Tech Babies

I was just about to leave for work this morning when I caught a glimpse of my computer screen. My 3-year-old was busy playing his favorite game, Need For Speed: Carbon, and I noticed one amazing thing: this 3-year-old could drive!

He took the turns just as I would, out-in-out, following an imaginary racing line. The thing is, he was winning races already! Excuse the exclamation marks, I'm simply amazed. The last time I saw him drive (before I did a reformat on my hard drive a couple of weeks back) he was running into walls and running the opposite direction most of the time. Now he was unlocking the challenge series one by one, IN SUCCESSION! And not just any challenge at that. Everyone knows that NFS:C does not have any difficulty settings that one can tweak. The challenges this baby was unlocking were the pursuit evasion ones. He knew how to evade cop chases and make use of Pursuit Breakers, then make his getaway after completing the challenge requirements. If you ask me, that's amazing for a 3-year-old toddler.

I guess it's the thing with the next generation. We thought WE were high-tech. We had the gadget revolution, we had the Internet explosion. We thought we were the most tech-savvy generation of geeks. We were wrong, for sprouting all around us are these babies who are born geeks, born not with silver spoons in their mouths, but with optical mice in their hands! I guess every generation one-ups the last, eh?

Know what my kid's first coherent phrase was?

"EA Sports, it's in the game..."

I have seen tonight's eclipse yesterday...

Yes, I have seen the eclipse happening tonight. Yesterday.

No, I'm not clairvoyant, silly. I'm resourceful. I saw the lunar eclipse, as well as the 9/11/2007 partial solar eclipse (from the best viewing location in the world) and other future celestial phenomena using a software called Starry Night. It's a "planetarium" program that lets you see the night, or day, skies at any given instant (read: past, present, & future) right at the comfort of your desktop. In possession of a telescope? You can also hook it up to Starry Night and let the program control the motion and position of your telescope.

Starry Night sells for about $200 but hey, you can't put a price on education. The amount of information inside this piece of software will have Galileo jumping and dancing with glee like a kid on Christmas Morning.

Now, excuse me, I'm off to watch the real thing...

Tech thoughts from a heavily medicated techie

During my severe asthma attack last weekend (yes, I'm asthmatic), I was under all kinds of medication and it kind of altered my mind for a moment (at least that's what I'd like to think, otherwise I'd have to believe that I really don't have a normal mind).

It was in this altered state that a realization hit me: we should combine a touch screen film, a scanner, and a glove. Yes, a glove. The touch screen film goes on the monitor, and the scanner goes into the tip of the glove's index finger. That way, if we want to copy a phrase or a word out of paper, or whatever surface for that matter, We can simply run our finger across the surface and touch the screen, and voila! The scanned words would then be pasted on the screen where we touched.

It's amazing what an overdose will do to the human mind. Imagine if I had a heart attack, the kind of technologies I could invent. =)

Ice Rocket : digital, medication, scanner, technology, touch screen, weird

3D Logos Galore

I did some 3D conversions of some logos from my previous schools a while back, and I've decided to share them here, to gather some comments and see where I need to improve my work. Enjoy, and feel free to leave your critics and comments. Keep them coming!

The first two are logos of Mindanao State University - Iligan Institute of Technology, and the bottom ones are of Philippine Science High School.

These are works in progress, so keep the comments coming so we can improve these, guys.

How I Crashed, and Lived to Tell About It

The persistent glitches on start-up should have sent warning bells ringing in my head, but that day I missed them completely. I was too preoccupied with trying to finish the project that I lost my common sense to stop, take a look around, and only move on when everything was absolutely safe. There was nothing that could distract me. Not the cold, not my aching eyes, and certainly not a few hurdles at the beginning. I was determined to smooth out my project and get it ready for presentation.

The whole thing happened so quickly and was over in less than a minute. I rebooted to finish installing an update, waited, waited ... and waited.

The blank screen stared back at me silently.

The truth began to painfully sink into my gut like a dull knife: I had suffered a crash.

Dreaded, unwelcome thoughts of losing ELEVEN GigaBytes of my porfolio - every document, every graphic, everything I had worked so hard at - began playing through my mind. I had no other copies of my files, ALL my files, since high school, except those on my PC. And now it just sat there, mocking me. I began to panic. I instinctively pressed the reset button and restarted the PC several times, with the same gloomy results. The BIOS setup indicated that my hard drives were intact, but since the operating system could not start, I had no way of knowing whether or not I was ever going to see my beloved files again.

Then a ray of light struck me and made me slap my head in "stupid-feelingness." I had just moved all my documents to another hard drive, the second one, by moving the "My Documents" pointer. My OS was on the first and that had crashed. That should have (hopefully) left my storage drive intact. With a little bit of luck, I should be able to reformat the primary hard drive, reinstall Windows, and repoint "My Documents" to my other hard drive. It should work, theoretically.

The next two hours were the longest I have ever had to endure. My fingers were crossed beyond recognition and I had probably four cups of coffee to calm my nerves (I was so nervous I forgot coffee works the opposite way, I ended up getting more and more tense).

Finally the time for first boot-up came and I had the chance to examine the storage drive. The files were there! I had never been more relieved, except for the time when I finally got home after a four-hour nonstop bus trip and I had diarrhea.

The moral lesson? Move your "My Documents" folder to another hard drive if you have one, or to another partition if you only have a single drive. In the event of a crash, you'll have a much better chance of only having to reinstall your OS and not starting from scratch with your entire portfolio.

