It’s no news that practice is the only path to being truly great at something. The art of software development is no different. The demand for programmers the way it is, however, means that a lot of folks jump into their careers head first with a certain level of formal subject knowledge, but very little […]
There’s a technique called the Polaroid emulsion lift that allows you to transfer a Polaroid print to different materials, such as glass, rock, or watercolor paper. Essentially, you soak a completely dry photo (one that has set for at least 24 hours) in hot water and carefully peel the emulsion layer from the photo backing. […]
Wired’s how-to Wiki ran an article about installing homebrew apps on your Nintendo DS, describing how to install and use Colors, a really pro-looking sketch application. It seems like such a simple application, but its capabilities as a sketch tool (in the hands of someone with artistic talent) are stunning. It uses the pressure sensitivity […]
I usually get all excited about tiny, noiseless, low-power PC hardware, but I have to admit that this 24 core, 186 Gflop render cluster built into an IKEA Helmer cabinet is pretty inspiring. Most cool is that when it’s not overburdened and jumping to swap, it’s still a reasonably efficient setup for its performance specs: […]
Keywurl is a nifty little Safari plugin that adds simple keyword search to the address bar. Say you wanted to pull up the Wikipedia entry for hacks: just type “wiki hacks” into the address bar. Looking for photos tagged with makerfaire? “flickr makerfaire” will take you to the appropriate place. The latest beta version for […]
I got sucked into reading one of those 15 amazing things you never knew about aluminum foil articles. One of the claims was that you could sharpen a pair of scissors by cutting aluminum. It sounded about as plausible as mending a broken leg by driving it over with a station wagon, but I’ll be […]
In 1983, Tom Duff invented a really strange way to use the C language’s switch and case statements for the in code “unrolling” optimization of large loops. As an example, he described a simple loop that copies an array to an output register: send(to, from, count) register short *to, *from; register count; { do *to […]
