The traditional gifts associated with various wedding anniversaries are arbitrary and inconsistent. For example, in Britain the 4th anniversary is celebrated with fruit and flowers, while in the US it is silk or linen. And that’s just the tradition; according to Wikipedia, the modern gift for the 4th is “appliances.” Reading the full list, the modern gifts look like they’ve been nobbled by commercial interests. Clocks? Desk sets? Fashion jewelry? Pfff.

Mrs. Bell and I follow a different system. Dmitri Mendeleev to the rescue! Since he went to all that work to organize all the elements in a nice ordered Periodic Table, why reinvent the wheel for weddings? Our first anniversary was our Hydoversary (element 1: H, hydrogen), then came our Heliaversary (element 2: He, helium), and so on.

In this system, a big landmark comes when you reach iron (element 26: Fe, iron). This is the first element at which fusion ceases to be energetically advantageous. In other words, after this point, you’d better have gotten the hang of this marriage thing, you won’t be able to rely on physics alone to help you stick together.

Mrs. Bell and I had a rather long engagement, which in fact allowed us to celebrate our Electroversary (-1: a free electron) one year before our wedding.

You can’t say that we didn’t start as we meant to go on.

Last note on this subject - Brownie posted a page explaining the math of binaversaries. He makes a good case for it I think. Basically, counting your age in logarithms makes the passing of the years a lot less stressful. The major drawback I see is that it makes for a lot less cake and presents…

For those not ready to switch from celebrating regular birthdays every year to celebrating binaversaries every power-of-two years, you can still save on candles by basing them on binary code. There seem to be some variants out there, but the one I like best is that suggested at halfbakery or used by a touch of grey, which is to put in a candle for each binary digit you want, and then just light those that correspond to binary one.

For binaversaries, you just use regular candles. Running out of space for candles is not likely to happen to you in your lifetime, unless you live to something like 65536 years (16 byears). So that’s one less problem…

Brownie and Bozo resurrected an old parody they made some time ago of free web-hosts. Back then they offered “50 MBs free” - the catch being that this was literally true, you had to make your website out of the letters M and B (and at most 50 of them). Since then of course things have moved on and now we offer 500 GBs. Enjoy!

Looks like a How-To Do-it-yourself guide to destroying the Earth is in the works. So many people out there who want to figure out how to build the button. But never press it. Heavens no.

Sam Hughes gives a careful, methodical analysis of how to destroy the Earth for real. Here’s the preamble:

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

(read more)

Now that Flash lets you process webcam images, lots of strange and wonderful things become possible with a browser that until now were only possible with specialized computer vision software. It feels a little bit like the early days of the web, when people were creating lots of mostly useless web scripts, some of which were the seeds of the blogs and googles we use today. I’m trying to collect some highlights of Flash webcam experimentation. Here’s what I have so far:

1. Grant Skinner’s Webcam Snowstorm, takes the webcam view and superimposes a light snow fall on it. The best part? The snow builds up into drifts on edges. Very pretty.
2. As a contrast, Skinner also made Webcam Fire, where anything in motion ignites.
3. Quasimondo’s Minority Cube - spin a cube through motion in front of the webcam (or by moving the webcam itself). Hard to describe, but fun. Tip: press the space bar. There’s also a webcam kaleidoscope.
4. Our own Webcam Hat gadget that tracks an object around, putting a jolly hat on it.
5. Our own Webcam Ambush, which will play a prerecorded sound when it detects someone entering the room.
6. Cameroid.com, which takes pictures, applying the kinds of distortion or framing you might get in novelty photo booths, and lets you download or post the result.
7. I’m not too clear on this one, because it is all in Japanese, but apparently the Laughing Man Camera tries to detect your face in the video stream and put a stamp over it. It didn’t work so well for me, and had an annoying feedback overlay I couldn’t get rid of.
8. DustyPixels has an “ASCII-cam” and some basic filters. Also, a more advanced ASCII-cam version developed later.
9. There’s a few more basic filters (mirroring, pixelating etc.) at a Sound and Software Art Workshop 2006 page (in Japanese).
10. The Motion Bubbles game. Like Skinner’s Webcam Snowstorm, but with bubbles instead of snow, and in game format - you can use your body to pop the smooth bubbles and avoid the spiky bubbles.
11. In Shockwave, there is PlaydoCAM, which has a few game demos. (Link via lessrain).
12. Everybody seems to love bubbles. With BubbleMaker you can blow bubbles (by breathing into the microphone) and then pop them visually. How… odd! (Link via lessrain).
13. Add a funky reflection effect at Pixelfumes.
14. Flash webcam DVR at Zero Point Nine. Records video, but requires a lot of memory to do so.
15. Using your webcam like a wii-mote (via Digg).
16. An interactive piano.

In looking around for these, I see the web is littered with advice for Mac users that I might as well repeat here: if your webcam doesn’t seem to be working from Flash, right-click (or control-click) on the Flash animation, select “settings,” and try choosing a different video source. The default is not always the right one.

Got a webcam, some spare time, and a friend you want to annoy? Lay a trap for them with our webcam ambush. This is an image change detector implemented in Flash which triggers whenever there’s motion in the field of view of your camera. When it triggers, it plays a sound of your choice.

So the scenario is: you leave your computer, webcam, and the ambush page running in a room. Later, your friend walks in and boom, the star trek “intruder alert” alarm goes off, or a mysterious voice laughs darkly, or there is a fanfare greeting, or … well, you get the idea.

It is like those 20 dollar gadgets you can buy that do basically the same thing, except now with extra internets!!

This gizmo was inspired by Guy Watson’s tutorial on Flash motion detection. It is in the same series as our webcam hat put-er on-er.

Invisible Man say, “I can has light.” Gots light.

And it was good. Then some people took it far too seriously.

We remember being impressed by the (now apparently defunct) Fez Pigeon site, which added a cute little hat to a webcam view of a pet pigeon. We are pretty confident that most people, if they reflected for just a moment, would find that this is exactly the service needed to fill that gaping hole in their lives they don’t even know they have. To evaluate interest in the automatic putting of hats on things, we’ve developed a webcam puppet that does exactly that. Plug in a webcam, load the puppet, and click on something in the scene that would look better with a party hat on it. And behold! The hat appears, following the object as it moves. You’ll have better luck if the object is nice and simple, with good color contrast with the background.

Brownie and Bozo have slowly been coming around to using cmake rather than autoconf/automake. Autoconf/automake is the obvious choice for keeping C/C++ projects compilable on all sorts of UNIX systems using standard build toolchains, but as soon as you mix in different kinds of IDEs and non-UNIX operating systems, cmake becomes a lot more attractive. It is basically willing to generate whatever kind of strange makefile / project / solution / hurgle-nurgle file your favorite build tool expects. We’ve been pushed towards using cmake in order to be friendly to visual studio and xcode users. But now we’re wondering if a widespread move towards tools like cmake might enable a revolution in build tools, since if someone comes up with a great new build tool all they’ll have to do is add another generator to cmake (or its equivalent) rather than rewriting all existing projects. The sheer variety of build tools supported already by cmake makes this particularly easy to imagine.