Category: Playful or Cool

MyMind by Sebastian Krau? is a Mac OS X freeware mindmapping tool. See also MyMind 1.2 – MacUpdate for details and to download. This is another mindmapping package for the list I blogged ealier – see More on Mindmapping. This is thanks to James Chartrand.

James, a graduate of our Multimedia program who is working in Japan came by for a visit and showed me his cell phone and the cool things it can do. Besides controlling things like a Karioke player with the IR port and being an MP3 player, it can scan QR Codes which are two-dimensional barcodes. The barcodes are showing up all over – in magazines to provide a coupon or a URL, on business cards so that you can scan in a person’s contact information, and on screens. The scanning software lets you scan multiple 2D barcodes and then can merge the data into one file so you can suck up little programs for your phone. Above all it seems quite robust – both the QR Code system and, for that matter, the regular OCR with the camera that lets you scan English text.
If you want to try it, this QR Code Generator lets you generate the barcodes. The code above is my contact information encoded for the Vodafone scanner. For more on QR Code see QR Code features or qrcode.com. According to their site, there is no licensing fee to use QR Codes, which may explain why it is taking off.
Continue reading QR Codes

Matt Patey pointed me to a cheaper source of Theremin kits. See PAiA: Theremax theremin, the kit costs $79 USD + shipping. Now I need to come up with a reason why I need this for multimedia research.

St?©fan Sinclair drew my attention to a neat interactive visualization of walking, BioMotionLab1.6 by the Biomotion Lab at Ruhr-University and Queen’s University. It took me a bit to get it. Try it out.

Talk about great presents! For my birthday I got “The Great Philosophers Finger Puppets” from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild.

The Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild began in 1992 when two students of philosophy found their inner creativity in the midst of a dwindling academic job market. As it turned out, fulfilling gift giving needs proved to be almost as satisfying as probing eternal questions. Though we still contemplate justice and truth, it is our wish to fulfill the gift giving needs of the funny & sophisticated everywhere! (About us)

It’s good to know that philosophy and gift giving go together. Coming soon – my Philosopher-Finger-Puppet Theatre!

According to Slashdot, Arlo Rose is porting Konfabulator to Windows. The Konfabulator site now goes to a strange “notebook” essay on “Ten Days In The Wild” which pretends to have discovered two types of creatures in the wild (Macs and PCs.) To see what Konfabultator in Windows would look like see image here.
This came to me from Chris. See also a previous grockwel: Research Notes: Konfabulator blog entry.

Boohbah Zone is a neat little Flash site for what I assume is a kids TV show. Sent to me by Judith.

From join-the-dots, a blog I have been enjoying recently, is a link to Geometric Paper Folding: Dr. David Huffman (as in Huffman coding.)
Continue reading Paper Folding

fuck sex granulation love the shit god

WORDCOUNT and its companion QUERYCOUNT are two text-art experiments by Jonathan Harris of Number27. (StÈfan Sinclair pointed this out.) WORDCOUNT uses the Britich National Corpus to present an interactive Flash view of all the words sorted by frequency (thus “The” starts the list of 86800 words.) QUERYCOUNT tracks the words people ask to see in the WORDCOUNT list, not surprisingly starting with “fuck” and “sex”, but followed (when I checked) by “granulation”. (There must be some group repeatedly asking for “granulation” or a bug for that to show up so high.) What does the list of words we look for (quoted at the start of this entry) say about us?
Continue reading WORDCOUNT

morphases.com is a site that lets you place with faces. It is a much more sophisticated version of the interactive face of me that Kathy programmed in Flash.

Thanks to Ross Scaife for this link.