Monthly Archives: September 2006

OMG

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Well, I thought the female body builders with boobs cartoons was bad, but then you haven’t read the reviews of Donkey Punch yet.

Something Awful has an incredible review of this film, littered with quotes like

The couple moves through a series of predictable sexual positions (each accompanied by punching of Daire’s ass or head) with long layovers that involve the man kicking her modest bosom or inserting much of his foot into her mouth. Probably the most painful-looking moment in the scene is when Daire assumes a head-down doggystyle position on the couch. The man begins having anal sex with her and then lifts a foot and steps on the side of her face while this is happening. She does not appear enthusiastic about this position and, given her discomfort, I move that it be stricken from the Kama Sutra.

At long last, the man reaches his climax and administers a series of blows to Daire’s head as he completes his day’s work. It should be noted that the men in the movie do restrain their punches. Not that the film doesn’t still appear quite painful for the women, just that the men seem aware that knocking the actress unconscious or punching teeth out of her mouth are probably grounds for a filming stop.

and

What makes this dramatic finale great is that “Cram” and “Grip” “Johnson” appear on screen in a special follow-up to the donkey punching. Along with them is Alex Divine who is flexing her distended asshole at the camera like some sort of anal bodybuilder. They proceed to apologize for “that dumb bitch” who “totally fucked up the most important part of the scene.” She continues to be somewhat bitchy, which is understandable, and they act like stupid assholes, which is also understandable. They slap her and pull her hair, she spits at them. The best line is Cram’s, “there’s no wrong spot to hit a woman,” which if it saw broader release would go down as one of the all time greatest lines in film history for a variety of reasons.

Virtual Reality Remote Control Flying

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This video sparked it off – a guy who’s mounted a camera onto an RC aircraft and fed the feed to a head mounted display (HMD). Now not much special in and of itself, I’ve seen that looong ago. But he’s also got a gyroscope attached to the HMD coupled to a motor on the camera allowing him to pan and tilt. The video is amazing!

The guy who made the video – VRFlyer – has a whole discussion about the technology here.

One of the aspects is the HMD to use. Things get difficult here. Basically it’s about the following things in the choice of HMD
1) Resolution (minimally 640×480 (ie. don’t get ripped off for 3240×240!), but preferably 800×600 [1.5 million pixels])
2) Whether the headset has a VGA connector as well as or instead of NTSC / PAL input
3) Whether the monitors in the HMD are independent of each other or not (most aren’t)
4) Virtual display size
5) Angle of view
6) Cost
7) Are the displays independent (stereo / 3D)?

If you’re only going to use the HMD for flying, VGA isn’t important, as the camera reciever is NTSC/PAL output anyway, but if you want to use it for other things (or view via a laptop) it becomes important.

Also, none of the HMDs is bright screen, so they’re pretty much useless in direct sunlight. Some kind of screen will have to be put on around them.
The maker of the system uses the Cyberman GVD510.
1) 640×480
2) no VGA
3) no
4) 40″, 2m away
5) 28 o
6) $499,-

[edit: 2007]
The Headplay unit offers 800×600, USB 2.0, VGA, NTSC, PAL inputs, optical settings adjustment for focus and inter-pupilar distances, 52″ diagonal (ie. 40″) at 6′ away and 360 colour fields/s. The goggles plug into a central unit which also has an output plug for a controller. It’s expected to retail at around $450,- or so.

Sony has a discontinued line of Glasstron HMDs which you might be able to pick up on ebay or something. The PLM A55 is sufficient, but really you want the 800×600 PLM S-700. No VGA input though.

The Cybermind Cy-visor dh-4400vp has similar specs as the PLM S-700. The Cybermindnl.com website has a whole load of different HMDs for sale. (NB the 900 series is 3D)

Tek Gear has a whole list of HMDs for sale as well.

Stereo3d.com has a huge list of HMDs in a comparison chart (unfortunately it’s static), so if you really like shopping around, this should help.

[edit: 16/7/7]
The Emagine Z800 3D Visor has a lot of good reviews and should be going for around $800,- to $900,- in the reviews. It’s 800×600 but on the official site it goes for a lot more.

They’re a lot cheaper on ebay, but a word of warning – the CrystalView HMDs come in 2 types, one of which is 1.5m pixels, in which case it’s a good deal, but the ‘poor’ model (don’t know how to tell which it is though) sucks so don’t get it!

Then we have the monacle systems which I really didn’t feel like getting into much. The Eyetop system was pointed out and looked quite nice, BUT QVGA (320×240) and no VGA in. It is, however a complete package for $425,-
This system is recommended for making aerial video’s but not for flying in first person view.

So, now we’ve got a HMD, we need a transmitter and a camera. You can get these at Blackwidowav.com.

Placing the transmitters is important and a question of trial and error. Stay away from metal as much as possible (so replace the landing struts, maybe) such as gates, fences, cars, etc.

