com

I've been looking for something like this for years. If only they did rotational symmetry as well. Also digging the Creative Commons licensing on the software ;)

Face to Face

Just watched a really interesting talk from Chris Dede held at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society that brought me back to a topic I've written a little about before.


Conceptually, it seems pretty clear that the science of augmented reality is still stuck on producing reality inside the computer. Instead, I think the focus should be creating new realities through the computer, paralleling quasi-teleportation.


Here's how it would work:


Take two conference rooms. In both rooms, one wall is a giant Ultra-HD screen linked to the other room via fiber-optic cable and an 8K camera, or maybe a grouping of these cameras depending on the dimensions of the room.


Walking in, nothing would appear different about the room, other than the fact that one wall is pitch black. Then it turns on. This fourth wall is now a "magic-mirror", linking the other room to your room and vice versa. Essentially, both rooms have now created a third room that they collectively share.


This isn't video-conferencing. This isn't virtual reality, and while the equipment I'm talking about is still experimental and available in limited quantities, Moore's law – or perhaps more accurately the demands of consumerism – will say otherwise.



The "killer-app" in this instance would probably be distance learning. A system like this would enable a lecturer in a far off land the availability of teaching an evening course to a class of students across the globe while maintaining the same classroom structure. The essential difference is that the experience for both parties sitting behind the camera/screen would be in such high-fidelity that it becomes truly indistinguishable from reality.


Just give it 10-20 years ;)

Small World

Just finished reading Brion Gysin's biography last night and this pops up on my radar. Small world indeed!

Schlieren!

Forgive me while I post a Wikipedia article that I thought was cool...

Schlieren (from German; singular "schliere") are optical inhomogeneities in transparent material not visible to the human eye. Schlieren physics developed out of the need to produce high-quality lenses void of these inhomogeneities. These inhomogeneities are localized differences in optical path length that cause light deviation. This light deviation is converted to shadow in a schlieren system.

If an image is worth a thousand words, then should we use Photoshop to adjust for inflation?

found via Photoshop Disasters

At the risk of sounding a little too Orwellian for a Thursday morning...I'll let you draw your own conclusions on this one.

Optical Illusions Explained?

Check out this article on LiveScience.com

an excerpt:

"...our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd."