Imaging

How-To: Generate dice mosaics from image files

Michael Boehm saw our post a couple of weeks ago about Etsy seller Stukenborg’s letterpress prints using dice as “type,” which mentioned the idea of using the same technique for making pixel-based images as well as geometric patterns. He got interested in the idea, went off to experiment, and eventually produced the dice-mosaic version of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres shown above. When he posted the results in the comment thread, I asked for, and he was nice enough to provide, a written explanation of the method, which uses Mark Probst’s open-source photomosaic utility Metapixel. I’ve reproduced Michael’s e-mail, with only minor edits, below. [Thanks, Michael!]

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Featured Maker: eBoy

Featured Maker: eBoy

Iconic pixel-art collective eBoy probably needs no introduction. Around here, they’re best known for the splendiferously intricate poster they made to promote Maker Faire Bay Area 2007, shown above. TBH, their catalog kind of puts me in an almost-panicky state of it’s-all-so-awesome overload. Their posters–which include a “cities” series featuring LA, NYC, Toyko, London, Berlin, Cologne, Venice, and the Baltimore docks, as well as “event” posters including a promotional for Amnesty International, the giant-robots-themed SuperBronco print created for their first solo gallery show, and FooBar, which is a mash-up of iconic Web 2.0 brands in a kind of “virtual city”–all induce the same jaw-dropping wonderland-of-details type effect. It feels like I could spend hours exploring any one of them, and there are so many. So many! Besides the posters, they also offera book which includes eight of their most popular designs reproduced on a smaller scale in case, like me, you just don’t have enough space on your walls for all the awesome they want to put there.

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Mechanically dimmed fluorescent lamp

Mechanically dimmed fluorescent lamp

In a purely practical sense, this idea is kind of goofy since electric lights can, in general, be dimmed, you know, electrically. However, and if my understanding is correct, that’s a little trickier with fluorescent lighting. It can be done, but it’s considerably more complicated than with incandescent bulbs, and there are problems maintaining a consistent color temperature. Even though it’s not exactly ground-breaking, then, I still really like this mechanically-dimmed lamp by designer Camille Blin, at least in part because it reminds me of the cool tunable neutral density filters (e.g. below) I used to play with on the optics bench in grad school. [via NOTCOT]

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Owl nest web cam

Owl nest web cam

I lived in a rental years ago that had a water tower on the property. Each year barn owls nested in the eaves of the water tower, and each year my husband and I spent many evenings sitting nearby watching them. We saw babies learn to fly, mother and father swoop in and out with […]

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