Boing Boing: Watch “Hardware Wars” in HD. “The description of this YouTube claims this HD transfer of the legendary Star Wars parody, Hardware Wars, was done under the supervision of director Ernie Fosselius! Hardware Wars was a film that every kid at my Elementary school heard about back in the late 1970s, but only one of us had seen.”
La Trobe University: Unveiling the sacred Wiradjuri carved trees. “Led by a collaborative effort between Central Tablelands Local Land Services, Gaanha-bula Action Group, Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council, Yarrawula Ngullubul Men’s Corporation, La Trobe University, and the University of Denver in the USA, this project has brought together Wiradjuri traditional cultural knowledge and cutting-edge archaeological techniques of ground-penetrating radar and 3D modelling, to shed light on these sacred locations.”
State of Michigan: Gov. Whitmer Launches Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential . “Today, Governor Gretchen Whitmer officially launched operation of the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential, or MiLEAP. The new department, established by executive order in July, is tasked with improving outcomes from preschool through postsecondary so anyone can ‘make it in Michigan’ with a solid education and a path to a good-paying job.”
AI Weirdness: AI Weirdness advent calendar 2023. “It’s 2023 and the combo of GPT-4/DALL-E3 can generate passable versions of the saccharine Christmas drawings in an advent calendar. They cannot, however, label them correctly. Also sometimes you get sweatermugs. This means the 2023 AI-generated advent calendar is happening!”
Music Radar: This web app randomly samples thousands of YouTube videos to create a playable grid of loops, giving you endless sonic inspiration. “Built by Technology Greg, Sonic Garbage pulls over 3000 randomly generated YouTube audio snippets into a colour-coded grid and sorts them by ‘audio energy’ (volume?) or length, giving you a playable set of randomized samples that is tons of fun to mess around with. Sure, the majority of them may not sound great, but play around for a few minutes and it’s remarkably easy to stumble on combinations of loops that fit together just right and create something unexpectedly musical.” It really is, I tried it. It was amazing to me how much random audio actually made half-decent samples.
New York Times: Nom Nom Nom. What’s the Deal With Cookie Monster’s Cookies?. “The recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue. The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely.” Great read.
Ars Technica: DOS_deck offers free, all-timer DOS games in a browser, with controller support. “DOS_deck [provides] the most frictionless path to playing classic DOS shareware and abandonware, like Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Command & Conquer, and Syndicate, with reconfigured controller support and a simplified interface benevolently looted from the Steam Deck. You can play it in a browser, right now, the one you’re using to read this post.” It looks like only the Android table is available for the Epic Pinball game. Just in case you try to play the Excalibur table a couple times before you figure it out. >cough
Ars Technica: GameMaker throws shade at Unity, makes its 2D engine free or $100 for most. “If you’re making a game with GameMaker for release on consoles, you have to pay for an ongoing $80-per-month Enterprise package. If you’re trying to sell a game on other platforms (PC, mobile, browser), there’s a one-time $100 fee. If you’re just messing about or making something that’s not for sale, it’s free. And GameMaker’s asset bundles are free now, too. And some existing subscribers might now get a free commercial license. There is, notably, no mention of ‘run-time’ or per-install fees.”
On GitHub, discovered via Boing Boing: Awesome Engineering Games. “A curated list of some of the best engineering games on PC. All titles are rated Very Positive or higher on Steam. Games are divided into broad categories based on the type(s) of engineering they’re most related to, such as civil engineering & city-building, transportation & route-building, computer science & electrical engineering, etc. See the Table of Contents for a full breakdown of categories.”
NPR: Oklahoma restricted how race can be taught. So these Black teachers stepped up. “The schoolchildren arrived at the community center’s cafeteria on a Saturday morning, their parents in tow. Some adults came without children, because they, too, wanted to learn the African American history that a new law has made many Oklahoma schoolteachers too afraid to teach.”
Ars Technica: Infocom’s ingenious code-porting tools for Zork and other games have been found. “The source code for many of Infocom’s foundational text-parsing adventure games, including Zork, has been available since 2019. But that code doesn’t do anything for modern computers, nor even computers of the era, when it comes to actually running the games. Most of Infocom’s games were written in ‘Zork Implementation Language,’ which was native to no particular platform or processor, but ready to be interpreted on all kinds of systems by versions of its Z-Machine.”
NASA: NASA Telescope Data Becomes Music You Can Play. “Since 2020, the “sonification” project at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Center has translated the digital data taken by telescopes into notes and sounds. This process allows the listener to experience the data through the sense of hearing instead of seeing it as images, a more common way to present astronomical data. A new phase of the sonification project takes the data into different territory. Working with composer Sophie Kastner, the team has developed versions of the data that can be played by musicians.”
LiveScience: From arsenic to urine, archaeologists find odd artifacts on museum shelves. “In a study published Oct. 19 in Advances in Archaeological Practice, University of Idaho archaeologist Mark S. Warner and his colleague, chemist Ray von Wandruszka, summarized the 15 years they have spent identifying and testing noxious substances from archaeological artifacts. Their hunt for the grossest objects lurking in museums began when a large excavation of the 19th-century town of Sandpoint in northern Idaho in 2008 uncovered sealed glass bottles with mysterious contents among the other nearly 600,000 artifacts.”
Digital Camera World: I shot photos with a 108-year-old Kodak camera lens to commemorate the soldiers of WWI . “During WWI soldiers were prohibited from using cameras and taking photographs of life in the trenches, however, many still did. They did so by using a small compact camera called the Kodak Vest Pocket film camera that was easy to conceal, and later became known as ‘The soldier’s camera’. Tom Calton, a photographer based in Peterborough, UK, has repurposed its otherwise fixed lens, adapting it to be used on a modern Sony mirrorless camera…”
404 Media: A 104-Year-Old Lost Silent Movie Has Been Found in a Basement. “A 104-year-old silent movie that had been thought lost forever has been found, an organization dedicated to preserving rare and endangered film has announced. The movie, called Sealed Hearts, was released in 1919 and was directed by Ralph Ince, who was prolific during the silent era. It was produced by Lewis Selznick, a giant of silent film, and starred Eugene O’Brien, Robert Edison, and Lucille Lee Stewart.”
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