A window into the mind of a computer engineer
In addition to this fun comic, I have added some pictures to my previous post about the NES-chuck which I had originally forgotten to upload. Scroll down to the bottom of the post to see what makes the NES-chuck tick.
This Christmas, my lovely girlfriend was kind enough to get me an Arduino Duemilanove. I’ll admit that I may have been somewhat specific about what I wanted as a gift, but she managed to still surprise me by buying an Arduino starter pack and wrapping every portion of the bundle in its own little box, including a whole box for all of the bubble wrap that the thing shipped in. I have a few project ideas for this thing, but I will save those for their own posts. Keep an eye out for some new micro-controller projects here.
When I was young I remember watching a great show by the name of ReBoot. I’m not sure if it was ever that popular, especially since it was a Canadian show, but it was ground breaking as it was the first ever computer animated television series. The show revolves around a group of “Sprites” living in a place they call “Mainframe”. The main character, Bob, has come to Mainframe to protect the people from the viruses amongst them and help them in their constant struggle to defeat the “User” in the various games that fall onto the city out of the sky. The show is rife with computer references to everything from binary to servers, the net and firewalls. While cleaning out my workspace at home, I stumbled across every episode of ReBoot which I happened to have on DVD (I gathered these after a friend and I convinced our high school band director that we should play the theme on our New York music tour, but I never got around to watching them). I have decided that it is a good plan to watch it all again through new eyes as a computer engineer instead of the eyes of an 8 year old. This should prove to be a highly nostalgic, humorous, and informative experience.
Note: in quickly skimming the Wikipedia article for the show, I noticed that there has been a new trilogy of films announced! I am definitely looking forward to those.
So I have once again stumbled upon a video I have found to be interesting. I don’t intend on this blog turning into a video sharing/review site, but this one is really cool in both quality of finished product as well as in concept.
I recommend watching this one at full resolution (available on the original YouTube page). I am a bit of a pixel addict in general, but this is one that truly benefits from the extra resolution.
For anyone who has ever been frustrated with using a mouse and keyboard to try and do any kind of 3D modeling or has just been blown away by computer user interfaces in movies such as Minority Report or Iron Man will be drooling over this thing. It reminds me a lot of Google Sketchup, actually, and if holograms ever do become practical, I can see this sucker actually coming to fruition for people that actually do 3D modeling and product design professionally. Since I don’t do either, I’m hoping I’ll be one of the ones lucky enough to actually make it so that I can use it for “testing” (read: spending way too much time building stuff like it is my own personal full size LEGO world). Until then, I guess I’ll just watch this video while I play with Google Sketchup.
