Notices by James Brown (ancientjames@mastodon.social)

I bought this fiddle toy to pad out an aliexpress order, and it’s crying out to be turned into a functioning keyboard but I’m not sure what the gimmick would be.

https://thespinoff.co.nz/science/13-02-2026/its-kakapo-fuck-season

"Animated Bokeh" has been on my whiteboard for a long time, and this is the result.

I thought it would just be for cheesy novelty effects, but it also does lightfield manipulation that was cooler than I expected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_2MAgS_pE

When I look at the shiny surface of the fingerprint sensor on my laptop, I can see my greasy fingerprint on it. Presumably one could take an image of this, print a rubber finger, and unlock the laptop that way. But this seems like such an obvious attack that I guess there's some reason it wouldn't work? Or are you supposed to wipe it every time you use it?

I get some truly deranged youtube comments about my hands, the only part of me that’s visible. Hat tip to anyone who actually appears in their videos. You are heroes.

If you're in Melbourne, you can currently see Doom-on-a-Lego-brick up close at ACMI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o76U0JPrMFk

https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/game-worlds/

When I made these, there were several I considered ruined because they had a prominent bubble or cavity, and I couldn't figure out how to colour match the resin.
I only recently discovered that you don't need to! Clear resin works just fine - the way the light bounces around in there, you can't see the difference.

You can still see a bit of a mess in front of the left stud here, but it used to be a gaping flaw.

That's probably enough spaceships for now. Need more maps and microscopes.

Have you ever listened to a beatboxer and thought, imagine if a machine could do that?

(As suggested by @aeva)

I don’t understand why people keep saying it’s “creepy”.

I think I'm ready to call this piece finished.

I made a new mouth mechanism. I'm calling it Selectramatronics.

I wrote a program to lipsync the shipping forecast in a terminal window, and I have no regrets.

I plugged this in for a soak test a week ago and forgot about it, so I guess it's soaked.

The UI is randomly generated, and I love what it came up with here.

I have Kiwix and an offline copy of wikipedia on my phone, and my local Gen Z was so surprised and excited by the concept that I thought we should have a dedicated thing for it. Cheap e-reader plus 128GB SD card plus no wifi.

Construction video for this display… https://youtu.be/pcAEqbYwixU

I tried the thumbnail testing feature on Youtube for the first time, which was fun. Upload 3 different images, and it randomly applies them and shows you which one was the most engaging. This was the winner.

(I didn't include one with my surprised face and an overlaid arrow pointing at something)

Everyone needs to build one of these displays so I can spend my time writing games for it.

Meme crustacean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydk3BhlUWYE I've been working more on capturing footage. Hand held camera movement is still a mess, but putting the content into rotisserie mode helps sell the 3D with a static camera.