The "objects in mirror are losing" sticker will turn even the most leisurely drive into a constant thrilling race guaranteed to get the adrenaline pumping. It’s a great little humorous touch for any car and makes an ideal gift for drivers with a competitive nature.via
OK, so this isn't the first in-browser emulator we've seen, but we thought you might get a kick out of it anyway. Using Chrome's Portable Native Client (PNaCl), Google developer Christian Stefansen has the Universal Amiga Emulator (UAE) running within the browser.
Introduced in 2009, Google's Native Client (NaCl) started out as a way of running native x86 code in a safe, sandboxed environment. It uses specially compiled programs, combined with the x86 processor's built-in memory segmentation capabilities, to offer something like 95 percent of the performance of unsandboxed programs. An ARM version made its debut in 2010.
NaCl gets its performance—and the "native" part of its name—by using processor-specific code. x86, x64, and ARM are all currently supported, but programs must be compiled separately for each: ARM processors obviously cannot run x86 code, nor vice versa.
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The last time we checked in with Alice Finch, she had just unveiled the world’s largest LEGO Hogwarts built from several hundred thousand LEGO bricks. Not content to let sleeping bricks lie, Alice has teamed up with David Frank to recreate one of my favorite locations in Middle-earth, Rivendell, “the last homely house west of the mountains,” where Elrond hosts both Bilbo and his dwarven companions in The Hobbit and Frodo and the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings.
The Brothers Brick is pleased to unveil official photos from the two builders and an exclusive interview with Alice and David.
The Brothers Brick: How did the two of you meet?
Alice Finch & David Frank: The July 2011 meeting was our first SeaLUG meeting, and I remember David brought a part of his Dragon Knight Castle. Even though we were both relatively new to LEGO, it was clear that he was already building like an expert. We got to talking about castles — those that we’d seen in person and those that we wanted to build out of bricks — and we both mentioned how we thought building Rivendell would be the ultimate challenge. We’re both avid readers and dedicated Tolkien fans, so our friendship began with a thorough discussion of Elven architecture.
Over the last two years, we’ve had other projects that we focused on: David has built several castles, one with accompanying village and market, we both participated in a collaborative build of Hobbiton for SeaLUG’s display at Emerald City Comicon, and Alice built Hogwarts Castle. after our building skills had been honed on our own big builds, and with the second Hobbit movie about to come out, we decided 2013 was a good time to take on the challenge of building Rivendell.
TBB: In the movies, Rivendell is simultaneously sprawling and highly detailed. How do you even start a daunting build like that?
Alice: Our first task was to do research, which began with the laborious task of watching The Fellowship of the Ring — again. We got together and looked at the models in the movie, screen by screen trying to figure out how the buildings fit together and how we might approach the swooping arches and colorful roofs. Alice looked through all the “behind the scenes” and “making of” books on LOTR and found some of the original sketches for the models.
David: And I found a souvenir model that Weta Workshop made of Rivendell. It turns out that when they were making the Weta model, they had to do some serious research themselves because the film never really established what scenes happened where. The model was key as it allowed me to map out 48×48 sections in a Visio diagram to figure out roughly what size we would need to build it to.
TBB: Elven architecture in Tolkien’s artwork and Jackson’s films is very distinct, with swooping curves and intricate details that don’t easily lend themselves to accurate representation in LEGO. How did you approach this project from a design standpoint?
Alice: By the spring, I started studying some of the more interesting and potentially difficult parts of the model. The first thing I experimented with was the iconic tower from Arwyn’s building (far left of the model). I wanted to try out some of the large wedge pieces I had left over from some experiments I’d done for Hogwarts and thought they might just work. Again, it took some wrangling to figure out how to attach them, but I was really excited about getting that particular challenge ticked off my list.
I also did some studies for the roof design — 1×1 tiles, 1×1 round plates, and “cheese” slopes were all options to achieve the patterned designs. I tried them all — alone and together — and found that all cheese was by far the best and also had the most color options. Ideally, it would have been nice if LEGO would have churned out a few thousand sand red, sand purple, and sand blue cheese for me, but at least I had a drawer full of sand green to pair with the dark green, dark red, dark blue, and tan cheese. After all the patterned roofs were completed, I think we figured that there are about 8,000 cheese in the roofs and another 2,000 or so in the mosaic bridges and courtyards.
