Well, OK, just in theory. But this amazing NXT-controlled LEGO robot by Hknssn can build its own tower, and since the robot rides up the tower with each new piece it places, there’s theoretically no limit to how high it can build as long as it continues to be fed pieces.
Keith Skretch combined Ennio Morricone, a sander, a camera, and infinite patience to create this incredible video.
To create this strata-cut animation, I planed down a block of wood one layer at a time, photographing it at each pass. The painstaking process revealed a hidden life and motion in the seemingly static grain of the wood, even as the wood itself was reduced to a mound of sawdust.
That nukeblast effect is looking pretty nifty, actually!
Hi guys,
I'm back from Barcelona and at the bench again---yay!
Got into some weathering now....lets see, what have I done?./...OK, I did some metallic sponge-chipping all over the tank. Secondly, I added pin washes in black-brown, and in some dark rust tones in different places for variety's sake.
I added some "Bright Green filter" from Adam Wilder's Nitro Line to alter the inner parts of the green patches. I also added some Gray Brown filters over the sand and gray colors.
I also used the "Spatter method"--loading up a stiff brush with paint and then flicking it to transfer the paint in small drops against the model--to ad some rusty micro-chips to the hull and to tint the tracks.
The wheels got hair-spray treatment first, a wash of gray-brown and then rust, and then flicked with rust. Still quite a bit to do here....
It's starting to look grimier.The rear is going to be a BIT cleaner, obviously.
SStill much to do in terms of adding actual dust, dirt, etc. I'm hoping to make good progress tomorrow and with a little luck get the track on. Stay tuned!!!
Tasan viisi vuotta sitten kirjoitettiin ensimmäinen merkintä Kiinan auringonpimennysmatkaan liittyen. Silloin blogin oli tarkoitus toimia ainoastaan pari viikkoa ja niin se tekikin. Reissukertomus talteen ja se oli siinä. Sitten saatiin ajatus lähteä Pohjois-Norjaan kuvaamaan Venuksen ylikulkua. Blogi heräteltiin henkiin jo reissuun valmistautuessa ja suunnitelmia laatiessa. Taas, kun matka oli ohi, alkoi hiljaiselo.
Viime kesänä Harri Haukka esitti ajatuksen, jos alkaisin koostamaan tänne havaintoja ja mietteitä tähtiharrastuksesta – siitä se sitten lähti. Nyt viisi vuotta Kiinan reissun jälkeen kasassa on 277 artikkelia, joista suurin osa havaintoja ilmakehän ilmöistä tai tähtitaivaan kohteista. Näiden lisäksi pilvisinä päivinä olen kirjoitellut artikkeleita kokoelmassani olevista meteoriiteista, ihan vain niistä itsekin lisää oppiakseni. Ei niiden kaikkien taustoja muuten tulisi kuitenkaan niin tarkkaan selvitettyä.
Pilvisten iltojen ratoksi aionkin jatkossa kirjoitella myös esittelyjä tähti- ja avaruusharrastukseen liittyvistä vierailukohteista, kuten jo tuossa reilu viikko sitten kirjoitinkin käynnistäni Archenholdin Observatoriolla. Esiteltävät kohteet tulevat olemaan sellaisia, joissa olen itse käynyt.
Muistutetaan tässä yhteydessä tulevasta Kassiopeian Aurinkopäivästä Härkämäen Observatoriolla 27. päivä kuluvaa kuukautta. Tapahtuma on ilmainen ja kaikille avoin, joten tervetuloa! Mielenkiintoisten luentojen lisäksi nähtävillä tulee olemaan ainakin allekirjoittaneen meteoriittikokoelma ja toivottavasti myös parin muun keräilijän kokoelma. Taivaalta tippuneita avaruuskiviä on siis luvassa hyvän kokoinen kasa nähtäväksi.
I'm pretty sure that 100% of the TSA people are officially brainless.
The TSA has demanded that overseas airports, like London's Heathrow, should require travellers to turn on their electronics before flying to the USA, and ban any broken or out-of-power devices.
Read the rest
Good news everyone!
Adrian Drake (BrickFrenzy) is back with another MEGA awesome build for Brickworld this year. This time, it’s a life-sized Bender from Futurama:
At 6 feet tall (including antenna) and built with approximately 20,000 pieces – it may surprise you that this build only took about Adrian a month to build. I think this was the single most photographed build at Brickworld, and earned Adrian the Judge’s Choice Award and nomination for Best Mega Creation.
Of course no life sized bender would be complete without a functional chest cavity (featuring one of Brickworld’s finest traditional drinks).
