Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog
One should always have something sensational to read on the net...
Technology doesn't only help humans move around in new ways: This project at CMU allows a goldfish to drive its tank around the room.
Now they've done the difficult bit, all they need to do is work out how to explain to the goldfish what exactly is going on. I fear that may still take a few million years...
Holme Fen
A photo taken last weekend in Monks Wood, with a little processing.
(To hide the fairies. They're very camera-shy and wouldn't sign a model release.)
We had a rather chilly but very pretty walk on the Wimpole Hall estate this morning.
Here's the view from near the folly:
If you really want to see the whole picture from here, though, there's another of my scrolly-panorama things here.
Then we walked back through the woods.
I got a new tripod yesterday, and took it out to play today (just very briefly while I was ostensibly walking the dog).
One thing I've been enjoying recently is stitching together multiple images to create a panorama, and a tripod makes this work very much better. But how to display the very wide images that can result?
Well, here's one way.
And here's another image from a slightly different viewpoint.
I quite like this effect, but even in this form, I'm using images that are 1/5th of the original size in each dimension. Here's the smaller one as a 60 Mpixel image, for example, albeit not at full quality.
Now, interestingly, I have a printer which can take rolls of photo paper, meaning that I could actually print out something like this at a decent size. Anybody got a spare corridor in which to hang it, though?
I've always liked this particular link. I can pretty much guarantee that there will be at least something on the other end of it that you don't know.
How do I know that?
Well, that link takes you to a random page on Wikipedia. Since the English version of Wikipedia has over 5 million pages, the chance of you hitting one on a subject about which you have any reasonably complete knowledge is really quite small. (At least, it would be for me!)
So, go ahead, click it and learn something new!
(If, by any chance, you hit a page where you find the subject matter somewhat uninteresting, then you can instead marvel at the fact that somebody found it interesting enough to create a page about it!)
I often wonder whether the manufacturers of tennis balls see their primary market as:
Mmm.
Those of you who are kind enough to read my random musings on a regular basis often do so via the RSS feed or Twitter, and many others got their updates via Facebook until I started my period of abstinence.
But this is just a reminder that you can also get Status-Q in your inbox, and what could be more exciting than that?!
I used to do this via a rather cobbled-together system based on IFTTT, but there's now a button on the right hand side of the Status-Q pages (which links to here), where you can sign up to a much more sophisticated system based on MailChimp.
Thanks to those of you who have already tried it out! Hope it's useful, or at least occasionally helps you start your day with a wry smile...
Here's a lovely clock created by G. Wade Johnson, which should appeal to any electronics geeks out there.
(I've put a copy here for posterity.)
