I am super amused by this:

“Super Cipher P2P Messenger is a secure P2P messenger, that uses unbreakable Infinity bit Triple Layer Socket Encryption for completely secure communication.”

Super Cipher P2P Messenger download and review – secure P2P messenger from SnapFiles

Oh yeah well I have a product with “Infinity+1 bit Quadruple Layer Socket Encryption”

Chris Jordon’s series of photographs titled “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption” are quite amazing.

Anonym.os is a nifty OpenBSD based live CD that privides an “anonymous” workstation. It’s integrated with Tor so even your browsing is anonymous.

Steganos LockNote is a cute little secure Windows notepad for keeping track of important notes.

This guy makes high resolution digital cameras out of cheap scanners.

For fun Kyle and I were goofing around taking interval photos from our office window of the street below.

We decided to record 24 hours of the view from our office window. The entire clip was intended to be just under 4 minutes long at 30fps which means we would take just under 7000 images (roughly one image every 13 seconds).

Unfortunately it turns out that after about 14 hours at 3000 images the Canon Remote Capture software hung so the real clip is only about 100sec long.
These images were taken using my Canon A75 using Canon’s fancy remote control software and its interval timer.

The camera captures 1200×1600 images.

We used IrfanView to scale the image to 360×480. A version for DVD was created by then adding a 180 pixel black border on the left and right to pad the image to 720×480 DVD resolution.

Once these images are created we can run it through mencoder to convert the individual JPGs to a MPEG-4 video.

mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=360:h=480:fps=30:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac copy -o output-mpeg4.avi

And voila.

You can download the movie below:

• XVid Format (11 MB)
• XVid Format (30 MB) – Less compression artifacts
• MPEG4/DivX Format (11 MB) – I have no idea how to play this in anything but mplayer

For even more fun Kyle did this with the video:

• XVid Format (15 MB)

It looks like Minolta has not just withdrawn from selling cameras in Canada but they are pulling out entirely.? Luckily for SLR/DSLR users with an investment in removable lenses, Minolta has a deal with Sony where Sony will begin to produce DSLRs with the Maxxum mount.

Press release details | KONICA MINOLTA

It’s kind of a sad day.? They made some really nice cameras.? I love my Maxxum 7000s!

For the “The Smashening ][” Kyle and I were discussing suspending a camera above the destruction zone and taking shots aimed straight down. This sounds like a great idea. Positioning the camera should be easy enough but operating it (without standing in the line of fire) could be quite a trick.

I came across an article discussing the remote capture capabilities of my A75. It turns out Canon makes some fancy free software that allows you to control the camera (most of the settings even) from your computer which sounds pefect. So now we can have my camera anchored to the roof above the smash-zone and a long USB cable running to my laptop running this software. The software does not allow manual focus but it does allow AF lock which will be enough. It allows allows you to put the camera into full manual mode and adjust exposure yourself.
The software is available here:

canon-digital-camera-remote-capture-2.7.5-windows-98se-me-2000-xp

It requires WIA driver for XP which is available on Canon’s website or here:

canon-powershot-a75-a310-digital-camera-wia-driver-v6.2.3-windows-xp

There is also a commercial package called PSRemote that sports a much nicer interface but at $50 with few additional features it isn’t worth it for me:

http://www.breezesys.com/PSRemote/

The only trick to installing this stuff was to make sure to put your camera in review mode. I mistakenly assumed that I should leave my camera in shooting mode when hooking it up and that prevented the computer from talking to it.

On the 26th I ended up suspending my polyphasic sleep experiment due to the difficulty of taking my naps with so much family stuff happening. I decided I’d give myself a bit of a break but I think that time is over. I really miss all the free time I had during my month of polyphasic sleep. So the plan is to start back up again.

I’ve been trying for a few days to get back into it but I seem to lose control at about 3am every night and sleep for 2.5 hrs. Luckily I wake up, like clockwork, at 5:30am so I’m not sleeping through work or anything but it’s more sleep than I’d like to be having.

I’ll keep at it and hopefully it will improve. So far I haven’t been getting much done. It gets easier to be productive once I stop being so sleepy (although just at night. during the day I feel quite good). Part of the problem might be that I’m getting a lot more exercise during the day than I did last time since I’m biking to work again.

Last night I started watching Boa vs. Python which I bought for $3 from a discount bin (entirely because it sounded terrible). So far it’s definately lame but much less so than I would have thought. The premis is that a huge (80ft) python gets lose in Philadelphia and the best idea the feds have to fix the situation is to let loose a similarly huge boa to hunt it down. Ummm. sure.

Pens

Originally uploaded by charsplat.

In case anyone is interested I’ve been making a lot of pens lately. I made a bunch of them for Christmas gifts. It’s suprisingly simple to make suprisingly good looking pens and with very little equipment.