As a huge Futurama fan, I couldn’t help but get caught up in life-sized-Bender Fever, and decided to build Nixon’s head (minus jar) to put on Bender’s body (ARROOOOO!).
Oh and Adrian totally trusted me enough to let me put on Bender’s Head.
A special thanks to Adam Myers for letting me build Nixon from his collection in Chicago, and for loaning out Nixon head to Adrian to display at BrickFair VA.
It’s incredibly simple, just butter (she’s French, so bien sûr), dark chocolate, sugar, flour, a bit of baking powder and her secret ingredient: water. A spoonful or two here and another there creates a decadent crumb you won’t read about in any cookbook. Sure, you could use milk or maybe replace a spoonful with some kirsch but she does not so I do not. The whole thing, save some hand-whisked egg yolks and machine-whipped egg whites (which gives it an airy lift and almost crackly meringue of a lid), is mixed in the pot where you melt the chocolate. It bakes in 30 minutes, which is convenient when your afternoon is rerouted, and tastes amazing. And I bet she regrets ever giving me the recipe.
I just love the MS way of declaring that "you're breaching hundreds of our patents - but we won't tell which ones because then you'd stop breaching them and we couldn't sue you anymore!" Patents. Bleh!
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock
For more than three years now, Microsoft has held to the line that it has loads of patents that are infringed by Google's Android operating system. "Licensing is the solution," wrote the company's head IP honcho in 2011, explaining Microsoft's decision to sue Barnes & Noble's Android-powered Nook reader.
Microsoft has revealed a few of those patents since as it has unleashed litigation against Android device makers. But for the most part, they've remained secret. That's led to a kind of parlor game where industry observers have speculated about what patents Microsoft might be holding over Android.
That long guessing game is now over. A list of hundreds of patents that Microsoft believes entitle it to royalties over Android phones, and perhaps smartphones in general, has been published on a Chinese language website.
It’s been barely a week since LEGO’s announcement about the new Mini Cooper creator set. Inspired by the pictures of that set, Miro Dudas built a mini-fig scaled version:
I haven’t decided yet whether this super little build is going to temporarily satisfy my craving for the real set, or just make waiting until August even that more hard to do!
I'd be more interested in this if I had a WiiU instead of a normal old Wii... *think*
Mario Maker is coming to the Wii U console, and it lets you edit and play your own Super Mario Bros. levels easily.
At Nintendo's E3 press briefing it showed off gameplay footage of Mario Maker, displaying how easy it is to create complex environments and play them through.
The level editor shown looks like it will be a lot of fun to play with. You seem to be able to switch between "old" and newer graphics too.
Unfortunately this game doesn't come out until next year, however.
Astronaut Steve Swanson, who is currently serving as commander of the ISS, designed original artwork for the Expedition 40 crew patch which pays homage to Star Trek.
Keywords: concept spaceship environments space art illustrations design from the dark shepherd book the art of fred gambino hd high definition resolution portfolio image samples from artstation.com
Imagine the finesse of Jerac‘s spaceship building skills applied to a massive model: the result is this over 2 meter long Imperial Star Destroyer. It is the only large model of the ISD built using the SNOT technique. The result is a super smooth design that hardly looks like a Lego creation. Check out more photos on Jeraec’s Flickr photostream.
Check out this amazing edit by Jerac’s friend Migalart
Sounds interesting and looks like something by the Bitmap Brothers. Colour me interested!
You should never underestimate the power of a great video game trailer. The Czech Republic team behind fascinating otherworldly crafting game Factorio know this all too well, given how a single well-produced video changed their fortunes so dramatically.
Michal Kovarik first started thinking about Factorio at the start of 2012, when he found himself a bit sick of the programming job he'd landed. His core concept centred around wanting to take a more modern crafting game like Minecraft, and give it the feel of a classic "good old game."
When Kovarik decided to make his idea a reality, Tomas Kozelek joined him as a programmer, and the pair found Spanish animator Albert Bertolin Soler through an online advert. Now the team was ready to begin.
"Before we even started think about making a computer game, we were searching for games like Factorio," notes Kozelek. "Games where you can build factory designs with transport belts etc. But we didn't find anything serious."
"That was the moment we realised there is a huge gap in the gaming world and we could try to fill it," he adds. "So we knew we were doing something different from the start, we just didn't know if other people would enjoy it as well."
It turns out that people do indeed enjoy it, or at the very least, love the concept. The team ran a successful IndieGoGo campaign last year (which IndieGames covered), and at the time of writing, the game is sitting on 28,756 copies sold at at least 10 euros each.
