This is the story of an artist who was able to take numerous photos of a sculpture of a horse's head, "Head of a horse of Selene" now found in the British Museum - but originally from near the Acropolis in ancient Greece (circa 438-432 BC) - and who then fed the said photographs (taken from many different perspectives) to a revolutionary (free) software/app called
123D Catch (by AutoDesk, makers of AutoCAD),
which then created the wireframes needed to print out exact replicas (in pieces that must then be assembled) on a 3D printer. The artist makes it
available on Thingiverse, if you'd like to make one on your own on
your 3D printer. If
the demo video for 123D Catch doesn't blow your mind, your mind has probably already been blown.
With apologies to Dr. Hook
posted by spock
on Mar 7, 2013 -
38 comments
Marc Andreessen predicts
the end of traditional retail.
Retail chains are a fundamentally implausible economic structure if there’s a viable alternative. You combine the fixed cost of real estate with inventory, and it puts every retailer in a highly leveraged position. Few can survive a decline of 20 to 30 percent in revenues. It just doesn’t make any sense for all this stuff to sit on shelves. There is fundamentally a better model.
posted by beagle
on Jan 31, 2013 -
113 comments
Alan Cooper and the Goal Directed Design Process The heart of the problem, he concludes, is that the people responsible for developing software products don’t know precisely what constitutes a good product. It follows that they also do not know what processes lead to a good product. In short, they are operating by trial and error, with outcomes like customer satisfaction achieved by little more than blind luck. By Hugh Dubberly, first published AIGA GAIN Journal, 2001
posted by infini
on Dec 13, 2012 -
28 comments
John McAfee [
recent previously], eccentric Silicon Valley mogul and creator of a McAfee antivirus software, lowered his taxes by relocating to Belize a few years ago. But his expatriate neighbor
Gregory Faull was not a fan McAfee's dogs, prostitutes and partying. After Faull was shot to death last month Belize police named McAfee a "person of interest" in the case. McAfee went on the lam and invited
Vice Magazine to join him, which must've seemed like a good idea at the time. McAfee was soon arrested and has since been fighting extradition back to Belize from a Guatemalan jail. McAfee said yesterday he just wants to
return to a "normal life" in the U.S.
posted by nowhere man
on Dec 10, 2012 -
70 comments
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (a collaborative book by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost (previously, previously, previously), Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas (of Facade), Casey Reas, Mark Sample and Noah Vawter) uses a
single line of code as a basis for pontificating on
creative computing and the impact of software in popular culture. 10 PRINT's content is available as a
PDF (50 MB).
Pictures via Casey Reas' Flickr.
posted by mrgrimm
on Nov 29, 2012 -
47 comments
"We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had
built."
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Nov 16, 2012 -
30 comments
Remember that big
Red/Blue map that you kept looking at on election night?
That graphic was really pretty deceptive, and maps were mentioned 117 times in our huge election thread, often because they didn't make sense or were confusing.
Mark Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, has created
a neat page that represents the data from last Tuesday in a more visually accurate manner.
[more inside]
posted by HuronBob
on Nov 10, 2012 -
96 comments
Classic Shell is an open-source program that fixes two of the biggest problems users perceive with the newly-released Windows 8: it brings back the Start Menu, and it allows users to log-in directly to the Desktop instead of the Start Screen.
(8.4 MB WINDOWS DOWNLOAD)
posted by JHarris
on Oct 29, 2012 -
154 comments
Have you ever wanted to sort a particular Amazon's reviewer's reviews by their number of stars? Amazon has never added this feature to its user profile pages, but here's a
workaround. Or perhaps you need a tool that lets you see ratings, dates of reviews, helpful and unhelpful votes, and number of comments, all in a helpful sortable list. Maybe you need to download and install the
Amazon Reviewer Analysis Tool.
posted by shivohum
on Aug 6, 2012 -
9 comments
Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products. ... How did this jaw-dropping role reversal happen? How could a company that stands among the most cash-rich in the world, the onetime icon of cool that broke IBM’s iron grip on the computer industry, have stumbled so badly in a race it was winning? [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Jul 26, 2012 -
124 comments
The IRL Fetish
"If the hardware has spread virally within physical space, the software is even more insidious. Thoughts, ideas, locations, photos, identities, friendships, memories, politics, and almost everything else are finding their way to social media. The power of “social” is not just a matter of the time we’re spending checking apps, nor is it the data that for-profit media companies are gathering; it’s also that the logic of the sites has burrowed far into our consciousness."
posted by stoneweaver
on Jul 5, 2012 -
57 comments
The US
has lost a quarter of its high-tech jobs since 2000, the number declining by 687,000. A veteran headhunter
opines on the causes:
The technical jobs in Silicon Valley are hard to fill with Americans...I get email every day from new grads, asking for help finding jobs, but honestly, most are Indian or Chinese, not many Americans. He cites a
NYT article which claims that the reason iPhone manufacturing doesn't happen in the US is that
Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
posted by shivohum
on Jun 2, 2012 -
107 comments
Are you curious how the brand of a large suite of complementary products is developed? It's more interesting than you might think.
Adobe describes the decisions that went into the new icons, splash screens, and other brand elements of Creative Suite 6.
posted by gilrain
on May 25, 2012 -
23 comments
Twitter will not weaponize your work (without your permission). According to an agreement it now makes with its engineers and inventors, Twitter does not have the right to use the patents of its employees offensively without their consent, and this limitation will apply to future purchasers of the Twitter patent portfolio.
The patent wars
previously and
previouslier on the blue.
posted by gauche
on Apr 18, 2012 -
41 comments
/dev/sigh :: user-contributed scenes from the sometimes frustrating world of software and web development.
posted by milquetoast
on Mar 22, 2012 -
43 comments
Since its last
* appearance in the blue,
yWriter has been updated to version 5. Designed specifically for
novels, this freeware "contains no adverts, unwanted web toolbars, desktop search programs or other cruft".
posted by Trurl
on Feb 11, 2012 -
56 comments
Gizmo's Freeware is a non-commercial community website staffed entirely by volunteers. Our primary function is to help you select the best freeware product for your particular needs.
posted by Trurl
on Jan 21, 2012 -
8 comments
Leisure Suit Larry is a series of adventure games written by Al Lowe and published by Sierra from 1987 to 2009. The main character, whose full name is Larry Laffer, is a balding, dorky, double entendre-speaking, leisure suit-wearing (but still somewhat lovable) "loser" in his 40s. The games follow him as he spends much of his life trying (usually unsuccessfully) to seduce attractive women. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 7, 2011 -
68 comments