David: I had less actual buildings in my sections, so I really focused on blending what I had with the landscape. My main building really emerges from the rock and was built After the landscaping had taken shape. The actual buildings were very different than anything I have ever done as they needed to be airy and sweeping, so I focused on a more open design and heavily utilized odd angles to get a different look from the brick.
TBB: What part combination are you the most proud of?
Alice: In my prowling for interesting parts on BrickLink, I came upon the Gungan shields. My first thought was how they would make some very elegant Elven windows, so I ordered a few to investigate and see if I could make them work in an architectural setting. Figuring out how to secure them was a bit of a challenge, but with some experimentation I figured out how to make them cooperate inside the framing of some SNOT arches.
Once I figured out how to frame them, I designed the rest of the building around them, bringing in as much sand red and sand purple as possible. I’ve been collecting sand color parts almost since I first started building again, knowing that someday I wanted to do Rivendell and that if I wanted enough to build with, I’d have to gather them a few at a time.
David: Oddly enough, for me it’s simple 1×2 trans-clear plates. I had to figure out a way to represent horses emerging from waves and my part selection was very limited. I am very happy with the result.
There are many other areas I am happy with, but given what I had to pull off, that would be it.
TBB: Were there any structures you just couldn’t find a way to recreate purely from LEGO bricks?
Alice: I know the purists will cringe, but I used a few pieces made by altBricks because they fit so perfectly with the elegant, flowing style of the Elven architecture. The panel piece is one of my favorite pieces in this model since you can can apply it in so many different settings: tower-top decorations, windows, and balcony railing to name a few. I also used their 1×2 column since I like the fine texture of the fluting and the back has a nice arched opening as well.
David: In the bridge section, the altBricks element was key, since tan telescopes were not available and I really needed to project that sweeping flowy look. I tried to remain as purist as possible, but in a build like this we needed that part to really get the look we wanted.
TBB: What did you struggle with the most?
Alice & David: One of the major challenges with this build was making the buildings truly fit into their setting. Usually when you design a building, you do just that — you do the structure first and then fit it into its setting. In this case, we did all the landscaping first, which involved some significant elevation change and quite a few waterfalls. And since it’s on a total of 32 baseplates, we had to make sure that the joints were as invisible as possible — no small challenge when there are so many different elevations.
Alice: Because the landscape and vegetation are so important to the model, I came up with the idea of having it transition through the seasons. We now have so many different leaf colors to choose from that I thought it would be great to be able to use them all, and having it flow gradually from spring on the left to autumn on the right would be an interesting way to highlight the variety of foliage colors. We spent an entire day just building trees.
David came over with his two sons and I had my two boys, and the six of us spent the day experimenting and improving on various tree designs. David has a great tree design that uses technic pieces that is flexible in terms of the variation you can achieve, but also is very strong, something that is really important when you have so many trees and need to move the model around to conventions. We found that we were continuously improving designs and trying out new ones.
Even my 5 year old came up with an interesting way to combine the palm top with the technic pieces to create a nicely vertical tree shape which works really well right up next to a rock face where you don’t have a lot of room for a more traditionally shaped tree.
I needed some tall trees behind the library building but I wanted them to be their own little scene, so I tried out a new style of tree that looks like a birch tree. I thought the combination of black sprinkled in with the white worked pretty well to achieve the right look, but unlike David’s trees, they are amazingly flimsy and will fall apart if you breathe on them too hard.
TBB: LEGO doesn’t make too many “official” elves, but your Rivendell is teeming with Elven life. How’d you manage such a thriving population of elves?
Alice & David: We wanted to make Rivendell feel inhabited by lots of elves and we had some elf pieces to work with, but when I found some decals by Eurobricks member ED-209, I knew I’d hit a gold mine. They are all beautiful and go well with the existing color schemes of sand green and dark green. I ordered up 200 torsos and got to work putting decals on them. We didn’t end up using them all, but you can’t have too many elves!
TBB: We’ve come to expect large-scale collaborations at events like BrickCon, and you’re both members of SEALUG, but it’s not like you’re neighbors on the same block. How did you coordinate your sections to ensure a consistent display?
Alice & David: Overall, I thought the collaborative aspect of the build worked really well. We live within an hour of each other and met often enough to check our progress to make sure our color schemes and roof patterns were staying aligned, building styles looked related but not the same, landscapes matched, and waterways and paths looked natural. The last few months, we were both working really hard.
TBB: How do your families feel about LEGO on such a scale?
