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)

Via BlenderNation, a script for exporting blender 3d models to javascript. This reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s quip: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” The conversion is approximate and the animation slow for non-trivial models, but it is impressive to see plain javascript doing this. Kudos to useless pickles for the core triangle-drawing trickery.

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.

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 came up with a new animation for the MakeSweet Blender, featuring a table falling from space with a cake on it. Now that I write that down, it seems a little … odd. I’m not sure if this was the one missing piece that the world was lacking in order to achieve a completely harmonious whole. You can control the image on the cake, and some words that sort of hover nearby it, so I suppose if you made some breathtaking choice of image and words, you might achieve … something. “This is not a pipe“, perhaps? They’ve used it in the past as an elaborate birthday card, apparently.

The movie generation procedure has been improved a bit; you can finally request email notifications (which is important, given that movies can take hours to produce), and it is a bit more obvious how to actually download the result (as opposed to viewing it online).

Enjoy!

The MakeSweet Blender, a tool for making customized 3D movies online, just got a whole lot better. We’re trying to do our bit to bring the possibilities of blender (an open source 3D design and animation program) to the masses. We now have the beginnings of a web interface for customizing designs. Now we just need to recruit some artists to come up with some cool movies. Our in-house talent on this isn’t up to much unfortunately (no offense, Brownie and Bozo). Watch this space, it is going to be fun!

For those not familar with blender, you should check it out. The learning curve is steep, but with just a little patience you can learn to make crazy animations of exploding business models and impress all the other CEOs (or whoever you hang out with).

My team have been working on polishing the code quacker for some time now. Initially I couldn’t understand what Poland and the Polish had to do with anything, but I have to admit that now the quacker does indeed look better. For newcomers, the code quacker is a tool that let’s you encode messages in various interesting vocabularies. For example, if someone proposed to you, what could be more romantic than sending them an email saying:

Snuggle snuggle. Cuddle tickle! Hug kiss hug. Cuddle cuddle. Kiss hug! Smooch tickle! Smooch smooch. Cuddle smooch cuddle cuddle kiss. Snuggle snuggle! Snuggle kiss. Tickle cuddle smooch hug kiss! Snuggle cuddle smooch smooch wriggle? Wriggle hug.

Which, after using the code quacker, they discover translates to:

No!

Ever felt there’s something missing from the web? At makesweet.com, we tried to add a little romance to cold, stand-offish html on The Wuv Net. But sometimes, as I pace sleepless through the night in the echoing darkness of one of my more solitary mansions, I think it is not enough. But then I warm my hands on a <blink> tag, stare into its eternal, regular depths, and I feel at peace again.

I didn’t believe them. My people kept coming to me with charts and spreadsheets, but I would push them away. I just couldn’t, in my heart, truly believe there was a market for adopting a horde of rampaging penguins. Well, the sales reports just came in, and how wrong I was.

I still don’t understand it though. I mean, don’t get me wrong, penguins are cute, some of my best friends are penguins, I see the attraction there as much as the next guy, but come on. These penguins are hungry!

I guess the only lesson to draw from this is, sometimes I’m an idiot. I don’t really like that notion though, so I’ll obscure it behind some vague motivational prose about having faith in “the team”. That’s right, I should have more trust in my unerring ability to pick good people. That sounds a lot better…