A couple of weeks ago I was travelling in Montpellier. I snapped this picture. I had some idea that I had read an article on this project in Wired, but did not remember much of what it was.
Then this article on BoingBoing brings it all together and points me to www.space-invaders.com.
The ever so utterly intelligent Thorolf Tønjum has solved the programming contest using Microsoft Excel.
And, the result is amazing. Something shows up. I am sure. Actually, it seems like the center of all entertainment – Las Vegas has something to do with this? 😉
Link to the XLS-sheet: allsee_6d.xls
Could Google render all possible television pictures and take over the industry?
I am working within the television industry. When going from analogue to digital equipment we started to treat our content as numbers instead of electrical pulses of different magnitude.
When working with numbers things get more absolute than the analogue electrical pulses. Suddenly it struck me that there actually is a limited number of possible television pictures out there. And, that it would be possible to create a computer program that could render all these pictures.
Have a look at this experiment:
We make a very simple picture. It consist of 4 x 4 pixels and no colour or shades of gray. Just black or white. This picture will contain 4 x 4 = 16 pixels. Since the pixels can be only black or white it is very easy to map it to a binary number containing 16 bits. This is the grid for my very simple picture:
Lets take the number 27030. The binary version of this number is 0110100110010110. Mapped into the 4×4 picture it would look like this:
With pixels instead of numbers it looks like this:
I have been reading about airliners implementing WLAN and broadband in their planes, but never tried it. I know the tecnology, and I have been using mail since 1992. Still, it was somewhat special when I just recieved a mail from a coworker.
He is on his way to somwhere far east and is right now 11 000 m over Mongolia.
He is sitting there, 11 000 meters over Mongolia, watching Norwegian TV, listening to his favourite radio channels and sending email to his coworkers.
I was pretty impressed when I travelled with Singapore Airlines from Penang to Singapore back in 1999. They was very early in including personal entertainment in all seats, including computer games and a broad selection of movies. But, having broadband internet while flying is of course quite unbeatable. Now we’re talking! For a long flight, I am without doubt willing to pay extra for that kind of functionallity.
My friend is flying SAS, but as far as I know more airliners plan to include broadband on board.
Well, add "choose an airliner with broadband on board" to my current
list of travel essentials for long commutes:
– Active noise cancelling headphones
– A bottle of tabasco (to give the airline food some taste)
– The latest number of Wired
– Patience
I have updated my post about travelling with a GPS and a digital camera and included the excel worksheet for download:
“For the people that are familiar with excel and visual basic for applications (VBA) you can now download the very undocumented excel sheet with the code that match gps points with pictures here:
PlacePicturesGPS.xls”
Click here for the complete article.
Because I can not live without them:
1. Session saver
2. Mouse Gestures
I shot this nice photo of norwegian fjords, glaciers and mountains on my way from Bergen to Oslo. It is a part of the Hardanger Fjord called Sørfjorden. This fjord leads into the industrial centre of Odda. The white mountains to the right in the picture are parts of the Folgefonni glacier.
This could have been very nice to add to Geobloggers …if I had the GPS coordinates and GoogleMaps would extend their service with proper maps and satellite photos of Europe as well.
Related post:
Travelling with a GPS and a digital camera
I am running Windows Media Center edition 2005 on a box with a GeForce 6600 GT screen card. Regular DVD, TV, Xvid etc. plays smooth in MCE.
For some strange kind of reason WMV-HD did not play smooth when played back directly from a WMV-HD DVD.
I am not talking “not smooth” as in dropping frames and struggeling with CPU load. On my box WMV-HD 720p plays with 40% CPU-load and 1080p plays with 75% load. I am talking “not smooth” as in the way video plays when your mother-in-law would say “So what is the problem, this looks perfect”, but YOU can clearly see that this is not right. It is not smooth.
Could look a bit like the trouble you would have if you use the wrong methods when you convert from NTSC (30 fps) to PAL (25 fps).
It took some time before I managed to fix the problem, but it is now fixed, and this is my theory:
MCE 2005 works 100% in WMR9-mode when rendering video. On my GeForce 6600 GT this works very well. However, windows media player 10 defaults to video overlay. This is no problem, because MCE runs smooth on top, utilizing VMR9-video rendering.
But, when inserting a WMV-HD DVD MCE2005 actually quits and starts a special instance of windows media player 10. If you have left windows media player 10 the way it was installed by default, it now plays using video overlay. And, apparently – on my system overlay will not play completely smooth.
I went into the Windows Media Player 10 settings and changed the following:
Tools->Options->Performance->Advanced->
Uncheck “Use overlays” and check “Use high quality mode”
For my system, this fixed the problem and WMV-HD now plays smooooooth!
Update:
I just installed an update from Microsoft and the CPU load went from 75% to 45% when playing WMV-HD 1080p. You find the update here:
Update to enable DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) of Windows Media Video content in Windows Media Player 10
And the thread over at AVSForum about this patch here:
WMP10 Patch for WMV Acceleration
I snapped this picture at the train station at Stansted. One of the worst cases of burn-in I have ever seen. Click the picture for a closer look. This is why a Plasma screen is totally out of the question for my HTPC!
I wonder what the sales persons told the people at the train station when they sold these screens?
“We have these new fantastic flat screens for your train tables. They are only £ 10 000,- a piece and will last for at least two years.”
Recently, I bought a new screen card to be able to run Win MCE 2005. I went for an XFX GeForce 6600 GT AGP. Mainly because the GeForce 6600 GT supports NVidia PureVideo and because the XFX Card had two DVI connectors.
I knew that I had to remove the original fan and mount something more silent, so at the same time I ordered a Zalman VF700 Cu.
I followed the instructions and the VF700 is quite simple to install. However, I encountered one problem on my particular card. The instructions tell you to mount the RAM heatsinks, then mount the GPU heatsink. Well, guess what – the RAM chips are too close to the GPU on this card, so the GPU heatsink will not fit if you mount the RAM heatsinks. It is close to impossible to remove the RAM heatsinks when they are properly in place.
A couple of minutes with some cutting pliers, and the problem was solved. You can see the result in the pictures.
After the modification everything went smooth. From a very noisy card to a dead silent one and a 10 degrees lower GPU temp!
Just thought it could be interesting for people to read this if they plan to buy the same combination.
eirikso 