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The Apple ][ Video Player

An interesting bit of systems art and a gloriously difficult hack all at once, this work explores the modern ubiquity of digital video by bringing it to the 30 year old Apple ][ family of 8-bit computers.

Video files (converted from short animated GIFs) are loaded into memory via floppies. The files are made using a Python script and played back with a decoder written in 6502 machine language. Compression is achieved via a combination of Run Length Encoding (RLE) on frame updates, and the LZ77 algorithm on full frames.

This project has enjoyed a bit of notoriety on the Internet and has appeared on such sites as:

• Hackaday
• Cult of Mac
• Adafruit
• MacWorld France

link to Hackaday article

The @tweetTrek Twitter Account

The goal of this project was to create a weekly, automatic event for people who like Star Trek and MST3K style comedy.

During a show, commentary is sent as replies to the @tweetTrek account. This makes the content searchable, and puts it out of the way of those not also following the account. Participants vote to select the episode that will be viewed that week by interacting with the bot, and highlights from the last show (as judged by the number of favorites) are retweeted throughout the week.

Automation is done using Python scripts, the 't' console based Twitter client, and the Linux cron daemon.

link to @tweetTrek account

Retro Arcade Control Panel and Game Console

Built into an old writing desk, the layout of this panel was tuned so that I would have a relatively cheap platform on which to practice the oddball control scheme of Williams Defender. A few added tweaks also make it a suitable controller for Stargate (Defender II), Asteroids, and a very large number of other games. It even has a passable NEOGEO layout for more modern stuff like the Metal Slug series.

It functions as both a USB controller for a PC, or as a standalone game system driven by an internal Raspberry Pi. It runs the AdvanceMAME and MAME4ALL emulators with an AdvanceMenu frontend -- all made available as part of the installed PiMAME (now called PiPlay) Linux distribution.

link to PiPlay (by Shea Silverman -- not me!)

Pronouncing "GIF": A Psycholinguistic Approach

Animated GIFs have been kind to me. The small amount of Internet fame I've managed to garner is due mostly to a very niche GIF-related project I finished last summer. So lately I pay a little more attention to the format, and yes, the Great Pronunciation War often weighs heavily on my mind. Today I'm thinking there's a good reason...

read on medium.com

Spike Jonze's Her Is Good Science Fiction:
An Overdue Review, Submitted For Partial Credit

If there's one quality that most science fiction is sorely lacking it's the presence of a light touch. A movie with a scope of action that encompasses the fate of an entire world, galaxy, starship or what-have-you often has to sacrifice human nuance in the service of advancing the plot. The majority of works in the genre seem to bite off more than they can chew in this manner, and SF fans who crave subtlety...

read on medium.com

Taking My Opinion On GMO Foods Out For A Walk:
In Which New Methods Of Human Flight Are Discovered, and The Facts Are Reconsidered

I'm something of an armchair critic of armchair critics of GMO food, but lately I've been making an effort to firm up my stance on the matter.

One of the first hard-science-citing articles that you can come upon when searching for the dangers of GMO food is written by a guy who also believes in something called "Yogic Flying" (you will find the relevant Wikipedia page on this to be subtle, but the Photoshop-stuffed Google image tab to be, well, not quite as subtle). The knowledge-hungry reader will be interested to note...

read on medium.com

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