Schwippy

Forums

Visit the Schwippy Forums

(Page should automatically redirect you, if it does not, click here)

Poetry at the Mall

If you’ve ever been to a mid to high end mall, chances are that you have seen one of those advertisement machines that incorporate a hanging projector that project stuff on the floor. Well, I just came across something over in the Make Group that would use something to that sense, but it isn’t interactive like the commercial advertisements. Rather, this is simply a performance piece.

I usually wouldn’t post about a performance piece like this, but this short film just kind of hit me and I don’t really know why. I felt like I was inside the world of the artist, which is exactly what any movie creator/producer/artist wants for his/her viewer. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do to me. I just cant be immersed into a film that easily.

Thats why im posting about this. The movie is meant to be projected onto the floor, so while watching the film, try to imagine yourself standing in the immediate center and seeing all this around you. Oh, and one more thing, try to give this piece your full attention… it definitely deserves it. (Its probably time you took a break from WoW anyways, don’t you think?)

The story comes in two parts : You are alone in the center, suddenly the craziness of this world, crowds, people shouting, emotional impulses. Second part is a ballet, the world is turning, you remain still in the center watching it all. A character, a little lens dances solo and approaches you, … desire … desire … dance … and slowly going away without realization. The crowd moves away, living you by yourself, again.

AVRA _ cinema poetic machine @ Instructables

Worlds Oldest Business Is No More

Just try to make a guess on how old the world’s oldest business would be. 50 years? Nah, Carl’s J.R. restaurants are older than that. How about 100 years? Not even close. Ok, ok… enough senseless guessing. The worlds oldest business record is held by a Japanese company called Kongō Gumi, which has built many famous Japanese temples. Kongō Gumi has been in the temple building business for over 40 generations. 40 generations! What does that work out to in years? Try 1,428!

According to Wikipedia:

Headquartered in Osaka, the family-owned construction company has origins dating back to the year 578, when Prince Shotoku brought Kongō family members from Baekje, Korea to Japan to build the Buddhist Shitennoji Temple, which still stands. Over the centuries, Kongō Gumi has participated in the construction of many famous buildings, including the 16th century Osaka Castle, Hōryū-ji in Nara, and Shitennō-ji.

But it looks as though the business has finally lost its ongoing record. While they still hold the record for the longest running business, they lost the record for the oldest business still running when they were bought by the Takamatsu Corporation.

Now heres the question… Who is the world’s oldest business that is still running? It doesn’t look like many people have an answer for that one.

Business Week [Via BoingBoing]

Making Thumbnails Automatically in Photoshop

If you have a folder full of images and want to post them to a web page somehow, you’ll probably want to size them down some way or another. You actually have a few options for doing so too, such as uploading to flickr or another photo site and have it automatically done for you, or you could download some batch photo tool dedicated specifically to making thumbnails. But if you have Adobe Photoshop, why not use its great built in re-sampling algorithms and have the batch feature do it all for you?

The following tutorial will show you how to do just that. After this walk through, you will have a folder full of all your original images turned into thumbnail sized images.

Step 1: Find the Actions Pallet

After opening Photoshop, what your going to need to find is your Actions pallet. If it isn’t immediately visible on your screen, you can make it pop up by going to these menus: Window > Actions.

Step 2: Add Some Resizing Actions

Adding your own custom actions is an extremely simple process. Basically all you need to do is tell Photoshop to watch what you do, and remember it. So what we need to do is, on that actions pallet, lets click the Folder Button at the bottom. This is going to create a new folder for us to play around in. You can call this folder anything you want, but for this tutorial (and possibly more later) lets go ahead and call it Tutorials. After you press enter, you should now have a new folder called Tutorials, but with nothing in it. So lets put some stuff in it! Lets now add the entire script that will handle our image resizing process. Go ahead and click the New Action button.

Lets name this new action something informative that you can use later, such as Make Thumbnail.

After naming it, click the Record button. This will add your new action to the Tutorials folder and also start the recording process. When an action is recording, it is watching every step in Photoshop you do and adding it to the action. So, say for example, you applied a filter right now. The filter application would get recorded, and at any time in the future, you could simply double click that action with any image open in Photoshop and it would apply that filter with the exact same settings you used.

