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Found up by a cash register at a UBC coffee shop. Clever.

My previous post was about an artist who goes by Floex for his personal compilations, and Tomas Dvorak for his soundtrack work. In researching his other work, I came across a puzzle-adventure game called Machinarium (try the free demo here), for which he did the soundtrack.

Love. Love everything about it. For so many reasons. Concept, aesthetic, music, intrigue, cuteness, robots. Love.

Playful, cute, inspiring, happy-making. A must-try musical internet toy!

Check it out here.

I recommend holding down your mouse button while scribbling wildly all over the grid; like splattering paint, only with notes.

Just one of the many sparkly gems on his site, too. Enjoy!

For the past few years, I’ve been looking for something like this for my parents: a large (yet unobtrusive), video-streming, wall-mounted, internet-connected touchscreen monitor for the kitchen. What a fun DIY project! Check out the details here.

Whoever decides to take this from a DIY prototype to an affordable commercial product could make some great cash! But then, Apple is probably all over it (iKitchen?).

High Dynamic Range, or HDR, photography has become quite popular in recent years, and for good reason; check out these gorgeously wonderfully stunningly inspiring examples.

If you don’t have an HDR monitor to display a true HDR image, you can create a 32-bit-per-channel HDR image in Photoshop from two or more identical photos taken at varying exposures (File > Automate > Merge to HDR).

However, if you’re like me and don’t own a tripod, then you can also fake the HDR effect in Photoshop using a single image; I stumbled across this online tutorial, and the results inspired me to try it for myself. I didn’t follow the tutorial exactly, experimenting with different layer opacities and layer blending parameters. The key step in this approach is based on Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight command, which allows the user to lighten underexposed regions and  similarly darken overexposed regions. It does this based on the surrounding pixels (local neighborhood) in the shadows or highlights.

Here’s my result. ‘Cute Bear’ becomes ‘Cute HDR Bear’:

Kay, so it’s a far cry from real HDR, and HDR from merging multiple images, but it’s still a pretty cool effect. Photoshop love!

A friend told me this riddle once upon a time and I liked it for its elegance. Goes like this.

There are 50 pennies spread out on a table, tails-up. I blindfold you and flip over 17 of them at random. While blinded, can you divide the pennies up into two piles such that you can be sure there are an equal number of coins lying heads-up in each pile? You may turn over whichever coins you wish, as many times as you wish.

No stupid play-on-words trick. Nor do you have fine-enough sensory resolution on your fingertips to determine which side of the penny is facing up based on the imprint. The solution is purely logical.

Take your time..

…

Figured it out?  It’s pretty easy once you realize that both piles don’t have to be the same size, hey? Just make one pile of 17 pennies and flip each coin in that pile, et voila.  (Alternatively you could stand all the pennies up on edge and make two piles of them, resulting in no heads-up coins in both…..but that’s cheap.) Most people that I’ve shared this with end up intuiting the answer, satisfied that it seems to make sense, without actually testing every possible case. Those people have better things to do. I, however, can be helplessly OCD about things like this, so here’s the  general solution I worked out.

N = total # of coins on the table

X = # of coins lying heads up

p1 = # of coins in first pile

h1 = # of heads in the first pile

t1 = # of tails in the first pile

h2 = # of heads in the second pile

Solution: First let p1 = X.  Making this assignment allows us to make the following statements:

(1) h1 + t1 = p1 = X (all coins in first pile)

(2) h1 + h2 = X (total number of heads-up coins on the table)

Now flip all coins in the first pile and call the new number of heads and tails in that pile h1′ and t1′ respectively. Therefore:

(3) h1′=t1

(4) t1′ =h1

Substituting eq’n (3) and (4) into (1), and (4) into (2) gives us:

(5) t1′ + h1′ = X

(6) t1′ + h2 = X

Substituting (6) into (5):

t1′ + h1′ = t1′ + h2

h1′ = h2

Note that the solution does not depend on the values of X or N.

And thats my two cents.

Learning Labview (v. 8.6) right now and I got this error while trying to run code that accesses an external Data Acquisition Card (NI PCI MIO):

NI-DAQmx Error -50103 “The Specified Resource is Reserved”

Solution: Open up “Measurement and Automation Explorer”, click on “Devices and Interfaces” and then at the top of the browser on the right, click on “Reset device”.