Alice: Thank goodness we both have amazingly supportive families who knew we had a serious schedule to keep. I would often come down at 1 am and find an email from him with some WIP photos and I’d respond back. He’d zip off an answer back to me and so a lot of our communication happened in the middle of the night during the final push to the end. We were motivated to get it done for BrickCon, which is the first weekend in October, partly because we hadn’t seen it all put together and we wanted to see what it would actually look like with all the buildings nestled into the landscape.
David: My wife was very patient and I worked on this through a move from Puyallup to Edmonds. My saving grace was that I involved the kids as much as possible. I have a great deal of water in my sections of the build, and my boys did 90% of the water and had a hand in many of the trees you see in the front. One of the most rewarding portions of the build was the time that our children spent building with us.
TBB: Taking good pictures of a regular-sized model is challenging enough for many of us. Alice, you’ve now unveiled two massive models. Any tips you can share about photographing very large LEGO models?
Alice & David: The last challenge has been photographing Rivendell. Even though it isn’t as big as Hogwarts, this model still spans 10 feet by 5 feet (over 3 meters by 1.5 meters) and it takes a pretty serious setup to get pictures. With two 10-foot rolls of paper and the help of some friends, we gathered the equipment we needed to make it work. The funny thing about setting something like this up is that no matter how much care you take to get every blade of grass stuck down, you can always find more tiny little things to adjust.
So it goes when you have 200,000 or so bricks to wrangle!
Winter has crashed down upon us and settled in for a long stay, but that does not mean nature’s beauty has faded away. As you can see in this series of winter landscape photographs, nature plays no favorites with beauty. She is just as cunning of an artist with ice and snow as she is with green grass. flowers, and trees. She paints the trees with a dusting of frost. She creates icy mirrors from the still lakes to reflect the beauty of her creations. She creates sculptures with her icicles and snow drifts. She intermixes snow covered trees and ground with open waters filled with wild geese. She floats snow through the nighttime air creating twinkling flakes reflecting lights. Nature’s elegance stretches through the seasons. We are thrilled that some photographer dare the cold to capture some of nature’s most dramatic scenes.
Photo above by EarthPix
Photo by Lake Baikal
Photo by Hideyuki Katagiri
Photo by Marcin Ryczek
Photo by Kent Shiraishi
Photo by Jan Machata
Photo by Dmitry Dubikovskiy
Photo by Norbert Maier
Photo by deep21
Photo by Friðþjófur M
Photo by Lars van der Goor
Photo by Thomas Zakowski
Photo by Edwin van Nuil
Photo by Evgeni Dinev
Photo by Mark Geistweite
Photo by Emmanuel Coupe
Photo by Peter From
Photo by oskarpall
Unless you live with an asshole dog.
Photographer Christoffer Relander (previously here and here) returns with the third installment of his beautifully executed multiple exposure photographs that blend aspects of nature with portraits of people. Titled We Are Nature Vol. III, the series continues the Finnish photog’s experimentation with layering images in-camera using his Nikon D800, without the use of Photoshop. Prints available on request.
I’m so….I’m just so so sorry for this.
I AM LAUGHING SO HARD WHO IS THIS GUY YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER
oh my god i cant stop laughing though this guy
gUYS OH MY GOD STOP TEXTING HIM I AM SCARED NOW
[DoctorBeet] noticed the advertisements on the landing screen of his new LG smart television and started wondering about tracking. His curiosity got the better of him when he came across a promotional video aimed at advertisers that boasts about the information gathered from people who use these TVs. He decided to sniff the web traffic. If what he discovered is accurate, there is an invasive amount of data being collect by this hardware. To make matters worse, his testing showed that even if the user switches the “Collection of watching info” menu item to off it doesn’t stop the data from being phoned home.
The findings start off rather innocuous, with the channel name and a unique ID being transmitted every time you change the station. Based on when the server receives the packets a description of your schedule and preferred content can be put together. This appears to be sent as plain data without any type of encryption or obfuscation.
Things get a lot more interesting when he discovers that filenames from a USB drive connected to the television are being broadcast as well. The server address they’re being sent to is a dead link — which makes us think this is some type of debugging step that was left in the production firmware — but it is still a rather sizable blunder when it comes to personal privacy. If you have one of these televisions [DoctorBeet] has a preliminary list of URLs to block with your router in order to help safeguard your privacy.
[Thanks Radcom]
While we await "The Day of the Doctor," the BBC invites us to travel back in Doctor Who history with an infographic sure to keep fans busy until they watch the 50th anniversary special.
    
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