The gyro is obtained from rc-tech.ch.

This are his mounting instructions, plus a how he recentres the view:

it’s plug in the trainer port, I modifie my tainer port to be able to get 9.6Vpower thrue the plug to power headset. But normally, you plug the gyro in High end radio like the Futaba 9C, it’s like givig partial control to the student. No gyro is available to be plug directly on pot. inside radio. I would have a model like this too, I will be able to use all my radio.
The momentary trainer switch on the radio have been replace
with standard switch. I toggle to student mode to activate the gyro, when I flip it back, the camera come to center fix. I can turn myself at that moments. When new orientation is acheive, I push a second switch mometarily to reset the gyro center, then I toggle the trainer switch to reactivate the gyro. I do that oftenly, when the planes is far, I prefer to look in the direction of the planes, if somethig wrong happens, I will save time. I got rarely problem, but I prefer be prepare if video fail.

Mounting the camera inside a canopy is not a good idea, because of the lack of clarity in plastic.

Now we need a digital recording device (PVR) to throw your flight movies onto. Again, look for a resolution of minimally 640×480, the quality loss going lower is amazing. That or use a laptop with a capture device.

There’s a discussion on PVRs here

If you go the MPVR, they’re reccomending the Aiptek MPVR 2K6, which is 640×480, is cheap and functions as a digital camera as well as being just an input machine.

So then what?
Uhm… yes… you need a plane, a RC controller and permission to fly RC planes (different per country). Good luck on that – that’s a whole new subject in and of itself!

SWIFT traffic monitored

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Earlier the Belgian SWIFT concern got into a muddle by stating that it had allowed the U.S. access to SWIFT transfer information based on warrants issued by the U.S., but refused to show the EU which warrants had been issued. They basically just maintained they had done nothing wrong and that was that.

Now it seems the U.S. has been monitoring SWIFT traffic for some time – sifting through all international payments in the hope of finding terrorists. Now I don’t remember giving the U.S. (or anyone else, for that matter) permission to sift through my private money transfers, and the E.U. is looking into the legality of the system.

Of course, the E.U. is going to roll over and not get anything done, but it’s nice to know that at least they’re concerned about our personal privacy – especially against the more and more dictatorial republik der Amerika.

Car to car communication

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This consortium has a whole load of car manufacturers in it trying to create a decentralised network of road cars which beam each other driving information using 802.11 built in networks. The idea is to beam information about driving conditions, accidents, traffic jams, etc to cars within a few hundred metres.
Nice idea, but how are you going to limit the spread of messages between cars from the point of interest and limit the flow of conversation? Another one, considering the ease of hacking any 802.11, is how are you going to stop people with laptops from clearing roads for themselves by injecting “road closed for construction” messages into the network from a whole host of fictitious cars?

EU: do the people have any say?

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Well, given the way the vote was swung by national governments in the last referendum for the consitution, it’s starting to look like the people might have something of a say, but given it’s track record on eg. Patents, I’m still waiting and seeing.
Now one million signatures have been collected to stop the EU parliament from going on holliday once a month to Strasbourg at a cost of EUR. 200 million per year. Aside from the ministers, aides and paperwork having to be carted around, the rent in Strasbourg (for buildings only used 12 times per year) is inflated.
France especially wants to keep it’s parliamentiary perks.

Matrox Triplehead2Go

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Matrox released this some time ago, but I just found it, so here it is:
The Triplehead2Go is a box you connect a single VGA (analog) out from your PC to and then connect 3 monitors to through it’s own VGA (analog) outputs. It’s not a graphics card – Matrox has decided to not compete with the likes of Nvidia and ATi, it processes the signal to create a max resolution of 3840×1024.
Reviewers rave about the size, immersion and cost of the product (3 monitors + the Triplehead2Go cost less than $1000) but unfortunately the desktop management software falls short, getting games to work properly can sometimes be a fiddle and if you have an ATi card you can forget about it. What surprises most reviewers is that there isn’t much of a framerate hit, and the bezels between the monitors doesn’t cause much disturbance to the viewer.

Good out of the box thinking by Matrox, but unfortunately it looks like this technology will have to mature a bit (by games manufacturers, ATi and Matrox) before it becomes a ‘must have’.

AVSim review
Tomshardware review
SimHQ review
List of compatible Matrox games

iPods cheapie cheapie

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Because they’re planning to launch a new product, they’re selling refurbished units with one year’s garauntee for massively cut rates on the Apple Website.
A video iPod 30GB for $179, a 2GB iPod nano for $99, for example…

Uhm, that is… if you can get it posted to you somehow – the USA Apple store doesn’t ship beyond the USA and they’re not available on the Netherlands / UK sites either.

So, if you have any idea how to get a white 30GB one here, please tell me – at $179 I’m finally overboard and want one.