Category: Interesting Reads

How the first color cartoons were made

Sometimes, we need to look back at the past and learn our history.  I don’t really know why, but I hear that if we don’t, we’ll repeat it.  Not, mind you, that I’d have problems repeating some of my past.  But then, there are things from my past that I’d rather not repeat – mononucleosis ranks high on the I’d rather not repeat that part of my past list.  Although I guess that’s not what people mean.  But I digress…

So, let’s look at the information the January 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine had to tell us about cartooning and how these magical mystical marvels of modern movement are made (yeah, baby – high five for decent alliteration there).

mm-xlg_color_cartoon_crop.jpg

After years of a successful black-and-white career, animated cartoons are due to take on the additional appeal of color, thanks to the perfection of a process which is explained in detail in this article.

THE first of 13 one-reel animated cartoon comedies in color have just been completed in Hollywood, marking the beginning of a new era in this popular form of entertainment which has already made Mickey Mouse and his cohorts the highest paid actors in the movie world, although they draw no salaries. Ted Eshbaugh, a Boston artist, is the man who has at last succeeded in producing animateds in color. Making the colored comics duplicates the manufacture of black-white comics excepting the intricate application of color to the characters and transferring that color to the double negative that creeps through the recording camera a frame at a time. When you consider that 15,000 separate drawings on celluloid must be made by a staff of artists for a single reeler, composed of 16,000 frames, and that each figure or group of figures on each celluloid will display possibly six color combinations, you get some idea of the intricacy and tediousness of the process.

It’s a rather lengthy article, and in a rare showing of restraint on my part, I’ll pass on copying a large part of it and filling up my page with things you have to skip over if you aren’t interested in seeing.  Instead, head over to the Modern Mechanix web site if you want to view the complete article and image.

[tags]Modern Mechanix, How color cartoons are made[/tags]

Illuminate your wallet

(via LifeHacker)
Got a little spare time and a desire to better see your wallet’s contents at night?  It’s time to mod that sucker and put some night-lighting in.

I first got exposed to the glorious field of illuminating wallets when shooting Gear Live’s The Bleeding Edge ( http://www.bleedingedgetv.com/ ), a weekly video show. They had been sent the Walit ( http://www.lazyboneuk.com/store/pro240.html ), an electroluminescent glowing wallet, to review. I was excited at the idea – I had personally never thought of a glowing wallet and was eager to see how it worked.

I was, however, completely disappointed. The Walit was terrible. It was dim, the batteries took up too much space, and it had a flimsy clip to turn the light on and off.

. . .

led-wallet.jpg

Parts list:

  • A leather wallet
  • At least four small surface mount LEDs (Search eBay for “white smt leds” or salvage them from an old cell phone)
  • Two colors of thin, flexible wire (I used wire wrapping wire)
  • Two CR1616 watch batteries
  • A small amount of sheet brass, or something to make the battery holder out of :
  • A 1/8 watt 100k-ohm resistor (though anything betweek 10k and 1 megohm should work)
  • A generic PNP transistor
  • A small tactile snapdome button

Now go, mod, and come back with pictures.

[tags]Wallet mods, Light your wallet, Night-light for money[/tags]

The robots, they do all the work now

I know we all dream of the future when the robots do all the work (and prior to the robot uprising in which they cleanse the earth of us miserable puny humans, of course) and we get to sit on the porch, sipping lemonade, chatting amicably with our neighbors, and just generally enjoying the bounties of the mechanical workers we command.  But would it interest you to know that we’ve already passed that time?  Yes, we had robots doing the work, and we flat missed it.

You don’t believe me, do you?  Well here, let me prove it to you.

mm-lrg_robot_plows.jpg

ROBOT PLOWS WHILE FARMER RESTS
While its owner sits comfortably on his porch, a new farm tractor operated by radio control plows his field for him. Radio impulses governing the tractor’s movements are supplied by an automatic radio transmitter, and are picked up by an antenna on the tractor. A receiving set starts the tractor’s engine, works the throttle and controls the steering. The new robot, exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair, is an improved model developed after earlier experiments.

See?  I told you.  This happened all the way back in September 1934, according to Popular Science magazine (thanks as always to the Modern Mechanix web site for  providing this delightful look back on the world as it was).

