Shum.Net
A Little of This – A Little of That
Roomba, the robot vacuum from iRobot out of Bedford, MA not only brush your floor while you’re gone, but can become a paintbrush of light for those photographers lucky enough to hire the talent. I found the post from May ‘09, but thought it was worth sharing again.
Words from creator: “I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it’s thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it’s cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!”
Don’t worry, we’re not talking about circumcision nor Bonsai trees, but we are talking about something that is obscure enough for the masses to ignore, but also something too personal to mention to a total stranger.
When you buy a nice coat, there are a few things people need to know. I’m sick and tired of seeing both men and women going around looking stupid less informed.
- Take the sewn on label off the outside of your sleeve – it might be sewn on, but it doesn’t belong there when you wear it.
- The pockets also DO work, even though they may also be sewn shut. Do yourself a favor and carefully snip them open so you can use the pockets. They are sewn shut for shipping so the garment doesn’t sag.
- Snip the few threads holding the back of the jacket if there is an opening (see below.) You don’t know how many people I see walking around like penguins in restricted long coats with the back tail slit sewn shut.
Thanks! Now I can move on in life 
So Guitar Hero exceeds $1B in sales, teaching absolutely nothing about playing the guitar. It’s a darn shame that after a kid (or adult) spends 10,000 hours playing this game, he or she would, according to Malcom Gladwell, would be an expert – but an expert only at Guitar Hero, and not the guitar.
Here are some suggestions to the product manager of Guitar Hero:
Start off Teaching Rhythm
The icons running up the screen indicate when to play, but you could easily add in measure indicators so at least you would know timing. After a few easy level of quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes, move up to eighth notes and sixteenth’s. Players spend HOURS starting out and something so basic should be achieved.
Intermediate Levels Can Teach Strings
The keys on the fake guitar are colored, and you make the player coordinate the colors of the notes with the colors of the keys. So make the 6 lines correspond to the 6 strings and work each string at different levels, then mix in rhythm and different strings at higher levels.
Turn the Music the Right Way
After a user plays Guitar Hero for too long, they may end up thinking reading music is like driving on a road. Turn it sideways and start getting players used to reading it the right way…. just like you would read a book – left to right, top to bottom.
Teach Notes
You’ve got 6 strings, the music written horizontally, and rhythm down pat. All that’s left is to introduce one note at a time and add some notes in between strings.
Teach Chords
The same way you would teach all the others – one chord at a time w/ fingering and tab shortcuts.
New Goals for Power Users
Not like gaining high score bragging rights and celebrating with your virtual trashy whore groupee is bad or anything, but imagine someone playing Guitar Hero for a couple years and finally picking up a guitar actually knowing what everything is… how’s that for success?
Imagine experts at Rock Band sitting down with real instruments knowing how to play a complete song with an entire band. That would be amazing… and there would be thousands of people who already know the song, ready to jam!
Think about the marketing leverage when someone’s at the store comparing games when one of them offers to actually teach music, while the other is just a game.
Inspired by Adobe’s Digital Imaging Evangelist, Julieanne Kost, I’ve been playing around with focal plane blur techniques in Photoshop CS4. What you can do with this is mimic (to some extent) the effect from a tilt-shift lens where you shift the focal plane.
Here’s one of my first test images:
Original is below:
Here are the steps from the video.
Basically, to create a more realistic photo, one would like to use the Lens Blur, but you can only apply a lens blur to a rasterized mask vs a Smart Object where you would create the gradient blur. I’m guessing most people stop at the gradient blur, but this technique adds a finer quality to the finished product, stead of a hazy look to the image.
Shall we say – Modern Day Laser Tag? – but this time around you don’t have to strap the sensor on your dog Shooting stuff will always be around no matter how many mothers out there stand rigidly against it. Kids have transitioned from cap guns to BB guns, then to laser, back to a reformed BB (Airsoft) and upgraded Nerf, and now back to upgraded infrared.
Interative Toy Concepts has developed a skeet shooter game designed to be an indoor toy.
The world’s first HD 3D camera – sorta speaks for itself.
2.6 millimetres – so we can ripped on buying a 3/4″ acrylic protector that all those iPhone accessory companies will cash in on!
Completely wireless HD TV’s – now I can mount this sucker just about everywhere – Monster Cable should lookout!
High speed camera – we’re talking 300FPS – capture that golf swing, tennis serve – finally!
Keep Polaroid film alive!
An iPhone-controlled drone helicopter – how cool is that toy??
I continuously struggle to keep my desktop clean… but I don’t. After a few months I end up with icons that completely cover my screen because you expect that if I put important stuff on my desktop that I don’t want to forget, I won’t forget it – but I do. Then after several more months, I shove them blindly into little folders and well – I might as well just have deleted them because it’s so difficult to sift through them again to find what I’m looking for.
BumpTop.com offers a great new way to organize just about everything through a revolutionary visual organization scheme. Your desktop becomes an entire cubicle. Pin stuff on the wall, create piles, reorganize, and… spread them all out again. You can undo, shrink, enlarge and many other options. And finally a cool visual app for both Mac and PC.
I’ve been managing the Shum.Net Website since 1994 – when Elias Alvord, Vice President & Co-Founder at Groundspeak, handed me a printout of an HTML guide as a freshman at Northeastern University. I thank him for that – greatly. On one hand, it helped me develop a career in the Web space, but it prevented me from developing my own site using Word Press… which I have deployed for countless other sites.
The day has come when I finally have gotten too lazy for my own good and have deployed it to serve up my own words via little simply Web-based text fields – boy will I miss my HTML editor – NOT.
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