Big Motherfucking Thing projection mapped

One of the biggest projection mapping displays ever.

Just discovered you can take '3D' pictures with Google Camera

Depthy extracts the depth map made by Google Camera Lens Blur photos allowing you to view them with a 3D parallax effect and changing of focus.

The picture in the post is just a shitty GIF export, it's way more awesome to play around with it yourself. Here is an example I made. Be sure to check out all the options in the settings.

Here is the Depthmap generated by the software, pretty impressive.

Google is now applying this tech to allow you to make 3D panoramas to view in Cardboard/VR: https://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2015/12/step-inside-your-photos-with-cardboard.html

I guess it's just a matter of time before we can get miniature drones that use this to automatically capture whole scenes in full 3D for you.

Stichting Full Reserve - DepositoBank

"Het nemen van risico zou een keuze moeten zijn. Wie geld giraal -dus op een bankrekening- wil aanhouden, kon tot nu toe niet kiezen voor een bank die geen risico neemt door het verstrekken van leningen. Straks wel."

Stichting Full Reserve probeert een bank op te richting zonder winstoogmerk en zonder geldschepping. Daarvoor zijn 16000 oprichters (leden) nodig. 

Het lijkt me mooi als een dergelijke bank er komt. Vreemd dat we die mogelijkheid nu niet hebben.

www.depositobank.nl

meldpunt.fietsersbond.nl

The fietsersbond is, in my experience, a very active and effective organisation that campaigns for better cycling conditions in the Netherlands.

They have a webapp, meldpunt.fietsersbond.nl, where you can report any issue related to cycle lanes and cycling infrastructure. Anything from glass or dirt on the road, to dangerous situations. Reports are usually (automatically) forwarded to local authorities. I have good experience with actions taken after filing a report.

The fietsersbond has only 35,000 members (compared to 4,100,000 for the ANWB).
Please consider joining the bond, lid.fietsersbond.nl. Membership starts at 26 euro per year.

We're on the cusp of a revolution that will change the world as much as computers did

Most people do not yet understand the potential impact of our newfound ability to edit and eventually rewrite genetic code, the blueprint for life itself.
At least, so say a number a number of experts in genetics and genomics. That idea was the major common thread in a series of interviews with some of the leading researchers in the field.

Full article... 

Please read the article so you are not 'most people'. I also truly believe this will be big. This is the technology that allows a gene drive that could exterminate a mosquito species for example.

Podcast: startup

I follow he podcast Startup a while, see link

This is a podcast about someone who wants to start podcast company. You follow his startup from the start and see where he bumps into. The podcast has high production value and gives in my opinion also a fairly accurate picture of what it is to start a startup.

Tip 1: Listen to the podcasts chronologically.

Tip 2: Season two is not as great as season one, but the mini season 3 starts very well.

Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months

I think this is the world record.

In November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga went fishing off the coast of Mexico. Two days later, a storm hit and he made a desperate SOS. It was the last anyone heard from him – for 438 days. This is his story

Full story @ The Guardian.

Rare weather event causes stunning ‘fire rainbow cloud’ to appear

Pretty spectacular example of cloud iridescence.

Article and video

Nice ones I found on Flickr: (FFS you need a Yahoo account to download pics there nowadays)

Heliumbeer, best thing since sliced bread.

My personality according to IBM Watson Personality Insights

I inputted a total of nearly 6000 words of my own original writing from my longer Reddit submissions to /r/futurology and dream report on my website. It seems like a pretty good result to me and gives way more insight than any four letter Myers-Briggs personality test (i.e. INTJ) I've taken before. Though I do spot some huge misses too, like Curiosity 31%?

I'm gonna try and compare it with inputting my MSc thesis next. I'm guessing there will be quite some difference. Maybe not, according to the research you need self reflective words and it was trained on social media such as twitter, blog posts, and forum posts. Makes sense. Gonna be harder to pull another 6000 words out of the Reddit hat.

You can try it for yourself here.
.

IBM Watson advert: Bob Dylan & IBM Watson on Language

Now that there are advertisements rolling out I hope we might finally start seeing some results from Watson too, I've been waiting long enough, with growing skepticism.

About Watson singing, I made him sing a Reggie Watts song some time ago, think it worked out okay :)

 

Europe's highest court rejected the 'safe harbor' agreement used by American tech companies

"The European Court of Justice has just ruled that the transatlantic Safe Harbour agreement, which lets American companies use a single standard for consumer privacy and data storage in both the US and Europe, is invalid.
...
Companies such as Facebook and Twitter may now face scrutiny from individual European countries' data regulators — and could be forced to host European user data in Europe, rather than hosting it in the US and transferring it over."

read more...