[tags]Modern Mechanix, Popular Science, Robots do the work, The robots before the uprising in which they crush all the puny humans[/tags]

How to get robbed

Well, if you’re going to be ballsy enough to steal a laptop in front of several employees, this looks to be the way to do it.

At 3:30pm today, I asked one of the other guys at work to setup a new machine we’d had delivered, he goes out to do it, and noticed that one of the laptops we have on display is missing, which he thinks is odd, because if anyone was going to sell one they would have sold one of the ones we have out the back, so he comes and asks me if I had sold it, or lent it to anyone, yadda yadda. We search the shop, workshop and our store, and can’t find it anywhere, so we resort to the video camera footage.

So we’re searching through the footage, rewinding hour by hour, at 2pm, it’s not there, at 1pm, it’s not there, at 12pm, it’s not there, but at 11am, it bloody is there! So we watch from there on in. We have a lady that works out in the shop, mainly receipting stock into our POS system, sales, accounts, banking, that sort of thing, and shes helping a couple of people with a hire purchase agreement, when this old dude, probably early 50s, walks in with a large coat on. I go out to serve him.

. . .

I go back out to the workshop, and think nothing of it. He walks around the shop a bit more, looks out the back to where he can see our security monitor, so he can see exactly what we’re recording, and then heads over to one of the laptops. He folds the lid down, then looks up at the counter where there’s still the couple and our retail lady are. He gets in between the line of view from those three and the laptop. He picks it up with one hand, walks away with it a bit, does a kinda swing around motion, and then slips it into his jacket, grabs his cellphone out of his pocket, and pretends to talk on it as he walks out of the shop!

So this video is all over the net now, and hopefully someone will know who this guy is and they’ll get the laptop back soon. The kicker for the thief is that this is a brand-new laptop with no battery. He didn’t get the charger, and because of a higher power drain and a new plug, the older HP laptop transformers don’t work, nor do current generic transformers. The laptop won’t work for this guy until he gets a battery and a transformer, and HP has put an alert out for any orders of batteries and/or transformers, and warned all their retail shops to do the same.

[tags]Laptop thief[/tags]

Your Blackberry can expose your company’s soft underbelly

(via Engadget)
That would be the internal company network, by the way.  Discussed at DefCon 14 was some information on the newfound attack via Blackberry.

Jesse D’Aguanno, a consultant with Praetorian Global, has developed a hacking program that exploits the trust relationship between a Blackberry and a company’s internal server to hijack a connection to the network. Because the data tunnel between the Blackberry and the server is encrypted, intrusion detection systems at the perimeter of the network won’t detect the attack.

The technique is successful, D’Aguanno says, because most companies aren’t equipped to detect someone trying to deliver an exploit from inside the network. It also works because few companies view the Blackberry as a plausible attack vector.

Continue reading “Your Blackberry can expose your company’s soft underbelly”

Historic events in gun-control history

This one is for all of you who support gun control. Check out the great things that gun control has brought other countries, and keep fighting the good fight.

  • In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • In 1935 China established gun control . From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • In 1938 Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
  • In 1956 Cambodia established gun control. From 1975 to 1977, one million ‘educated’ people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • In 1964 Guatemala established gun control. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated
  • In 1970 Uganda established gun control. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control: 56 million.

“But Randy,” you might protest, “those things were all so long ago. We know better how to do gun control now to make society better.”

OK, how about this tidbit, then?

It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by their own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.

The first year results are now in: Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent!) In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent. (Note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not, and criminals still possess their guns!)

While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.

There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the ELDERLY. Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in “successfully ridding Australian society of guns.” The Australian experience and the other historical facts above prove it.

Wake me up when someone gets it right.

[tags]Gun control, Historic events[/tags]

Firefox inline autocomplete

One of the very few things I like about Internet Exploder Explorer is inline autocomplete. Every time I install Firefox on a system, I have to go look up how to turn on inline autocomplete for my Firefox install. Since I can never remember, I figure some other folks out there have the same problem. For those that have this issue, here’s the method necessary to turn it on. Damn, it’s simple.