But that doesn't tell the whole story -- see, most of those copies were actually sold in the last couple of months, and just the last weekend alone saw over 2,000 copies sold. After the February 2013 crowdfunding campaign, the Factorio team found themselves struggling for cash, even with a purchasable alpha version available.
"We did the Indiegogo campaign because we needed the money and the reality check," notes Kozelek. "Obviously, we have totally underestimated the work and budget for completing the game. So for almost a year after the Indiegogo we have struggled to get through with alpha sales barely covering living expenses."
"We totally underestimated the work and budget for completing the game. For almost a year after the Indiegogo we struggled to get through with alpha sales barely covering living expenses."
2014 has seen alpha sales gradually increase, due to the game being closer to completion and more feature-filled. But it was the recent trailer that really did the job for the game, and has shifted sales figures into overdrive.
During the last few days I've been putting this article together, alpha sales have jumped by around 1,500 copies. It's no Minecraft sales, sure, but for a small team that has been on the ropes for quite some time, it's incredible how a little trailer can help so much.
"The influx of new players has been quite hectic," says Kozelek. "We've spent a lot of time on support, but the situation has stabilized a bit recently. The recent sales gave us the stability to continue developing the game."
"We can now safely hire two more people (one for programming and one for graphics) and still keep a solid reserve," he adds. "This saved us from a lot of stress we have been dealing with before."
It's a very handy approach: if you can't make the model look awesome in pristine condition, ruin it instead!
Hello all,
I am new to the forums but here is the first diorama that I have built in over twenty years. The kit I used was a Revell F-4U. I could not get the plane to go togeather right so I decided to do this.
The US Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC) has developed a new combination of helmet and respirator mask that will keep soldiers safer and more comfortable when buttoned down against chemical, biological, or radiation threats. The system, which bears a surface resemblance to helmets worn by Star Wars’ Darth Vader and Halo’s Master Chief, uses built-in fans to both cool a soldier’s face and keep the mask pressurized to prevent contaminated air from leaking in.
As someone who has spent hours in a gas mask, I can testify to how uncomfortable and distracting it can be—especially in high heat or humidity. Doing anything in full Nuclear-Biological-Chemical gear is an order of magnitude harder under the best of conditions. By adding a blower to the mask, the Army is hoping to make it easier for soldiers to focus more on the mission and less on the sweat pooling around their eyes.
The mask, which connects to a belt- or backpack-mounted battery, is based on a commercial version of the Avon M50 filtration mask used throughout the US military. A blower built into side of the mask pulls air into its nose cup to ensure consistent air flow during an inhale. When the wearer exhales, a valve closes and air is diverted to the area around the eyes, over-pressurizing the face mask area to prevent contaminated air from leaking in if the seal is broken.
The Internet Engineering Task Force has published RFC 7258, which is a bombshell whose title is: "Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack." It represents the outcome of a long argument about whether the Internet's technical architecture should take active countermeasures to fight mass surveillance, which Tim Bray summarizes. I especially like his rejoinder to people who argue against this because there are places where it's legitimate to monitor communications, like prisons: "We don't want an Internet optimized for prisons."Read the rest
George R.R. Martin, author of the hit 'Game of Thrones' series, still writes his books on a DOS machine using WordStar 4.0 as his processing system.
The author made the revelation on Conan's late night talk show.
"I actually have two computers," Martin said during the interview. "I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet. I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system."
WordStar was first released in the 1970s but had been mostly discontinued by the mid-1990s.
"I actually like it, it does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else," Martin added. "I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key."
A fully functional Pip-Boy 3000 has emerged from the vault of Team Reno, a five-member group of people way, way smarter than us. The device can display relative humidity, altitude, latitude and longitude, atmospheric pressure, ambient temperature,...
Is it ok to (ab)use DMCA this way? Do you really need to ask? :|
Sony Pictures has filed a DMCA takedown against 'Sintel', a 2010 short film released by the Blender Foundation with all materials available under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
The Blender Foundation develops and promotes the open source 3D graphics program Blender. It is a non-profit organization, funded by donations with the stated goal of providing the Internet community with access to 3D technology.
To showcase what you can do with Blender, the Blender Foundation has released several movies since 2006 that were developed with the system.
The latest movie is Sintel, which was released in 2010 and has been available on YouTube ever since, until now. Trying to view the video on YouTube now results instead in a notification that the video contains content from Sony Picture Movies and Shows.
Of course, there is one slight problem; Sony Pictures does not own the film or anything in it. All the materials used to make the short film were original materials, and have been licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so you can freely share the material.
The DMCA is most likely an error, but it brings up an important question surrounding DMCA takedowns on sites like YouTube; is it OK that videos can be so easily removed with DMCA takedown requests?