Carebear internals

Artist website

A nice list with more of his sculptures

Would love to get one of those sculptures :)

K2: The Killer Summit

Low quality youtube link here. There is also a 720p torrent out there (highly recommended because of the scenery), should I post the link or are we then endangering the blog?

I found this documentary quite fascinating although it doesn't really teach anything, it only tells the story of the most lethal day in the history of K2 using rather good re-enactments and stunning images of the landscape.

ps. I've slightly adjusted the width of the blog so that embedded clips have a better fit when set on 640x360.

The Egg - probably my favorite 5 minute read

The Egg

By: Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

  Full story...

Andy Weir also wrote The Martian which is one of my favorite hard sci-fi books and is currently being made into a movie. I read the book due to Adam Savage recommending it in a Tested video.

ONN Exclusive: One-On-One Interview With God

Incidentally this is also what Salvia often feels like to me.

They're finally here... our very own Rainbow Doritos!

Sub Explorer II "B2" Birthday Present Videos

We gave A Pimp Named Slick a Sub Explorer for a birthday present. He recorded a video. ExpendableAsset messed it up with horrible music.

Shroominati

ExpendableAsset came by with his camera to record the effects of color cycling RGB lights on the mushroom artwork in Cyberbeast's attic.

dekus, can you fix this?

When I visit our blog at 2560x1440 resolution I see this. Could we make the background autostretch or something? With your new webdev skills I'd think you should be able to.

Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp - The Chump Code Caper

How come I've never seen this before :)

 

Wiki
Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp is an American action/adventure comedy series that originally aired on ABC from September 12, 1970 to January 2, 1971. The Saturday morning live-action film series featured a cast of chimpanzees given apparent speaking roles by overdubbing with human voices.

If you can remember all your passwords, you’re doing it wrong

You need strong unique passwords. Those that you can't easily remember. That's where a password manager comes in. Security experts use them.

I've been using a password manager for some time now. It improved my browser experience. It's faster and more secure.

I use LastPass to store (client side encrypted) all my login information in the cloud. I use their browser extensions to sync these passwords among my different devices. On trusted devices, like my desktop and laptop, login fields are automatically filled in. On non trusted devices, I need to enter my LastPass password before the fields are filled in.

In addition, and this is optional, I need to insert my YubiKey (USB) and press its button to authenticate with a one-time-password, again only for non trusted devices, which is rare. You could use your phone for this too.

LastPass can also store encrypted notes. These can be used for other passwords and secret information that you want to access from anywhere.

Don't forget your LastPass password ;)

Transit Visualization Client

"This tracker provides movement visualization of transit data published by transit agencies and operators from all over the world. The movements are mostly based on static schedule data. Wherever real-time data is available it is also included in the visualization."

It does not (yet) use real-time data in the Netherlands, but it shows what is possible once real-team data is available.

The NS app already uses real-time data, edit: and has an in-app overview map.

Global Fishing Watch

Global Fishing Watch is  a technology to show all of the trackable fishing activity in the ocean. It was created to recognize the patterns of fishing boats and in this way to to detect them from other boats.
Nice use of data technology to identify illegal fishing, so it can be stopped. 

More information: http://globalfishingwatch.org/

G-Force simulators for the home

Do want! But screw those screens, this seems tailor made for an Oculus :)




Maybe for the arcades?

AHN, my favorite open geographic dataset of NL

One of the most detailed heightmaps in the world! www.ahn.nl

Access to this data used to be very expensive, now it's all open! I've made a selection of some layers and chosen special places to the Rainbowboys. Can you guess where they are? (file names will reveal location, so be careful when hovering over the images).

A: AHN2, raw data with legend

B: AHN2, Blue to Red, water=green

C: AHN3, Raw data

D: AHN2, Shaded Relief, water = aerial photo

E: AHN2: Raw data 50% transparency, Hillshade

F: AHN2: Raw data, shaded relief

G: AHN2: Shaded relief, red to blue

Here you can play with the data viewer yourself. Would love it if you added some special places to the list!

Year of construction map, the Netherlands

Future Space Tribe :)

Monday I started work on a website and though there is enough to share now.

It's still very much a WIP! Made with Squarespace, had no idea how awesome it is, and I've only scratched the surface.

http://futuretribe.space/

Laser drones!! The future is now.

One of the coolest things I saw at Psy-Fi.

I contacted the creator on Facebook, he used a DJI Spreading Wings s1000 with a 2W laser.
Take-off weight: 6Kg~11Kg
Should be more than enough for our movie plans :) $3,299 on Amazon.

Special glasses that can fix color blindness in many cases

Company website

Here are some non-promotional videos of people reacting to them that really gave me the feels: 1 - 2 - 3

Flow Hive - Honey on Tap!

