Schwippy

Emergency Party Button

I finally did the write-up on the Emergency Party Button that I made a few months ago. I took a short video as well.

The video does it no justice… you totally need to be there to experience the awesomeness.

If you want to see how it was done and what all it consists of, go to the Emergency Party Button page at www.plasma2002.com/epb

Control The Official Schwippy Christmas Tree

This year, we have set up a Christmas Tree with lights that can be controlled via a web interface for all to enjoy! On the Schwippy Christmas Tree page, you can choose to control our christmas lights and view a webcam image of the tree and anybody (or any thing, for that matter) that decides to run across it

If you are bored and feel like playing with our lights, go to the following website.

http://tree.schwippy.com

Kangaroos are idiots

’nuff said.

Rock Paper Scissors 25

Who knew that one of the best games ever invented could get even better?

Along with the three common hand signs that can be thrown, 22 more signs have been added, each with their own set of rules on what beats what.

Click the image for a full size view

Check out the main site for a different chart that you can buy a large print of and put on your wall for reference.
Rock Paper Scissors 25 @ UMOP

Top 10 reasons why I’m lazy

1) For one thing, I never get around to finishing things I started.

Sperman was a Jerk

Is it just me, or was Superman a total jerk back in the old days? Haha, check out these funny comic book covers and image scans from real comic books from way back when. Linky linky below!

Funny Superhero Book Covers @ Fresh99

2-Story Target and their Cartalator

So while in San Diego for the weekend, we decided to go to the mall do a little time-killing before we headed back to our simple lives in the good ol’ IE. Well, we found a Bed Bath and Beyond, and seeing as how me and Sarah are going to be getting an apartment soon, we decided to go in and get some decorating ideas and whatnot. Well, we were both surprised when it turned out to be a 2-story building. When we decided to go up to the second floor, we were both joking about how we should try to get the shopping cart on the escalator with us. But instead we just did it the boring old fashioned way and took it up with us on the elevator. I know, I know… so cliche.

Anyways, while we were riding up, I was thinking to myself of ideas on how a system could be made to accommodate shopping carts going up or down a story. Somewhat along the lines of an escalator system. Well, I left it at that and didn’t think about it much more afterwards.

After we left Bed Bath and Beyond, we went to the other side of the mall and found Target, my girlfriend’s OCD-friendly fantasy store. As much as she loves Target, I wasn’t surprised at how thrilled she was to learn that just like Bed Bath and Beyond, this store too was two stories. Up where we live, we have ever yet to see a 2 store Target. I honestly didn’t think they could have that much crap to sell.

What’s great about this Target is the fact that they had solved the shopping cart escalator problem! We were both as mesmerized with this thing much in the same way that Asian tourists are with a pretty blonde girl in Las Vegas. I felt like an idiot taking the footage of this thing in action, but I knew what I had to do. I was on a mission to bring back a sight of the new world to the people of the IE! So behold: the Target Cartalator! (Well, if I got to name it anyway…)

Poetry at the Mall

If you’ve ever been to a mid to high end mall, chances are that you have seen one of those advertisement machines that incorporate a hanging projector that project stuff on the floor. Well, I just came across something over in the Make Group that would use something to that sense, but it isn’t interactive like the commercial advertisements. Rather, this is simply a performance piece.

I usually wouldn’t post about a performance piece like this, but this short film just kind of hit me and I don’t really know why. I felt like I was inside the world of the artist, which is exactly what any movie creator/producer/artist wants for his/her viewer. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do to me. I just cant be immersed into a film that easily.

Thats why im posting about this. The movie is meant to be projected onto the floor, so while watching the film, try to imagine yourself standing in the immediate center and seeing all this around you. Oh, and one more thing, try to give this piece your full attention… it definitely deserves it. (Its probably time you took a break from WoW anyways, don’t you think?)

The story comes in two parts : You are alone in the center, suddenly the craziness of this world, crowds, people shouting, emotional impulses. Second part is a ballet, the world is turning, you remain still in the center watching it all. A character, a little lens dances solo and approaches you, … desire … desire … dance … and slowly going away without realization. The crowd moves away, living you by yourself, again.

AVRA _ cinema poetic machine @ Instructables

Worlds Oldest Business Is No More

Just try to make a guess on how old the world’s oldest business would be. 50 years? Nah, Carl’s J.R. restaurants are older than that. How about 100 years? Not even close. Ok, ok… enough senseless guessing. The worlds oldest business record is held by a Japanese company called Kongō Gumi, which has built many famous Japanese temples. Kongō Gumi has been in the temple building business for over 40 generations. 40 generations! What does that work out to in years? Try 1,428!

According to Wikipedia:

Headquartered in Osaka, the family-owned construction company has origins dating back to the year 578, when Prince Shotoku brought Kongō family members from Baekje, Korea to Japan to build the Buddhist Shitennoji Temple, which still stands. Over the centuries, Kongō Gumi has participated in the construction of many famous buildings, including the 16th century Osaka Castle, Hōryū-ji in Nara, and Shitennō-ji.