Lets start recording exactly what we want to do now. First we need to Open an image. It really doesn’t matter what image, since we are just showing Photoshop what we want to do. The specific images will be put into the batch process in a later step. As soon as you open an image, you should notice that a new action appeared inside your Make Thumbnail action definition; Open. New actions will appear every time we complete a process until we click the stop button.

Lets continue by now resizing our image we just opened. Go to the image menu, then image size. (Image > Image Size…). In the menu that popped up, make sure that constrain proportions is checked. Go ahead and put in a common width that you want all your thumbnails to be. In this example, I’m going to use 150 pixels. Leave the height to whatever it changes to. As long as constrain proportions is checked, it should be fine.

Click OK. You should now have a very small thumbnail of your original image on your screen. Now we have to save this image somewhere. It really doesn’t even matter where you save the file, simply because once we start the batch process, the saving part will get overridden with a set destination. So just ahead and save the file ANYWHERE you want. (Just don’t overwrite the file you opened…. unless you want to)

Once you saved the file, Close the image.

Now you should have a blank Photoshop. Go ahead and look at your actions pallet. Your’s should resemble mine:

If you have Open, Image Size, Save, and Close all listed, then you’re good to go! Now, simply hit the Stop Button . Its immediately to the left of the red record button on the actions pallet. You just created your thumbnail creation script.

Step 3: Start the Batch Process

Go to the File menu, then Automate, then Batch… (File > Automate > Batch…)

Upon getting to the Batch dialog, we want to change a few settings, but first, make sure that you have the right stuff selected: the Set needs to be the folder you created earlier, Tutorials in this case. The Action should be set to the new action we made, Make Thumbnail for our project.

In the next section, our Source should be set to Folder. Right below, is a button that says Choose…. Click the button. This will open a file and folder dialog, asking you what folder to use. Select the folder that has all your images that you want to make thumbnails in it.

Make sure you select the next box, Override Action “Open” Commands. What this does, is whenever it sees that we opened a file, it doesn’t ask us what file to open, but instead, it keeps opening files in the specified folder.

On the Destination drop-down, make sure to select Folder. Now below that, click Choose and select a destination folder that you want all your thumbnails to be output to. (I made a new folder for this, but you can use the same folder as long as you make each thumbnail have a different name - defined below)

Make sure Override Action “Save As” Command is checked. This will save each file by a set of rules we are making right now, instead of asking us how to save it on each file.

In the following drop-downs, you can leave them as they are, or you can customize them any way you want. In the second box, i typed _thumbnail and changed the 3rd box to extension. This will result in the files being saved like: OriginalName_thumbnail.jpg

Now just click OK!

As soon as you click OK, Photoshop will start opening all your images, one at a time, and instantly resizing them down to 150 pixels (or whatever size you chose earlier), then saving them where you told it to. It sure is a lot faster than doing it manually, wouldn’t you agree?

Interesting Advertising by KFC

KCF has it all figured out. They have been using technology to advertise like never before. I just learned that last year, KFC had a commercial that told the world how to get a free sandwich at any location just by saying a secret password. They even told you the password right in the advertisement…. except for the fact that it was only put in a couple frames of the entire commercial. The only way to figure out the password was to record the advertisement and play it back in slow motion, most easily done with TiVo, or another DVR.

This was great for KFC. For one thing, it singled out a certain group of individuals for the promotion, and whenever this happens, there is ALWAYS going to be people trying to get into this group that otherwise wouldn’t be in there. Even if they really dont want the free sandwich, they want to be able to get into something they otherwise are not able to do. Thats just human nature. So eventually, word got out of the password all across the internet and everyone found it. Now they have a password, and only one thing to do with it. Go get a sandwich, and KFC hopes a drink and some tater’s too.

Another thing that made this a great marketing strategy; it is relatively uncommon. Almost unheard of for real promotions. And what more would geeks want than to tell everyone else about something weird and new about technology? Its that reason that KFC gained a lot of free press across the internet. Just the simple fact that people like to tell other people about interesting stuff. Look at what im writing about right now. Im giving KFC some free press.

Anyways… that was a while back. Im posting about yet another way KFC is using their ultra high paid advertising monkeys to churn out even more evil advertising. They are using the technological fact that younger people are able to hear different tones than older individuals.