Sarah Harrison, a British journalist who's worked with Wikileaks and the Snowden papers, writes that she will not enter the UK any longer because the nation's overbroad anti-terror laws, combined with the court decision that validates using them to detain journalists who are not suspected of terrorism under any reasonable definition of the term, means that she fears begin detained at the airport and then jailed as a terrorist when she refuses to decrypt her files and grant police access to her online accounts. Under the UK's Terrorism Act of 2000, journalists who write because they hope to expose and halt corruption are liable to being jailed as terrorists because they report on leaks in a way that is "designed to influence the government." And "the government," according to the Act, is any government, anywhere in the world -- meaning that journalists who report on leaks that embarrass any government in the world can be treated as terrorists in the UK.
Nor is this an idle risk: Glenn Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was detained under terrorism rules when he transited through the UK, and a UK judge subsequently found that the detention was justified on these grounds, even though no one suggests that Miranda is involved in terrorism in any way. As Harrison writes, "Britain is turning into a country that can't tell its terrorists from its journalists."
The final paragraphs of Harrison's editorial sum it up neatly:
This erosion of basic human civil rights is a slippery slope. If the government can get away with spying on us – not just in collusion with, but at the behest of, the US – then what checks and balances are left for us to fall back on? Few of our representatives are doing anything to act against this abusive restriction on our press freedoms. Green MP Caroline Lucas tabled an early day motion on 29 January but only 18 MPs have signed it so far.
From my refuge in Berlin, this reeks of adopting Germany's past, rather than its future. I have thought about the extent to which British history would have been the poorer had the governments of the day had such an abusive instrument at their disposal. What would have happened to all the public campaigns carried out in an attempt to "influence the government"? I can see the suffragettes fighting for their right to vote being threatened into inaction, Jarrow marchers being labelled terrorists, and Dickens being locked up in Newgate prison.
In their willingness to ride roughshod over our traditions, British authorities and state agencies are gripped by an extremism that is every bit as dangerous to British public life as is the (real or imaginary) threat of terrorism. As Ouseley states, journalism in the UK does not possess a "constitutional status". But there can be no doubt that this country needs a freedom of speech roadmap for the years ahead. The British people should fight to show the government we will preserve our rights and our freedoms, whatever coercive measures and threats it throws at us.
"Motion picture industry continues to stagger under piracy with mere record-breaking income" sums it up nicely :D
Once again, the "piracy-stricken" motion picture association has had a banner year, with box office revenue breaking all records (as they've done in most recent years). The biggest gains this year come from China -- a market condemned by the studios as a hive of piracy.
Some of the best news in the report is that American movies are seeing success in China, which has become the first international market to reach more than $3 billion in movie sales. The Chinese enthusiasm for US-produced movies comes despite the fact that China continues to restrict the number of foreign-made films that can be released in theaters to 34 imports a year.
But the country at the top of the MPAA's sales charts is also at the top of its piracy target list. Last year, the MPAA placed China on the list of the “most notorious” markets for distributing pirated movies and TV shows. As reported by the LA Times, MPAA spokesperson Michael O’Leary has explained:
The criminals who profit from the most notorious markets through the world threaten the very heart of our industry and in doing so threaten the livelihoods of the people who give it life. These markets are an immediate threat to legitimate commerce, impairing legitimate markets' viability and curbing US competitiveness.
Despite prolific piracy, China's increase in sales has been positively "meteoric," MPAA chief Chris Dodd said at a press conference yesterday, noting a 27 percent increase.
The Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) set up a Change.org petition asking Wikipedia to make it easier to post crazy pseudo-science to Wikipedia, specifically information about "Energy Medicine, Energy Psychology, and specific approaches such as the Emotional Freedom Techniques, Thought Field Therapy, and the Tapas Acupressure Technique."
In response, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said "no," very emphatically. He told the petitioners that Wikipedia would continue to accept material published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, but would not "pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse.' It isn't."
No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.
Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals—that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.
What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse." It isn't.
The Advanced Gun System, left, is intended to take on the role of the battleship's 16-inch guns, right. Aside from its GPS-guided shell, the digital technology of the AGS's fire control system does exactly what the USS Iowa's Rangekeeper Mark 8 did—just with fewer people and less weight. (credit: US Navy)
Update: We are resurfacing this feature from 2014 for your reading pleasure on this holiday weekend.
The USS Zumwalt, the latest destroyer now undergoing acceptance trials, comes with a new type of naval artillery: the Advanced Gun System (AGS). The automated AGS can fire 10 rocket-assisted, precision-guided projectiles per minute at targets over 100 miles away.