  1. Type about:config in the Location Bar
  2. Right-click on the page and create a new boolean value
  3. Type browser.urlbar.autoFill
  4. Set the value to true

And you are done. I turn this feature on so often that I wish it were an built-in option so I didn’t have to manually add it. That, or have it default to on, and include instructions on the web for turning it off. But I’m guessing I’m in the minority for preferring it on, or it would default to on.

[tags]Firefox, Inline autocomplete[/tags]

The why of the 24-second shot clock

More useless knowledge that I found in my daily readings. Apparently, basketball used to be a slow-paced boring game (and yes, I know for some it is now a moderate or fast-paced boring game – this is for the folks that like the sport). When professional basketball leagues first played, a team could hold the ball as long as desired – typically until fouled or a realllllly wide open easy shot was seen. As the NBA was facing serious economic issues from declining attendance, a rule few changes were implemented. One of these was the 24 second shot clock.

This sped up the game, and attendance quickly recovered, growing significantly over the next couple of seasons. Scoring also went up, as the option was now try to score or just lose the ball.

The solution to this dilemma [ed. note – of declining attendance] was another rule change, one which might seem simple and obvious to today’s fans, but which was revolutionary for professional basketball at the time. Danny Biasone, the owner of the NBA’s Syracuse Nationals franchise, argued that the league needed to place a limit on how long a team could hold the ball, thereby preventing one side from stubbornly hanging onto the ball until they were fouled (or until the clock ran out) and forcing both teams to play the game at a faster pace. The implementation of this change — what Taylor described as “the single most important innovation in basketball since James Naismith invented the game” — was the 24-second clock. From 1954 onwards, every time a team gained possession of the basketball during a game, they had to attempt a shot within 24 seconds or turn the ball over to the other team — no more hanging on to the ball for minutes on end to run out the clock or force the other side to commit fouls.

The new rule was implemented a little crudely at first (typically by giving a recruit a stopwatch and having him stand on a sideline and yell “Time!” whenever 24 seconds elapsed during a possession), but by the end of the season all the teams in the NBA had set up 24-second shot clocks around their courts that made the timers visible to players, officials, and fans. The innovation was an immediate and obvious success: In 1953 and 1954 combined, only three times did a team score as many as 100 points in a playoff game; in the 1955 playoffs alone, one or both teams scored 100 points or more in over half the contests (eleven out of twenty-one games), and over the course of those two years attendance at NBA games jumped by 50 percent.

Not everyone was a fan of the rule change, but professional basketball is still around today, so enough people supported it.  Read the full article for more details.

[tags]Basketball, 24-second shot clock, Sport history[/tags]

Amazing new algorithm to remove photo-blur

While working on adding Digg functionality to articles on my site, I saw this little gem on a new photo-deblurring algorithm recently demonstrated at Siggraph on the Digg main page. This was of interest to me because my moderate hand tremors mean taking good pictures is always a tough thing for me. To compensate for my lack of steadiness, I tend to take multiple pictures of whatever I want to get. This new algorithm is specifically designed to help clear up camera shake blurriness, which should help me.  The bad news is this isn’t likely to show up for another year or two in popular photo-editting software.

camera-shake.jpg In a seminar entitled “Removing Camera Shake from a Single Photograph,” the MIT – U of Toronto research team presented an algorithm to correct high-level blurs at the world’s largest electronic and computer graphics conference today, which hosts “the best and most senior minds in technological innovation,” according to Siggraph spokesperson Brian Ban.

. . .

The algorithm is based on the principal that slight hand motions of even only a few millimeters cause camera rotations, resulting in image blur according to researcher and post-doc Rob Fergus in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

. . .

Geared for users of small handheld cameras, the new post-production technique could eliminate the need for bulky tripods or help camera owners who lack popular (and costly) anti-shake features in newer point-and-shoot cameras. “With lighter, newer cameras, [blurry images] are a common thing. We normally delete them because we don’t know what to do with them,” said Fergus, but the “photos you really care about” can be saved.

The mathematical model, however, cannot correct other kinds of blur, including inadequate depth of field in which images are out of focus. The model also cannot compensate for slow shutter speeds for fast moving objects such as cars.

[tags]Camera blur, SIGGRAPH[/tags]

Happy glow-in-the-dark day

I knew this, and forgot to post it earlier today. For those that aren’t aware of today’s historic event, we’ll let the History Channel website fill us in:

August 6

1945 – Atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima

On this day in 1945, at 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world’s first atom bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.

