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I was involved in making this really awesome, smart, fun, geeky history show with a strong science bent and a maker ethos. I hope you all watch the the show tonight, because it really deserves to live on as a series (and there’s a dearth of smart, fun, geeky shows on the air)!

From History.com:

Meet Nikola Tesla, the unsung genius behind the most miraculous advances of the Age of Electricity, and Hacker-extraordinaire Bre Pettis who will break the history of electricity down to its nuts and bolts. Bre will show you how to build your own versions of Tesla’s greatest inventions and takes you on a journey from New York City’s ultra modern power plants, to one of the world’s most advanced satellite research labs, and then onward into the future of energy…unlimited wireless power.

If you want to know more about it, check out these links:

• History’s listing for the show, they’re calling it “Hacking History” for some reason.
• MSNBC.com: History reveals: Tesla totally awesome!
• Bre’s Behind-the-Scenes photos and viewer photo group on flickr
• Help turn History Hacker pilot into a show!
• DAN JOHNSON - HISTORY HACKER SOUND RECORDIST
• HISTORY HACKER - DAY OF SHOW

By the way, you’re welcome to grab the image above (or click through to get the bigger one on flickr) and use it on your own blog or wherever to help promote the show. Go History Hacker!

After Effects Anaglyphic 3D Video, originally uploaded by bobtiki.

First test of using two Flip Video Ultra cameras to record stereo (3D) video. The cameras were gaffer-taped to a hard metal ruler with the lenses separated by three inches — more than a realistic intra-ocular distance, but I thought it might work out well to exaggerate the effects of the 3D separation. The videos were then synced and combined in After Effects (above) by assigning the left camera to the red channel of the image, and the right camera to the green and blue channels (creating a cyan look).

This is meant to be viewed with old-style red/cyan 3D glasses (red on the left eye). If you don’t have a pair laying about, you can get a free pair by mail from Rainbow Symphony.

The cameras were not aligned exactly, but seemed to give pretty decent result nonetheless. The only major issue is the Flip cams really tend to smear when panning, so it probably works best if you go really slow. Also, optimizing alignment and intra-ocular spacing will need some work. Still, looks promising for cheap 3D video.

Next up, color anaglyphs.

I was going to post a video of it here, but no matter what web-suitable format I tried (and I even tried AVI and WMV9), they all compressed the color in such a way that the red-green separation was damaged, and the 3D no longer looked very good. Surprisingly, in the case of H.264, it smeared the colors together into a double image, no mater how high a data rate I allowed it. I’m now wondering with the way these codecs reduce the color information, if perhaps a color anaglyph will actually fare better than an old-school black-n-white one.

I will test that soon, but in the meantime, the morbidly curious can download a 243 MB Apple Pixlet version here, that’s as small as I could get it.

You can read my experience at the workshop in my previous post, but just wanted to post that even making it home without a copy of the instructions, I figured it out, and actually got my cube working. Well, aside from the two dead LEDs, at least.

Here’s a short video of the test, where you can see I have 2 dead LEDs in the middle plane. Guess I should have tested all the LEDs before building the cube, instead of after.

The cube is built on top of a board that connects to headers that plug right in to the Arduino board, and the USB cable leads to my MBP whence I just uploaded the code.

Thanks to Tim Slagle of the local Make:DC group for the test code and putting this project together for the group. I’ll upload some more video once I find a couple of replacement LEDs and work up a fun animation.

UPDATE: Three dead LEDs later, time for some fun flashies:

If you want the Arduino code, it’s after the break:

[click to continue...]

This website, like all of my sites now, has an Webclip Bookmark Icon. That means that if you use the webclip feature of an iPhone or an iPod Touch to “Add to Home Screen”, you get a nice little icon in your home screen instead of just a miniature screenshot of the site itself.

How does this work? Pretty simple:

1. Create an icon for your site at 57×57px. Mobile Safari will automatically composite the icon with the standard “glassy” overlay so it looks like a built-in iPhone or iPod application— so you might not want to use an already-glossy icon, as that will give you a double-dose of lickable glossiness and actually ends up looking pretty bad.

   You can make it a different size if you really want, but it will be scaled to this size and— again— probably will look crappy because of the scaling. Build it at the right size and you’ll be happier.

   UPDATE: Then again, some are reporting that a 60×60 icon is resulting in a crisper-looking image, so feel free to experiment.

2. Save it as a PNG called “apple-touch-icon.png”, and upload it to the root directory of your server, just like how maybe you have a “favicon.ico” for your site icon in web browsers.

3. Profit!

If you want to have a different bookmark icon for a specific web page, insert a <link> element similar to <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/customIcon.png"/> within the <head> element of the page.

This morning, my AirPort Extreme Base Station with Gigabit Ethernet (802.11n) started crapping out on me. At first, I thought it was just a one-time glitch, and I cycled the power. Within a few minutes, however, it was frozen again.

[click to continue...]

In the words of its creator, John Gruber, “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).”

I’ve known about Markdown for quite some time, but for some reason, I’ve always just stuck with writing up my blog posts in plain ol’ HTML. Since I’m now trying out MarsEdit, and it has preview functionality for Markdown, I thought I’d give it a shot. Turns out, I love it, especially the human-readability of it, which I suppose is really the entire point.

I had a really hard time, however, finding a good cheat sheet. Several links to one made by Ollieman indicate he had the best one, but as his site is currently down, I ended up making my own. Please share and enjoy!

Since I use WordPress for my blog, and I have installed PHP Markdown Extra as a plug-in, I have also included an addendum on the second page of the cheat sheet noting the additions and changes in the “Extra” version.

I would also note that several popular text editors have support for Markdown translations, such as my much beloved TextMate, in which I am writing this very post. In fact, there is an excellent screencast which demonstrates use of the Blogging Bundle for TextMate, and gives a good overview of how Markdown can be used inside the editor, and how to export to various formats.

Many thanks to John Gruber and Aaron Swartz for creating Markdown, and Michel Fortin for creating the PHP “Extra” version.

Direct download: Markdown Syntax Cheat Sheet v1.0

If, like me, you were foolish enough to install the Safari 3 beta, and are now wondering why the heck RubyCocoa won’t work (or worse yet, why the install keeps failing), check out the article Safari 2, Safari 3, Adium & forcing WebKit Frameworks from SubtleGradient.com. Once I went through the steps outlined here, things worked fine, where the Safari 3 Beta Uninstaller had not. (The beta Uninstaller didn’t properly restore the old version of WebKit, plus somehow wiped out my entire WebKit Headers folder.)