This technology has been used in a few situations that I can think of off the top of my head such as cell phone ring tones that teachers couldn’t hear, but the kids could. Also I just saw a review on a device that was supposed to ward off teenagers from certain places that were more adult oriented (The review was horrible btw. It didnt work).

KFC’s new strategy is simple: insert a semi-ultrasonic tone into one of their advertisements. The advertisement looks and sounds completely normal to the elderly ear, but the commercial also says that there is a secret tone located somewhere in the commercial, and the first 1,000 kids to call a certain phone number with the correct location of the advertisement will get a free KFC menu item.

If you catch this commercial on the air and dont have one of your kids around to tell you where the sound is, I have a better idea. Go get your dog, set him by the television, and wait til the advertisement comes on again. When all of a sudden, your canine companion starts going into an epileptic seizure, you can bet that you just found that hidden sound.

Heres the commercial. I could hear that annoying sound perfectly, but just to be fair, this may be due to the video being transcoded into a digital medium. It may actually be a lot harder to hear on the TV.

KFC Mosquito Tone Commercial @ Engadget

Tangible Reactable What What?

Check out this instrument synth device. Aparently made by some hard core geeks.

The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Reactable [Via DialyCupOfTech]

Hampster Prance

Finally! Put your hamster to some REAL use! Make him work for his own well being. Load a sheet of paper into the shredder, and your little buddy just does his thing, running his little butt off, and presto; a few gear reductions later, an instant hamster bed made from purely recycled credit card applications and unfiled TPS reports.

This is artist Tom Ballhatchet’s design, which he plans to put on display in Milan, Italy.

Check out his hanster shredder and his site below.

Tom Ballhatchet [Via Gizmodo]

Best Dock Ever.

When it comes to peripheral docks, usually you don’t get that much choice in terms of customization. Chris decided he didn’t like that. At all.

He made himself a dock out of Legos! Its actually 3 docks in one. Chris can hook up his Pocket PC, get some more tunes on his iPod, and charge his Nintendo DS all at once.The site is just a Picasa web album, so I can’t verify it, but it seems that he most likely has a USB hub tucked under there to tie it all to one usb cable and one power cable. And if you look on the side there, it looks like theres a spare USB port for just about anything else you could think of putting in there.

The dock looks good. Almost perfect. It seems as though the iPod dock was meant to be there. Theres no doubt that this took quite a few re-building to get it just right. Good job Chris! I definatly wouldn’t mind having this up on my desk next to my monitor.

Lego Dock Web Album [Via Engadget]

One Dollar Silk Ties!

Quick! Amazon has a bunch of silk ties, cuff links, leather wallets, and silk squares all marked at $1!

I just found the deal online and ordered $20 worth, haha… i dont know how that happened, but whatever. Theres quite a lot of Christmas and other holiday ties, but if you sort through those, theres some nice ones lyin around there. And $1!

Ha!

Amazon $1 Deals [Via Bargainist]

Fake Photo Detection Software

When journalists are writing for a newspaper, they know the rule: no digital photo manipulation. In other words, no using that beloved stamp tool in Photoshop to take out that pedestrian that ruined your perfect shot of the president.

But sometimes, the temptation is just too much for the reporter and they decide they have enough Photoshop experience and talent to get away with changing some elements in their shot.

This is becoming such a problem, that the Associated Press actually has a third party help them out with it. They contract the help of Hany Farid. Hany has made special software that analyzes photos to determine if it is genuine or not automatically. The software looks for certain red flags about the photo that the normal eye just wouldn’t catch without a magnifying glass. Things like repeating pixels patterns, or unnatural shadows, pixel patterns due to rescaling, and especially the pupil reflections of multiple people in the shot.

It make sense when ya think about it. What is reflected in one person’s pupil should also be reflected in another person’s, to an extent.

Forgery has been around ever since… well…. authenticity. Theres no way to eliminate it. But even so, things need to be done.

“This is an arms race,” Farid says. “I can already tell you how it’s going to end: We’re going to lose. It’s always going to be easier to create a forgery than detect a forgery. But we’re going to take the power to create forgeries out of the hands of amateurs. We will raise that bar up until you have to be very, very good to do it.”

Computing Photographic Forgeries [Via Boing Boing]