The Computer History Museum is a really cool place that makes me feel particularly dated.

Actually, it's amazingly cool - I could spend days looking at this stuff. Note the "don't touch the
artifacts" sign protecting a slew of mid 80s boxes. I wonder if I could find a place for my old Amiga here?






link

Here's a bunch of video of the Faire from rocketboom:

via make


and a ton of photos from Scott Beale


via boingboing
http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/sets/72157600233065174/

There was a lot of cool stuff in the Microsoft area of the Maker Faire. Check out this rc car being controlled with a wii mote. BTW the picture is incorrect, the wii mote is held horizontally like a driving game and turning it turned the car.



So how'd they do that? Here's the gory details of how to use a Wii mote with C#.
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/03/14/1879033.aspx

Here's the even more gory details of doing the whole project
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/01/22/1507304.aspx

via
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/pages/MakerFaire2007.aspx

Here are some more pics from the Maker Faire today. It was much mellower than yesterday and had a totally different more laid back vibe. I was a little worried that next year will be too big for San Mateo but I've confirmed that it's already booked. Get your tickets early, I think the word is out. BTW, the craft magazine folks are awesome too, i was really impressed with the entire craft area!




Bike World - This was straight out of burning man. An entire area with rides made from bikes and hosted by road warrior clowns. Awesome... we had to sign a waver to ride :) heheheh Oh they had the coolest band as part of the show.

http://www.cyclecide.com/
the band.. http://www.myspace.com/losbanos


Cool fire sculptures from the crucible's fire dance.
crucible
fire ballet


Spinning pov art. Way cool, I didn't catch the maker's name.



My son leaning some really amazing paper airplane stuff. I'll update later with the author - the author had a world record for longest paper airplane flight,. He reproed that for about 1 minute at the show. We picked up his book after this lecture.

link forthcoming.


Survival Research Labs had some really frightening things. Like this (btw, imagine that blade spinning, because it was).
link forthcoming.

My son popping a balloon ala crazy makers style.

I so love the Maker Faire. I'm utterly exhasted and trying to plan out tomorrow, but I had to share this pic I took of the mentos and diet coke internet guys. This was amazing :) More pics to come.

BTW This years faire was gigantic! The only complaint I have is that I couldn't clone myself to be in more places at once. I'm Heading back tomorrow for the entire day and wish they were here for a week. I'm utterly amazed at the stuff people are doing. Expect a big diatribe on microsoft robotics and game design tools soon :)

Team Fortess 2 is looking terrific - check out this new pixar-like trailer.

This would have been awesome in my old house in Michigan.



via

Check out this wild time-lapse picture taken over a 10 hour period in Namibia. Cool.



Link
Via Make Magazine

Rezn8 recently did a treatment for some new x360 games. It's a wonderful tree made from what I presume to be particles and lots of custom code. Interspersed within are bits from new games, unfortunately Rezn8 did such a great job on the tree that the games look dull to my eye. Crysis admittedly looks great. Have a look, I'm really into this sort of thing lately.
via
link

Conan tours ILM = pure brilliance.


via thinkinganimation
direct youtube link

OnOne has released a new plug-in for Photoshop that uses the same tech as its award winning Genuine Fractals package. The plug-in analyzes a given image and finds naturally occurring fractal patterns that are used in the algorithm to resize the image.

Read more here

Word on the street says that Disney is going to be setting up shop in Marin, specifically in an old air force hanger at Hamilton Field. Cool!




http://www.marinij.com/marin/ci_5790555

I'm reading through a book called "Advanced Renderman - Creating CGI for Motion Pictures". Renderman is similar to HLSL but the author of the Renderman book if far more aimed at the artist which is a really nice change from the other books I have. He sited Jim Blinn with a quote I thought I came up with years ago :)

Basically Blinn's Law is that regardless of hardware, all renderings take the same amount of time. As computers get faster, all that happens is that the appetites of the users get greater, and the requirements get more demanding. In some studios, appetite grows even faster than Moore's law.

(that's true but a more important law is that animators should save their work and money often.)

The follow question comes from  http://www.yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html.

1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer.  80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies.  9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies.  A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening.  What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?

If you want to know the answer, try using Bayesian Reasoning -  it's also the way most good spam fighting programs use to determine valid email.

via codingHorror

[EDIT] I poked around this site and it's really great. I've also added a few more mental links at the bottom of this post.

A friend recommend this awesome site focused on the Mental Ray renderer.
mymentalray.com




Also check out these other great mental ray resources:

Zap's mental ray tips:
http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/

write shaders book companion
http://www.writingshaders.com/

LA mental ray user group
http://www.lamrug.org/

Here's a link to the newest Digital Domain reel - some great work including the Gears of War promo.

via cgsociety
link

Here is a short excerpt from "Crossing the Line", a new film Directed by Peter Jackson and recorded on Red digitial cameras.

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1883

To truly get an idea have a look at one of the still frames in it's full 4096x1743 glory at this link:
http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg

This video excessively overuses wipes and cheesy morphs but it's pretty fun to watch the evolution of several genres of games anyways. Check it out

http://www.planetvids.com/html/Video-Game-Evolution.html

I've been teaching myself how to program HLSL shaders and found this great video from a series on writing your own c# game . HLSL is  a programming language for creating real-time shaders and it's used in virtually every new video game Surprisingly I haven't come across many good HLSL or .fx tutorials on the web and 'm finding the lack of documentation is challenging.

 I managed to make the shader from this video and I even fixed a small bug with the light direction but I still have fundamental questions. I decided to break down and order a book on the subject but this was a great start. Check it out...

via codingforfun

 Scroll down to tutorial #6. http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2006/11/06/997852.aspx