Portent

Filigrams - Computer Generated Art

admin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:19:20 +0000

The image pictured is called a Filigram and was invented by programmer Simon Tatham. He was playing around with code trying to come up something vaguely fractal and came up with this.

There are several examples on the page and if you know which end of a C compiler you pour the code in, you can download the source code and try these out for yourself.
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A Site for Electronic Pinouts

admin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:41:27 +0000

Before the internet if you wanted to access information you had to go to a library, which having limited shelves and storage space had to choose what it had available. The internet has removed that restriction but still, finding information on specialist stuff requires a bit of digging.

Pinouts.ru is one such specialist site. It provides information on pinouts- eg those funny connectors you see on electronic devices as well as inside them. There is a lot here for the electronics specialist or merely the curious. A little bit out of the normal but an excellent resource nonetheless.

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Alternate to Microsoft Photosynth

admin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 10:53:24 +0000

This is a bit different. Microsoft have a website PhotoSynth which lets you view places from different angles. The idea being to take lots of different photos (viewpoints/angles etc) and let you view them.

Well this is a lower budget attempt to do the same thing. Click on a place on the left and move your mouse over the photo; you can see the different transitions highlighted. When you click on a photo at the bottom (of the same thing), it transitions in a pseudo 3D way to the new photo. Cleverly done.

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Political Compass- Where are you?

admin — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:49:15 +0000

Politics these days is not just a matter of Left v right but also authoritarian v Libertarian. I suspect this could be further mapped ie pro-business or anti-business etc.

The Political Compass is a website that asks you 6 pages (not long pages) of questions to establish where you fit in. The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy). Mine shows me as being marginally to the right of centre but definitely more pro libertarianism than authoritarian.

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Recaptcha - Stop Spammers and help scan books!

admin — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:19:02 +0000

This site combines two concepts. The first is helping to correct poorly scanned in books. Machines can’t always correctly scan and convert to text images of text. Humans are much better at it. And identifying humans to stop scripts being used say to create free email accounts is often done by using a captcha. You are shown an image and asked to type in the text or numbers. Captcha is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart .

This site serves captcha images to websites and email anti-spam using text images from badly scanned books. The correct results are then used to update the scanned book image. Quite clever though I do wonder how they know an answer is correct without doing the donkey work in the first place!

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Shift- Ingenious Multi Screen Flash Puzzle

admin — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:03:37 +0000

This is quite clever. You move a little man through a maze to get to the “end of screen” door, picking up keys to unlock barriers and avoiding jumping or moving onto the spikes.

So far so normal. However if you press the shift key, everything inverts - the screen dump actually shows the same screen twice, both normally and when it’s inverted. (Inverted 180 degrees and flipped colour).Lots of screens to get through and you will need to press shift as well as think outside the box. Very clever.

BTW, both this and the previous game are by Armor Games- a coincidence but also a tribute to the quality of their games. (And no I have no connection to them, financial or otherwise!)

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StormWinds- Epic Tower Defence Game

admin — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 10:45:27 +0000

This is something of an epic game! One of the few Flash games that has a campaign. It’s the usual tower defence game except the view is sideways not a top view.

You’ve got 4 turret positions with a wide variety of weapons, most of which you can’t afford to start with but you earn points as you progress. It has the dumb logic that as your country’s last hope you are given a weak initial defence and the enemy always attacks starting with the weakest and gradually progressing to strongest. Still it wouldn’t be much of a game otherwise!

Beautiful graphics, decent but ultimately irritating music and great game-play make this an excellent diversion. I suspect it could be a real time killer so you have been warned!

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If you love Colour you’ll love ColourLovers!

admin — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:23:34 +0000

The thing I like about art websites (which I loosely classify this as ), is that they are the visual equivalent of bakery shops. Instead of the freshly made bread smell, you get hit by a visual treat. I recognise my lack of artistic ability of course so my admiration for good design is almost if not quite boundless.

ColourLovers is a community type website with one simple aim. Submitting good colour palettes for others to share. There are rules on how colours work together; search for colour wheel on the web to see what I mean. But design goes further than that. Some colours are in or out each yet, and combinations can have associations with subjects. Well I find it fascinating anyway! If you like colour, you will I’m sure join the growing ranks of colour lovers.

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Turn a Photo in 3D

admin — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:34:55 +0000

Over a year ago, there was a Portent Story on turning photos into 3D at Carnegie Mellon. There is a working website at Stanford University where you can upload a photo (it needs registration) then have it processed into 3D and you can view it using Shockwave.

If you haven’t got Shockwave installed, it will do it for you and once it’s in, you can view your photo or others, zoom in, pan. It’s not bad at all, but it depends upon the original photo and landscapes like the one shown make the best images.

It takes about 5 minutes from uploading until your photo is ready to view. If you’re interested you can download and view the source code in C and C++, but it is a 42 MB file. There’s also a neat integration with Flickr so you can search for photos by tag on Flickr and use those.

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Excellent JavaScript Demo - BlobSalad

admin — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:30:26 +0000

Yes it doesn’t look much but it’s reasonably smooth animation with collision detection running in JavaScript. Hats off to the Swedish programmer (I guess) Bjoern Lindberg.

The controls are simple just g to toggle gravity, h to split blobs and j to join them. You can use cursor keys to move them or drag them with the mouse. Very neat demo.

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MagMyPic - Howto Make the Front Cover!

admin — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:53:38 +0000

Don’t recognise the face? That’ Bill Heine, the man who put Headington on the map with his shark through the roof.

MagMyPic is an excellently implemented generator of magazine covers. Just upload a photo, select a magazine- there’s 14 to pick from Vogue, Time, National Geographic and many more and the results are plain to see.

The man pictured is responsible for increased reporting of sharks (not the legal ones!) in the Oxford area. See the previous story!

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The Headington Shark

admin — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:19:35 +0000

Now over 21 years old and still standing! This was erected in 1986 as a protest by American born Bill Heine who stayed in Oxford after his postgraduate degree at Balliol College. It’s 25 foot long and Bill successfully overcame the ire of local town planners to keep it up. You can read how on the linked site.

Bill is now a presenter for Radio Oxford. I think for this one act with the shark, never mind his cinema naming end-run around the planners (read that on the linked site as well) he should be made an honorary Englishman.
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Superb Animation - Animator v Animation

admin — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:54:05 +0000

This is very well done by artist Alan Becker. He draws a small figure in photoshop (I think) named Victim and proceeds to torment the little stick figure. Then the stick figure escapes and engages in a full battle onscreen, mostly within Photoshop against the animator using the features of Photoshop.

This is very nicely done and highly recommended to fill in a dull moment or two!
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Excellent and Different Online Product Store

admin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:53:00 +0000

Sol it’s just another boring online product store? Not quite! Just watch it for a few seconds…

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Circlo - Fun Flash Game

admin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:49:41 +0000

This is quite a fun diversion. In the centre is a rotating arm with various coloured balls attached. You have a ball shooting gun that revolves around the perimeter. You have to shoot the ball to hit other balls of the same colour so they fall off the centre.

It’s all about the timing and the first few levels are pretty easy. After that…

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