ganglio's » Mixed stuff

Draw your penguin!

ganglio — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:51:10 +0000

Yesterday the Guardian published this brilliant how to by Oliver Jeffers about drawing penguins.

I got seriously stuck with it and started drawing.

This is the result of my “hard” work:

my penguin

What do you think?

(Thanks Papero!)

Day 3

ganglio — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:02:15 +0000

Date: 01/06/2011
Distance covered: 12.3km
Time to complete: 1h59min
Average speed: 6.2km/h

route 3 - 12.3km

Day 2

ganglio — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:35:51 +0000

Date: 31/05/2011
Distance covered: 8.3km
Time to complete: 1h07min
Average speed: 7.4km/h

route 2 - 8.3km

Day 1

ganglio — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:29:33 +0000

Date: 30/05/2011
Distance covered: 6.7km
Time to complete: 57min
Average speed: 7km/h

route 1 - 6.7km

Average you

ganglio — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 17:15:17 +0000

It really looks like I cannot stay doing nothing.
I grabbed the script I use to download my posts for the Everyday app and changed it a bit so I could download plenty of other people pictures.
416 to be precise.

I averaged all of them and this is the result:

average you

Cool, isn’t it? It’s a sort of daily ghost :þ

If you fancy to give it a try here is the script I used to fetch the images:

$numpages=10;
$maxresults=100;
$baselink="http://search.twitter.com/search.json";
$query="?q=@everydayapp&result_type=recent&rpp=$maxresults";
for ($i=0; $i<$numpages; $i++) {
$results=json_decode(file_get_contents($baselink.$query));
foreach ($results->results as $kk=>$result) {
preg_match("/http:\/\/yfrog\.com\/([a-z-0-9]*)/",$result->text,$matches);
$hash=$matches[1];
if ($hash) {
$xmlInfo=simplexml_load_string(file_get_contents("http://yfrog.com/api/xmlInfo?path=$hash"));
$link=$xmlInfo->links->image_link;
$filename=explode("/",parse_url($link,PHP_URL_PATH));
$filename=$filename[3];
file_put_contents($filename,file_get_contents($link));
}
echo "P:$i R:$kk H:$hash\n";
}
$query=$results->next_page;
}
?>

and here is the console commands I used to calculate the average above and the standard deviation below:

convert samples/* -average average.jpg
for i in `ls samples`; do composite average.jpg samples/$i -compose difference diff/$i; done
for i in `ls diff`; do composite diff/$i diff/$i -compose multiply mult/$i; done
convert mult/* -average sd.jpg

standard deviation

The original SD image was quite dark so I normalised its histogram a bit with the GIMP.

Average me

ganglio — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:06:16 +0000

You know those videos of people taking photographs of themselves everyday for a long time and than making a clip?
Well I’m doing the same with Everyday a nice iPhone application that allows to easily take the pictures and automatically makes the clip for you. It even twits your grunts if you want. And I do.

After a couple of days of that I decided that was just a pity to waste all those pictures posted on twitter, I fiddled a bit and wrote a quite simple app (this one) to browse through the photos taken so far.

Yesterday I published it, today I fixed the usual couples of bugs and now I’m presenting it to you :D

But, as you know I get easily bored so I decided to check how is my average me and here is the result.

Average me

The image is updated everyday around noon (GMT) with the new photos. You can add the reminders to your calendar if you are geek enough using this link:D

I just discovered that Homer J. Simpson has a time lapse video too.

Homer's time lapse

JSFiddle – Coders’ sandbox for JS, HTML & CSS

ganglio — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:40:47 +0000

Lately I came across JSFiddle a nice sandboxing tool to play with JS, HTML and CSS.
The approach is very simple and intuitive. You have your page divided in four areas one for each part of your fiddle and the last for the result.

the interface

The interface offers handy keyboard shortcuts to speed up the development.
It supports plenty of frameworks as MooTools, jQuery and Processing as well as the possibility to test AJAX and import external resources.

the result after playing a bit

You should definitely give it a try. It’s worthy and funny (at least if you find funny this kind of stuff :þ)

MinePaperCraft

ganglio — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 10:39:15 +0000

Few months ago a friend of mine introduced me to the strange, blocky world of Minecraft. It was love at first block.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about let me present you the best game ever! (IMHO).

Wikipedia says:

Minecraft is a sandbox building indie video game written in Java originally by creator Markus “Notch” Persson and now by his company, Mojang, formed from the proceeds of the game. The game is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world.

Basically, if you like legos, it’s the best thing that ever happened to you after a fat Sunday breakfast following a boozy night.

But let move further from Minecraft and reach the topic of this post. I’m quite a fan of tubbypaws a “Happy blog of illustration and character design” quoting the author. It’s packed with cute characters and, from time to time, papercrafts. Looks like the author got lost looking for diamonds in deep, dark and badly monsters-stuffed caves :D

This is his tribute to the amazing blocky game.

Final result

Cool, isn’t it?

Diagram here.
Via tubbypaws.

Phisically interacting web pages

ganglio — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:44:32 +0000

Today I spent a couple of hours playing with some of the most interesting capabilities of Mobile Safari.
Yes, I’m an iPhone owner and quite a fanboy too. I think that, at the moment, it’s the most advanced mobile platform on the market.

Anyway. I started documenting about the possibility to interrogate the accelerometer and the gyroscope from a webpage and I discovered that, not only it’s possible, but it’s also quite easy.
Basically the browser allow the code to bind two special events: the DeviceOrientationEvent and the DeviceMotionEvent. (Documentation here and here).

For my exercise I used the DeviceOrientation one. I read the gyro’s angles and use them to move the shadows of the boxes in the page.

It took me less than one hour to make it work and then I got bored. It’s just too easy.
So I decided to make it more “difficult” and decided to rotate the boxes accordingly to the gyro’s angles to give them a 3D appearance. I googled a bit and I found this article on 24ways. (BTW the website style is AMAZING! I really love the calendar part :)

Here is the result of two hours (hey, I had to work too while I was developing my toy :þ):

A quasi-explicative screenshot

You can give it a try live here.

4×4 Pixels

ganglio — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:29:02 +0000

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant blog about iconic characters depicted in only 16 pixels.

Here is Chewbacca:

4x4 Chewbacca

For each of them there’s both a fullsize and 60x zoom view :D

4×4 Pixels [via Digital Tools]