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hemmer | 8 years ago | on: 3D scanning by dipping into a liquid

I wonder how much of a role wetting/capillary effects play in this? The liquid interface will distort as it approaches the object, and will try to meet at a certain contact angle (based on surface tensions etc). Correcting for this might help improve the resolution of the scans?

hemmer | 8 years ago | on: A Year After ‘Pokémon Go,’ Where Are the Augmented-Reality Hits?

This is speculation, but perhaps there's a game-theory issue here. If IEEE loses money by people pirating (and you can apply the usual counter-arguments about whether the pirateer would have gone on to purchase it anyway) rather than paying then publishing costs increase to cover that loss, and therefore hurting the authors who must cover that increase in future if they want to publish in the journal again.

A better situation is where the preprint or open access version is available.

hemmer | 10 years ago | on: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

I've tried a variety of RSS readers recently for keeping track of academic publications (arxiv and journal feeds etc). I've settled on inoreader [1] as this: (i) includes a search feature in the free tier, (ii) has keyword highlighting (useful for trawling through long lists of papers), (iii) has a reliable Android app.

[1] http://www.inoreader.com

hemmer | 10 years ago | on: Fourier series

It's interestingly that the Gibbs phenomenon appears visually as a whiplash effect. You can see how it would only get worse as higher order terms are included.

hemmer | 11 years ago | on: Relaxing with Runcible, the circular 'anti-smartphone'

This reminds me of the aesthetic in Her [1], which was summarised nicely here [2] by the production designer:

  "You could say that Her is, in fact, a counterpoint to that prevailing vision of the future–the anti-Minority Report. Imagining its world wasn’t about heaping new technology on society as we know it today. It was looking at those places where technology could fade into the background, integrate more seamlessly. It was about envisioning a future, perhaps, that looked more like the past. “In a way,” says Barrett, “my job was to undesign the design.”
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ [2] http://www.wired.com/2014/01/will-influential-ui-design-mino...

hemmer | 11 years ago | on: Geologic Map of Mars

This is lovely, would probably make a nice print! I'm working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy; this makes a great accompaniment.

hemmer | 12 years ago | on: Juce: An extensive, mature, cross-platform C++ toolkit

I've been using JUCE for a couple of years for VST development. I've found it to be a very well put together library for audio work (diving straight into Steinberg's SDK is pretty daunting for someone new to audio like myself), and a lot just works out of the box.

There is strong leadership from Jules on the direction of the library which is generally a very good thing, though it does mean that sometimes there isn't much room to budge on controversial issues. Font rendering is one aspect that several have battled with for a while, I've struggled to get good crisp smaller fonts without resorting to using freetype. Jules argument seems to be that small fonts shouldn't be used period, therefore the library wont render them well (I think there are technical as well as philosophical reasons for this, particularly on OSX). While I agree they should generally be avoided, there are certain situations where this isn't the case (reproducing an exiting GUI for a client, fitting non-critical text in when screen real estate is at a premium etc).

Overall I would certainly recommend for anyone starting out in audio development, but be prepared to fiddle around with fonts; I'm not so familiar with the non-audio parts of the library.

hemmer | 12 years ago | on: Gift for a 10 year old

Possibly a raspberry pi (with camera)? A fun project might be to make a bird house webcam or similar.
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