EagerEyes Shorts
Words cannot describe the brilliance of this photo. The shallow depth of field and the stuff around her make it look like they photographed her Barbie, not herself.
Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern Schplenden Schlitter Crasscrenbon Fried Digger Dangle Dungle Burstein von Knacker Thrasher Apple Banger Horowitz Ticolensic Grander Knotty Spelltinkle Grandlich Grumblemeyer Spelterwasser Kürstlich Himbleeisen Bahnwagen Gutenabend Bitte Eine Nürnburger Bratwustle Gerspurten mit Zweimache Luber Hundsfut Gumberaber Shönendanker Kalbsfleisch Mittler Raucher von Hautkopft of Ulm, composer.
This is the companion video for a paper we submitted recently. It describes a technique for interacting with parallel coordinates using the multi-touch trackpad found on laptops like Apple’s MacBook Pro.
It’s a lot better if you watch it in HD on the vimeo site.
For my presentation at Pecha Kucha Night Charlotte, Volume 6, I was looking for a way to keep the timing (20 seconds per slide). I also need to see at least my current slide to know what I’m talking about. When I give talks or lecture in class, I always use the presenter view, so I can also see the next slide.
There are some iPhone timer apps for Pecha Kucha, but they’re very basic: they simply show you the number of the current slide and how much time you have left as a number. I wanted something a bit more visual than that.
So I decided to create a video from my presentation that would show me the current slide and an indication how much time I had left. I added 19 little boxes to each slide, each of which would disappear a second after the previous one. This is what that looks like on the title slide:
The boxes have a 2px white border so they are also visible on a dark background. Depending on the colors in your presentation, you might want to adapt that. But black and white work pretty much everywhere.
Exporting the video took a bit of experimentation. It seems that Keynote gets a little confused when there are automatic slide transitions and you want to create a video: it ends up adding the time for the export transition to the slide timing. So remove the slide timer and then export with a 1-second delay and 1 second for the transition (it won’t allow smaller values, and somehow that, together with the 19 timed boxes, ends up being exactly the right timing).
One issue is that exporting with the Full Quality setting creates a video that has a bit rate that is too high for the iPhone. So you can either use the CD-ROM Movie, Medium setting, which gives you only 400x300 pixels (which is workable, it’s just not very pretty). Or you can export using the higher-quality setting, which is 800x600, and then reduce the bit rate later. I used Stomp for this purpose, but there are lots of other choices. I reduced the bit rate to 125kbps and the frame rate to 10 (still way more than necessary).
This may sound tedious, but even with some experimenting, it didn’t take very long. And having my current slide and a usable timer in front of me was tremendously helpful during my presentation. The video was also useful to scrub through on the phone a few times right before the presentation, to remind me of the order and think through the things I wanted to say.
Reblogged from thedailywhat|436 notes
Sign Of The Times of the Day: Pump’s Are Not Taking Debit Card’s? Thats a Hell ov a Inconvenius.
[reddit.]
Two kids working at bloom recently asked me for help with spelling the word “inconvenience,” which they needed for a sign. Between the two of them and Word’s spellchecker, they couldn’t figure it out. They had to ask me, whose native language is not English, for help.
![thedailywhat:
Sign Of The Times of the Day: Pump’s Are Not Taking Debit Card’s? Thats a Hell ov a Inconvenius.
[reddit.]
Two kids working at bloom recently asked me for help with spelling the word “inconvenience,” which they needed for a sign. Between the two of them and Word’s spellchecker, they couldn’t figure it out. They had to ask me, whose native language is not English, for help.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l51rx891Py1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
We always need someone to hate. Until recently, for many of us that was Bill Gates. But now that he’s fighting Malaria and curing AIDS, that gets more difficult to do.
So we put up an ad to find someone new who would fit the bill. The ideal candidate
- makes a wildly successful product we come to depend on,
- does things with it we don’t like
- abuses his power, and
- is a recluse, sociopath, or both.
Thankfully, Mark Zuckerberg has stepped up to the plate.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
The Insipid World of Infographics
Edit: this was apparently created by Will Lybrand
By popular demand, here’s my list of books to read in the summer. Not sure yet about the order, but this is the rough plan:
- Stephen Few, Now You See It
- Fred Brooks, The Design of Design
- James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
- Kaiser Fung, Numbers Rule Your World
- Cornelia Dean, Am I Making Myself Clear?
- Donald Norman, Things That Make Us Smart
Since I’m notorious for starting books an never finishing them, I am instituting the rule that I can only read one book at a time, and have to finish one book before I start the next. Let’s see how this goes.
After all the criticism of bad and pointless infographics, here’s a really good one for a change. It explains how a cell phone call works, how the network is set up, and even illustrates some very technical points like code-division multiple access (CDMA).
From Cellphones.org. That site also has a few other interesting infographics.
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