‘Darwin at Home is an open source software project that aims to bring the process of evolution into your computer at home so that you can see it working. From the initial projects to evolve locomotion it is now moving towards a more generic framework for evolution in general.’ See the weird creatures that evolved in the informational womb of the computer in this ten-minute mellow video. (Via Jason Kottke.)

One fast:

(Via Bottom Half Nude

( And one slower one )

From The FAQ page of the Cosmovox web site. (Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

It’s a novel musical instrument but apparently takes some practice to make good sounds with (which is par for the course for a musical instrument, surely). Might be hard to perform live dramatically in that it mostly would involve standing stock still and waggling your hand up and down.

I eagerly await the first iPhone orchestra, where all the various virtual musical instruments are in use simultaneously.

Warning: contains gruesome Japanese horror. (Via Bottom Half Nude)

This is a late addition to my snaps from the Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element album launch in the Wheatsheaf on Oxford on 30 May 2008: I used my dinky pocket camera to record the final song from Space Heroes of the People, ‘Motorway to Moscow’. They had had part of Fritz Lang’s silent film Metropolis (1927) playing in the background, and the famously fickle finger of fate determined that the robot transformation scene turn up just as this song started. The result was a level of awesomeness that my camera and YouTube can offer you a tiny glimmer of.

I took a few shots of the Pandaemonium Picnic performance on Saturday. Only a couple came out. Two short clips are on Flickr:



A longer clip of the finale is on YouTube:

Another nifty video from Kirby Ferguson.

There is a larger-format version on the Goodie Bag web site.

How to play the drums and piano if you can’t play the drums or piano. (Via my dad.)

I previously linked to the Archie Comics cover of ‘Common People’ by Pulp. Here’s Shatner’s version, with visuals lifted from the Animated Series. (Via Therin of Andor)

(Editied to correct attribution of the song!)

A vistor to our garden—perhaps we have new neighbours and they have brought a new cat?

This is my first attempt at adding a soundtrack with iMovie—it seems to have come out at FULL VOLUME so be prepared to cover your ears.

( And here’s Part II )

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo. (Via Cool Hunting.)

Flip Ultra (warning: gratuitous Flash), a pocket-sized video camera that records an hour’s 640x480 video, has a built-in USB connector, no tapes, no optical zoom, runs on AA batteries, and has an optional ‘action mount’ for your bike handlebars. And it comes in a choice of retro colour schemes. As reviewed by Dave Pogue (after a short advertisement).

[Tried to post this yesterday but Flickr refused. So posted from Youtube instead!]

Had Christmas lunch hosted by squigglyruth and truecatachresis with oxfordslacker, and mr_snips. Goose was eaten, we deployed the card tabke and sorted out the German postal system after a bout of Zombie Fluxx. Our hosts showed us the Wii version of Guitar Hero, and tonyjo discovered she seems to be a natural at this game (or perhaps the similarity of the instrument to a cello or violin helps).

In the end the pudding had to be indefinitely postponed—none of us felt we could do it justice after stuffing ourselves at lunch.


Today I have been mostly assembling the robot kangaroo illustrated here. It comes in a box with little bags containing tiny, tiny screws and various other itty bitty bits and bobs. It comes with a small screwdriver, the world’s smallest Allen key, and a tube of grease, but you have to supply your own modelling knife and tweezers.

ATP is a music festival held in an out-of-season Butlins holiday camp—thus avoiding the traditional problem with music festivals, which is having to live in a tent for a few nights.

This year I shared a chalet with oxfordslacker, motodraconis, badasstronaut, timscience, and cleanskies. I took some photos, but those attempts at taking pix of performances tend to suffer from the low light and my distance from the stage. Moto’s photos from her much more high-falutin’ camera have much better shots of people on stage. Debra’s photos have more of those intimate chalet scenes, including dreamy close-ups of Jeremy’s latest invention, the Champagne Screen Saver cocktail. Alex supplies capsule reviews of some of the bands via the magic of (Loud)Twitter: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning. These are especially amusing when read aloud by the Mac’s speech synthesiser. As well as the aforementioned cocktail, Jeremy has posted a clip of the Chrome Hoofs, a performance I tragically missed.

Steve Jobs has announced the future availability of a software-development kit for the iPhone, which we assume will have access to all the iPhone's input devices, including its accelerometers. Here's what someone called ealf has already done with a hacked model. Won't it be fun when everyone is developing mini-Wii-style games for this gadget?

Before starting to build our greenhouse we had another chore to on Sunday: taking Jeremy’s pterodactyl on a fly around Port Meadow. I have attempted to capture some of the experience on video.

Alas! I am still having trouble working out a combination of parameters that makes video that will not look like trash on YouTube, so it is a little fuzzy. But hopefully entertaining for the 82 seconds it lasts for.

Star Trek: Intrepid ‘Heavy Lies the Crown’ has at last escaped post-production and been released on to the Internet.

I’ve downloaded it and got it to play on my PowerBook (using the Flip4Mac plug-in for QuickTime, which allows QuickTime to play movies in WMV format). It would have been cool if I could have copied it to a memory card and then played it on TV upstairs via the VMate box, but alas! QuickTime would not convert it to MPEG-4. So I dragged the PowerBook upstairs so I could watch from the drömminge rather than at my desk.

I actually enjoyed watching it, though there are obviously a few compromises on the story forced on them by limitations on how often they can call people in for extra work given it is a spare-time-only project. The sequences in the ship itself, of the Star Fleet characters bimbling about and teasing each other about their lack of latin skills, work pretty well—apart from some awkwardness in the first scene (chess game) they come across naturally and you might think this was the Nth episode of a Intrepid TV series. The TNG style of starship décor lends itself nicely to the use of virtual sets: most of the time the only clue that the sets were realized entirely in the informational womb of the computer is some strained camera angles.

The outdoors scenes looked great: you can’t go too far wrong with Scottish scenery as a backdrop. I was a bit vague as to what the survey team were up to exactly, and whether this was the same planet as in the earlier sequence with the invisible captain in her lander—with no captain’s log to spoon-feed us this info, maybe it needs more telegraphing? On the other hand, the characters were fine, and the antagonism between my brother Mike’s Mr Angry and the Star Fleet people who are only trying to help works well. It makes sense that Star Fleet is a little tarnished in reputation after the mess they made of things in the last few seasons of DS9 and Voyager, and for their tarnished reputation to translate in to a real problem when the chips are down and they need people’s trust.

All in all a respectable first effort, and not bad for a budget of a few grand as opposed to $2m per episode (with a standing set and actors on retainer...).

Updated to add: I has a wiki. Ahem. At some point they added a wiki for the Intrepid universe.

If all goes well there will be an embedded movie viewer here:


Otherwise, you could try going direct to the page for Wii Loop Machine Demo on Vimeo.

Found on the Cult of Mac Blog

Apparently this commercial originates in France, in which case I am slightly surprised at the language used at the end. :-)

This clip is hosted on YouTube, but I recommend that you don’t read the comments.

This is the thrilling, or at least short, sequel to Airship Versus Rocket. Having claimed a victory by default in the battle of the flying machines, Tim shows Jeremy how to fire a rocket.