More information on this momentous occasion is available in the full History Channel article. Go read just how bad this was to the victims of the attack.

Oh, and yes, I know someone will be offended by the article subject or my Technorati tags below. I recommend they start their own blog and word it more nicely, however, as I kinda like the macabre humor implied in my wording.

[tags]Today in history, The History Channel, What’s that green glow?, What’s that cloud mean momma?, Hiroshima, Enola Gay[/tags]

Tennessee (and soon Minnesota) help users find meth dealers

(via boingboing)

Perhaps hoping to shame meth dealers into living more carefully, the way sex offenders presumably do after being listed in sex offender registries (I don’t know if they change their behavior, but I believe that is part of the intention of the program), it seems Tennessee is going to try shaming meth dealers into better lifestyles (go on and check the site – you can look up meth dealers near you).  As written in this Slate article, what does this really do, other than make it easier for addicts with internet connectivity to find a convenient dealer?

What exactly will this punitive harassment accomplish? It certainly won’t encourage meth offenders to assume a lawful place in society. Minnesota State Attorney General Mike Hatch, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate for governor and no softie on the drug issue, considers the meth registry a referral service for users. “What better place to find a meth dealer than on an Internet Web site,” Hatch said last week.

Or maybe not. The Tennessee meth registry doesn’t promise accuracy, covering its ass with a disclaimer on the home page stating that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which is in charge of the database, doesn’t verify any of the information sent to it by counties. If it’s not accurate, why bother?

Even if desirable, are the registries practical? Law enforcement doesn’t have the resources to keep tabs on sex offenders who refuse to register. How are they going to track the thousands of meth offenders streaming out of prisons? Would any police chief, sheriff, or state attorney general advocate such a deployment of resources?

Perhaps the folks responsible for these programs didn’t consider this?  But what does this registry really do?

[tags]Meth offenders registry, Tennessee helps you find a meth dealer[/tags]

Good-bye, Norma Jean

Well, you know what they say – “Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did.”

1962 Marilyn Monroe dies

On this day in 1962, Marilyn Monroe dies from an overdose of barbiturates. Her death was widely presumed to be suicide.

Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortensen and also known as Norma Jean Baker, had a tragic childhood. Her mother, a negative cutter at several film studios, was mentally unstable and was institutionalized when Norma Jean was five. Afterward, the little girl lived in a series of foster homes, where she suffered from neglect and abuse, and later lived in an orphanage. At 16, she quit high school and married a 21-year-old aircraft plant worker named Joe Dougherty.

In 1944, her husband was sent overseas with the military, and Monroe went to work as a paint sprayer in a defense plant. A photographer spotted her there, and she soon became a popular pin-up girl. She began working as a model and divorced her husband two years later. In 1946, 20th Century Fox signed her for $125 a week but dropped her after one film, from which her scenes were cut. Columbia signed her but also dropped her after one film. Unemployed, she posed nude for a calendar for $50; the calendar sold a million copies and made $750,000.

Monroe played a series of small film roles until 1950, when Fox signed her again. This time, they touted her as a star and began giving her leading roles in 1952 with films like Don’t Bother to Knock and Monkey Business. Her star continued to rise during the next few years with hits like Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953) and Some Like It Hot (1959). Her tremendous sex appeal and little-girl mannerisms made her enormously popular. In 1954, she married baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, but they divorced only nine months later.

After the divorce, Monroe searched for more serious roles and announced she would found her own studio. She began studying acting with the famous Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio in New York. She gave an impressive comic performance in Bus Stop in 1955. The following year, she married intellectual playwright Arthur Miller. Miller wrote a screenplay for her, The Misfits (1961), which was her last picture. She divorced him a week before the film opened. She attempted one more film, Something’s Got to Give, but was fired for her frequent illnesses and absences from the set, which many believed to be related to drug addiction. In August 1962, she died of an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of 36. Since her death, her popularity and mystique have lingered, with numerous biographies published after her death. Her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio continued to send flowers to her grave every day for the rest of his life.

[tags]Norma Jean Mortensen, Marilyn Monroe, Today in History[/tags]