A great concept with crowd funded implementation that looks promising. 

It still takes quite some effort to keep bees, but a great extra feature that may lure me into beekeeping.

Rainbow village?

In Spain, Entire Villages Are Up For Sale — And They're Going Cheap

The abandoned village of O Penso, in northwest Spain, is for sale for about $230,000. The last resident died a decade ago. The village includes 100 acres with half a dozen houses, two sprawling farms with room for 70 cattle and a stand-alone bread-making kitchen.

Full article...

New post and comment notification

Rainbowboys can enable email notifications for new post and/or comment.
Add your email here: https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=32272597#emailandmobilesettings

Works great in combination with email filter and label.

The Sony Alpha A7s allows you to turn night into day with its ridiculously high 409,600 ISO sensitivity

Almost unbelievable that this video was captured at night with only the moon for illumination. My brain just can't seem to process it, as its light sensitivity is so vastly better than my night vision, and its in full color too!

 

Super awesome, though a bit unsettling that while you might think you are hidden privately in the dark someone with this camera could clearly see you. I don't think the girl in the video knew she could be filmed like that :)

Here is another impressive video with some more variation and comparison between ISO settings.

High end smartphone cameras are approaching the quality of compact cameras

Just came across this article comparing the Galaxy S6 camera to the Sony RX100, a €350 compact. It's not quite there yet, especially when you zoom to 100%, but I'm very impressed with how close the results are. It's amazing how quickly these things have improved, though maybe not so surprising considering it is one of the prime features of smartphones being carried around by nearly two billion people.

With so much funding behind it engineers have managed to make all kinds of innovations tackling some of the seemingly impossible obstacles inherent in having a smaller camera. I'm convinced they will keep doing so and the gap will be negligible in a few years.

Even at this point I don't think I will be buying a compact camera again but will go for a high end smartphone instead. Besides the much better form factor a smartphone can also do things like GPS tagging, timelapses, 4K video, slow motion video, HDR burst. And there is a large choice of apps allowing you to get your favorite interface and features.

A top of the line expensive smartphone now also looks like a much better deal to me as it saves me from buying a compact.

Best video so far of the two massive explosions in Tianjin

From wiki:

On 12 August 2015, at least two explosions within 30 seconds of each other occurred at a container storage station at the Port of Tianjin in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, China.[4][5] The cause of the explosions was not immediately known, but initial reports pointed to an industrial accident.[5] Chinese state media said that at least the initial blast was from unknown hazardous materials in shipping containers at a plant warehouse owned by Ruihai Logistics,[6] a firm specializing in handling hazardous materials.

 [...]

 Several reports stated that at least 71 people were severely injured, and more than 50 killed.

What's Up With This Big Hole? - The Onion does VICE.

Holiday Villas (8p), Peloponnese, Greece

A collection of villas on the Peloponnese, Greece, that sleep at least 8.

Methoni

 

Plaka

 

Zykanthos

 

Kyparissia

Lafka

Cranage

Some CSI-level photo manipulation

A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography

How Do Bikes Stay Up?

We discussed this a while ago, I don't know the supported arguments anymore, but it turns out we were both wrong/right. It's complicated and not exactly known.

A nice quote from the brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson:

You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

This is also really interesting, a bicycle that steers in reverse and is only possible to control after a lot of practice:

Ireland, West Coast

Lost and Found dog

Even though it's fake, still I think this is a great example of fun advertisement.

Crane Physics

I see your rainbow and raise you a waterfall :P

The Panda Bear Song

Thought mr wiggles would appreciate this.

Rainbow from Ireland

Blender to WebGL

I just found out about Blend4Web, a great addon for Blender that lets you convert Blender scenes to embeddable WebGL relatively easy. Here is demo of a simple model I made for a previous project. You can rotate, pan, and zoom with mouse controls around the interactive model below:

Here is a more impressive example from a somewhat more complex project I did, big file (24MB)

As you can see from the online demos it's capable of much more impressive scenes and even interactive apps.

KUNG FURY

One of the best half hours in recent movie history :).

A movie made possible by Kickstarter. You really want to see how the wolf riding was done.

Holy fuck, this is terrifying

Complete car hacking and takeover is entirely possible now, even without ever having physical access to the car. You would think the manufacturers could have seen this coming and done something about security before it got to this point.

Full article here.

Makes the conspiracy theory about the journalist Michael Hastings being killed by remote car hack more plausible.

Extreme blobbing

Much crazier and higher but non-embeddable link. Gif version:

Global electricity network

Europe,

The Netherlands, wind turbines as red dots,

Interactive map, http://www.itoworld.com/map/

web.archive.org/web/2010/August/rainbowboys.org

First close-up of Pluto

More to come...