But it looks as though the business has finally lost its ongoing record. While they still hold the record for the longest running business, they lost the record for the oldest business still running when they were bought by the Takamatsu Corporation.

Now heres the question… Who is the world’s oldest business that is still running? It doesn’t look like many people have an answer for that one.

Business Week [Via BoingBoing]

Making Thumbnails Automatically in Photoshop

If you have a folder full of images and want to post them to a web page somehow, you’ll probably want to size them down some way or another. You actually have a few options for doing so too, such as uploading to flickr or another photo site and have it automatically done for you, or you could download some batch photo tool dedicated specifically to making thumbnails. But if you have Adobe Photoshop, why not use its great built in re-sampling algorithms and have the batch feature do it all for you?

The following tutorial will show you how to do just that. After this walk through, you will have a folder full of all your original images turned into thumbnail sized images.

Step 1: Find the Actions Pallet

After opening Photoshop, what your going to need to find is your Actions pallet. If it isn’t immediately visible on your screen, you can make it pop up by going to these menus: Window > Actions.

Step 2: Add Some Resizing Actions

Adding your own custom actions is an extremely simple process. Basically all you need to do is tell Photoshop to watch what you do, and remember it. So what we need to do is, on that actions pallet, lets click the Folder Button at the bottom. This is going to create a new folder for us to play around in. You can call this folder anything you want, but for this tutorial (and possibly more later) lets go ahead and call it Tutorials. After you press enter, you should now have a new folder called Tutorials, but with nothing in it. So lets put some stuff in it! Lets now add the entire script that will handle our image resizing process. Go ahead and click the New Action button.

Lets name this new action something informative that you can use later, such as Make Thumbnail.

After naming it, click the Record button. This will add your new action to the Tutorials folder and also start the recording process. When an action is recording, it is watching every step in Photoshop you do and adding it to the action. So, say for example, you applied a filter right now. The filter application would get recorded, and at any time in the future, you could simply double click that action with any image open in Photoshop and it would apply that filter with the exact same settings you used.

Lets start recording exactly what we want to do now. First we need to Open an image. It really doesn’t matter what image, since we are just showing Photoshop what we want to do. The specific images will be put into the batch process in a later step. As soon as you open an image, you should notice that a new action appeared inside your Make Thumbnail action definition; Open. New actions will appear every time we complete a process until we click the stop button.

Lets continue by now resizing our image we just opened. Go to the image menu, then image size. (Image > Image Size…). In the menu that popped up, make sure that constrain proportions is checked. Go ahead and put in a common width that you want all your thumbnails to be. In this example, I’m going to use 150 pixels. Leave the height to whatever it changes to. As long as constrain proportions is checked, it should be fine.

Click OK. You should now have a very small thumbnail of your original image on your screen. Now we have to save this image somewhere. It really doesn’t even matter where you save the file, simply because once we start the batch process, the saving part will get overridden with a set destination. So just ahead and save the file ANYWHERE you want. (Just don’t overwrite the file you opened…. unless you want to)

Once you saved the file, Close the image.

Now you should have a blank Photoshop. Go ahead and look at your actions pallet. Your’s should resemble mine:

If you have Open, Image Size, Save, and Close all listed, then you’re good to go! Now, simply hit the Stop Button . Its immediately to the left of the red record button on the actions pallet. You just created your thumbnail creation script.

Step 3: Start the Batch Process

Go to the File menu, then Automate, then Batch… (File > Automate > Batch…)

Upon getting to the Batch dialog, we want to change a few settings, but first, make sure that you have the right stuff selected: the Set needs to be the folder you created earlier, Tutorials in this case. The Action should be set to the new action we made, Make Thumbnail for our project.

In the next section, our Source should be set to Folder. Right below, is a button that says Choose…. Click the button. This will open a file and folder dialog, asking you what folder to use. Select the folder that has all your images that you want to make thumbnails in it.

Make sure you select the next box, Override Action “Open” Commands. What this does, is whenever it sees that we opened a file, it doesn’t ask us what file to open, but instead, it keeps opening files in the specified folder.

On the Destination drop-down, make sure to select Folder. Now below that, click Choose and select a destination folder that you want all your thumbnails to be output to. (I made a new folder for this, but you can use the same folder as long as you make each thumbnail have a different name - defined below)

Make sure Override Action “Save As” Command is checked. This will save each file by a set of rules we are making right now, instead of asking us how to save it on each file.

In the following drop-downs, you can leave them as they are, or you can customize them any way you want. In the second box, i typed _thumbnail and changed the 3rd box to extension. This will result in the files being saved like: OriginalName_thumbnail.jpg

Now just click OK!

As soon as you click OK, Photoshop will start opening all your images, one at a time, and instantly resizing them down to 150 pixels (or whatever size you chose earlier), then saving them where you told it to. It sure is a lot faster than doing it manually, wouldn’t you agree?