yinpong's blog

Make your own rainbow - testing from Mr Lam

TV Buddy - Look at the three colours in his head!

Mehrzeller, the Multicellular Caravan

Mehrzeller, the Multicellular Caravan: "

Mehrzeller, or this Multicellular caravan concept, is pretty awesome.

These days, people are always on the move, and even job locations are becoming more mobile. With respect to the modern camper market, there are not too many design-y trailers with the exception of the Airstream. However, people are really looking for personalization and custom design. Enter the Mehrzeller.

Using an online design tool, every user can create a design that is unique. The configuration is generated by a computer using the customer’s inputs, and then the final design is crafted by parameters from the architects to yield an attractive and practicable result.

Thanks, George!

Facebook - Design Milk - Business - Design - Construction and Maintenance"

David Pogue's Best Photography Tricks (and Ours)

Tech columnist David Pogue pulls out "The Best Photography Tricks of All Time" for anyone shooting digital, including the crafty use of a lampshade:

It turns out that the threads at the top of just about any lamp—the place where the lampshade screws on—are precisely the same diameter as a tripod mount! In a pinch, you can whip off the lampshade, screw on the camera, and presto: You've got a rock-steady indoor tripod.

His other tips—always half-pressing the shutter button to reduce camera lag, getting a limited depth of field, forcing the flash on outdoors, and exploiting the "magic hour"—are all good reading for anyone new to shooting, especially to memory cards instead of film. We thought we'd add a few of our own collected tips from over the years to round things out a bit:

* Exhale and pull elbows in for steady shots: Especially if you're not rocking a vibration-control lens on a DSLR rig, this body-steadying practice can make all the difference for no-flash shots.
* Use the Unsharp Mask/Smart Sharpen for crisper shots: Photojojo explains how to use Photoshop (and similar photo editing tools) to get finer contrast on digital camera pics. Our commenters wisely point out, however, that the Smart Sharpen tool in Photoshop CS1 and later is the way to go.
* Deal with shooting in direct light: Because you, and your subjects, can't always get up at the hour just after dawn, Digital Photography School explains how to work with, and around, a hard sun.
* Get behind something to shoot more candidly: As Rick pointed out (taken from Digital Photography School's tips), it's hard to walk around with a lens pointed and not be noticed. For more candid shots, try shooting over someone's shoulder, or shooting through or around something that you don't mind being in the actual photograph for a voyeuristic effect—tree branches, window frames, and the like.
* Get a cheap, DIY lens hood or flash filter: A lens hood—like the kind you can print yourself—prevents glare, flare, and other light tricks beaming in from just around your lens edges. Similarly, a piece of white coffee filter can work wonders for diffusing your flash, giving bar shots and other low-light situations a much mellower light.

If you had only one tip to give a newcomer to digital photography, what would it be? Step up the chalkboard in the comments. Photo by ssh.
Pogue’s Photography Tips and Tricks [New York Times]

The Formula For a Perfect Movie

The Formula For a Perfect Movie: "

A Cornell University professor analyzed 150 of the highest grossing movies of the last 70 years. The more recent the movie, he found, the closer it adhered to the mathematical formula that describes the human attention span.

In the 1990s, researchers at University of Texas in Austin determined that our attention spans could be described by the 1/f fluctuation, a pattern representing the ebb and flow of our concentration over a period of time. In a new study, professor James Cutting found that the more recent the blockbuster, the more closely the length of its shots followed that same fluctuation.

Whereas Detour, made in 1945, has shots that only vaguely correspond to the 1/f fluctuation, the 2005 King Kong remake stays surprisingly snug with the attention span wave.

As Cutting explains, this increasing correlation means that films 'resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans,' but just because movies are increasingly pleasing to our subconscious minds doesn't mean that we will necessarily like them more: the Star Wars prequels strictly followed the formula. [PhysOrg and PopSci]

[extracted from The Formula For a Perfect Movie [Science] via feedly]

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Exploded images of everyday objects

Exploded images of everyday objects: "

Artist Adam Voorhes has created a series of exploded images of everyday objects, including an Etch-a-Sketch, a handgun, a frog, and a rotary phone (my favorite, pictured here. Man, that thing is a tank).

Exploded
(via Neatorama)

Previously:

December 1945 issue of Popular Science Boing Boing

A Day in the Life of a Networked Designer's Smart Things diagram ...

Nuclear reactor cutaway diagrams Boing Boing

Dating advice for men explained in electrical diagrams - Boing Boing

Custom laser-engraved patent drawings on copper sheets Boing Boing

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HOWTO choose a barber

HOWTO choose a barber: "From Rules of Thumb (which doesn't seem to have permalinks?): 'Between two barbers in a shop, choose the one with the worst haircut. They cut each other's hair. Submitted by: George Cameron, Wilmington, NC, USA'

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Vintage photos of "The Empire That Was Russia"

Vintage photos of "The Empire That Was Russia": " 04414V

Vann Hall says:

Yesterday's Boing Boing entry on panoramic photos of power-plant control rooms reminded me of a Library of Congress site, 'The Empire That Was Russia,' showcasing the color(!) photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, taken in the years immediately preceding WWI.

Prokudin-Gorskii used a camera of his own design that took three photographs in rapid succession on a 9x3' glass plate; the images were shot through a red, green, and blue filter, respectively. After developing, a full-color image could be projected from the plate using a custom, three-part projection system.

In 1948, the LoC bought the existing plates from Prokudin-Gorskii's heirs -- seemingly including nearly 1,900 color images, along with an unknown number of black-and-white photos. They've since been digitized and made available on the LoC web site. Most are available in three variations -- composite color image, single-frame black-and-white image, and entire (three-frame) negative -- and, amazingly, each variant is available as a medium- or high-resolution JPEG ('high-resolution' in this case reflecting typical usage at the time the scan was made: namely 1024 x 826 or thereabouts) or an uncompressed archival TIFF (e.g. 3200 x 2700 pixel for composite image). In addition, selected images are also presented in a 'corrected' format that takes into account problems with plate shrinkage and misregistration.

The subject matter varies widely, as Prokudin-Gorskii's intent had been systematically to document the Russian Empire...

The Empire That Was Russia (Thanks, Vann!)