Wallpapers From Mobile Pictures

Say goodbye to plain desktop wallpapers taken from your mobile phone. With a few steps, you can turn that dull desktop you'd like to cover up with apps into something you'd like to frame.

1. Take a snapshot of your favorite subject or choose a photo from your huge library of cellphone/digital pictures. In my case, I chose this (not so glamorous) shot of myself to demonstrate how a dull, unattractive (to some), picture can turn your desktop into something worthwhile to look at.
   


2. Fire up your favorite image editor and make some adjustments (levels, brightness/contrast, curves) to fine-tune the brightness and overall exposure of your image to the look you want for your desktop. Don't forget to do this all on a duplicate layer so that you can undo your mistakes. For this particular project, I chose a darker, subdued, and slightly reddish look to go with my plan on making the background red (plus my shirt is red in this image).


3. Once that is done, use the pen tool (or your favorite crop tool) to draw a mask around the face so we only select the part of the photo we want on the foreground. Put this on a separate layer.


4. Before we can smooth out the skin for that "magazine model look," we have to remove the major imperfections (like that garish mole on my nose). We can do this easily using the Healing Brush tool in Photoshop or your favorite editor. take care not to remove too much lest you end up looking like a picture-perfect alien.


5. Next, once the major blemishes are taken care of, it's time to smooth out the wrinkles and close the PORES. We do this by once again duplicating the image layer and applying a low-power, low-opacity median filter to our face. This smoothens out the complexion quite a bit so I emphasize low-power, low-opacity (These are not options. What I mean is you lower the median effect radius and the layer opacity until you achieve the desired level of smoothness to your skin). Use the Liquefy filter to modify the shape of your face. Slight modifications work fine, like the one i did to shrink my nose. Don't change your face too much or no one will know it's you.


6. Select the original image layer and duplicate it. To the bottom duplicate, we apply a Gaussian Blur filter, and to the upper one apply a pixelate -> mosaic filter for the pixelated look. Draw a gradient mask from black to white on the upper layer to show only half of the pixelated layer and show the bottom blurred layer beneath it.


7. Lastly, apply an HSL (Hue/Saturation/Lightness) adjustment to the two layers we just used. I colorized the two layers to a deep, dark red that it the look I wanted for my image.


8. Export to your favorite file format and place on your desktop as wallpaper and you're done!


9. Enjoy your new desktop. Show it off to your friends.

A Brief History of Cell Phone Photography (a common man’s perspective)

The onslaught of modern cellular phone technology has brought with it a new breed of hobbyist photographers armed with nothing more than camera phones. Ever since the first camera phones came out, we've been seeing blogs and even entire web communities popping up on the internet built around photos taken using mobile phones.

First generation camera phones produced pictures that were of very low resolution by today's standards (320 pixels x 240 pixels, or even smaller), but they had one characteristic that made them perfect for the old internet's limited bandwidth: small file sizes. Back then if a person had a 128-Kbps internet connection at home his friends would move in with him.

As the internet evolved, so did camera phone technology, and megapixel cameras on mobile phones were fast becoming commonplace. This meant that it was now possible to take better-quality, higher-resolution pictures. Camera phones now provided an alternative to dedicated digital cameras. Although they were far from posing a threat to true digital cameras, people were choosing them for the simple fact that camera phones were very portable, being integrated into cell phones.

As more and more people started to publish an increasing variety of photos online, it became apparent that some form of control would need to be implemented soon, because some, no, make that a lot of photos were being posted that were clearly not what the cell phone designers had in mind when they first created the camera phones.

Phone manufactures came up with different methods to deter the improper use of the gadgets, and perverts kept coming up with ways to defeat them. The cycle continues to this day.

Fortunately, as camera phones went up in class, so did the users. They began to see their phones as true digital cameras, using them for more than snapshots. There are even many extraordinary cell phone photographers in existence today.

Today, the highest resolution for a camera phone is 5 megapixels, the same as the average digital camera. With a creative eye, and perhaps a little Photoshop skill, the average camera phone – wielding Joe can bring out the artist in him.

the iPhone and Pinoy

With Apple's iPhone already out on the streets, it'll only be a matter of time before it falls in the hands of the people who will use it the most: the Filipino Rich Kid (PRK from this point on in the article).

Yes, folks, you read right. If you're in the Philippines, do not expect the iPhone to show up on the hands of the business elite just yet; instead, watch for it in malls, universities, and in some extreme cases, inside high school classrooms, well before it hits the hands of the Filipino business community.

Don't expect the half the users to know half the iPhone's functions, either. Among the advertised features of the iPhone (read: Cellphone + Internet Browser + iPod + kitchen sink), probably the ones they will use will be text messaging, calls, camera, and music player.

"But hey," you say, "My cellphone can already do all that at less than half the cost of the iPhone!"

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT. But not everyone knows that cellular phones in the Philippines are like luxury sports cars in other countries. They're not used for their primary purpose (In the case of cars, transportation. You figure it out for cellphones). They're status symbols.

So, while you may throw the occasional look of Gee, I wish I had a phone like that... at PRKs hanging out at the mall, think about how they had to spend more than twice the amount you paid for your phone to be able to do what your phone can do (the iPhone has a 2-megapixel camera, some existing phones have 3 and even 5-megapixel ones), smile to yourself, and walk away.