Those projectiles use GPS and inertial guidance to improve the gun’s accuracy to a 50 meter (164 feet) circle of probable error—meaning that half of its GPS-guided shells will fall within that distance from the target. But take away the fancy GPS shells, and the AGS and its digital fire control system are no more accurate than mechanical analog technology that is nearly a century old.
:D I'm not sure if that "sanity" option made things much better
Orteil42, creator of Cookie Clicker and Nested, has published a random game concept generator. The Insanity Game Jam, whereby one must implement one of machine's ideas, is to run April 1-4. The main rule? You have to uncheck the box on Orteil42's concept generator that guarantees "sanity" in its offerings.
Avoid your soul in a sandbox world. A sim game where you discover the beauty of genetics and you hate every single minute of it. A role-playing game where you rethink heroes until the end of the world.
The seed "Boing Boing" yields "A shooting game where you nuke eggs with a pickaxe," which sounds about right.
I don't think I'm the only one to think that some sort of abuse prevention mechanism should have been implemented to begin with. But that's just me and I'm not a rightsholder.
Although deceptively small considering its impact, Automattic is a company that touches hundreds of millions of Internet users every day. The company, best known for being behind the WordPress blogging and publishing platform, currently hosts more than 48 million sites on WordPress.com.
Servicing 400 million visitors accessing 13.1 billion pages each month is no mean feat, and with so much user-generated content on-board it’s obvious why the company has a keen interest in the DMCA and the protections it offers service providers.
Speaking today during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Section 512 of Title 17, Automattic General Counsel Paul Sieminski spoke about his company’s experiences with the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA. Noting that the process works well overall, Sieminski said that shortcomings in the system negatively affect freedom of expression and adversly impact companies like Automattic.
Sieminski says that significant resources are being diverted away from product development at Automattic in order to deal with overbroad and abusive DMCA takedown notices. On the one hand the company wants to ensure freedom of speech, but balancing that with its legal commitments under the DMCA is not an easy task.
“At Automattic, we’ve seen an increasing amount of abuse of the DMCA’s takedown process. The DMCA’s takedown process provides what can be an easy avenue for censorship: simply send in a DMCA notice claiming copyrights in a piece of content that you don’t agree with. Regardless of whether you own the copyright, the service provider that hosts the content must take it down or risk being out of compliance with the DMCA,” the lawyer explained.
Sieminski went on to detail several cases where the DMCA had been abused to stifle speech, including one elaborate scam in which someone tried to undermine the work of science journalists by copying their work, backdating it, and claiming copyright in order to take down the original content. Although the journalists filed a counter-notice, it took the full 10 days mandated by the DMCA to get it put back online.
Another case involved a UK-based journalist who reported on a freely-given press statement. The source of the press release changed his mind on having it published, claimed copyright, and had the journalist’s work taken down under the DMCA. Concerned about submitting to the jurisdiction of a US court (those submitting a counter-notice are required to reveal their name and address and agree to be sued in federal court), the journalist chose to back down. His report remains censored to this day.
As reported here on TF on many occasions, wrongful DMCA notices are sent on a daily basis, many the product of automated systems that lack the finesse to correctly identify infringement, much less consider fair use situations. Add these notices to the millions already being sent and they often go undetected, taken down by nervous service providers wary of becoming liable for the infringements of others.
According to Automattic, a solution needs to be found.
“The DMCA system gives copyright holders a powerful and easy-to-use weapon: the unilateral right to issue a takedown notice that a website operator (like Automattic) must honor or risk legal liability,” Sieminski explained.
“The system works so long as copyright owners use this power in good faith. But too often they don’t, and there should be clear legal consequences for those who choose to abuse the system. I’d urge the Committee to add such penalties to the DMCA to deter and punish these types of abuses,” the lawyer concludes.
Mario Maker is coming to the Wii U console, and it lets you edit and play your own Super Mario Bros. levels easily.
George R.R. Martin, author of the hit 'Game of Thrones' series, still writes his books on a DOS machine using WordStar 4.0 as his processing system.
A fully functional Pip-Boy 3000 has emerged from the vault of Team Reno, a five-member group of people way, way smarter than us. The device can display relative humidity, altitude, latitude and longitude, atmospheric pressure, ambient temperature,...
Sony Pictures has filed a DMCA takedown against 'Sintel', a 2010 short film released by the Blender Foundation with all materials available under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Although deceptively small considering its impact, Automattic is a company that touches hundreds of millions of Internet users every day. The company, best known for being behind the WordPress blogging and publishing platform, currently hosts more than 48 million sites on WordPress.com.