Obscure Instruments Saturday

For all the attention given to music in the world, most people only recognize a small, ‘famous’ portion of musical instruments. There are many obscure, wonderful instruments that produce  unique timbres but which couldn’t be identified even by people who have probably heard them in a piece of music. This post will be examining two relatively unknown, but heard and slightly related instruments: the theremin and ondes Martenot, their obscurity reinforced by the fact spell check recognizes neither of them in its judgements.

The theremin is most likely the more recognized of these two instruments, as it has a rather iconic shape and unforgettable method that is used to play it. The theremin is controlled by two antennae, one controlling volume and the other, pitch. It is one of the simplest arrangements conceivable, and yet so very difficult to master.

Patch 3.2.0 Translations

In reading the patch notes to World of Warcraft, it is easy to see a certain critical intelligence behind the notes, belying a certain amount of critical undertones in the notes. I have attempted to extract these undertones from the notes and put their meanings out where it’s easy for the average player to see.

# The quest log is now double-paned for more easily viewing quest information. The list of all quests a player has will show in one pane, while the quest details of any highlighted quest will display in the next.

Do your poor, strained eyes tire from the tiny morsels of story we still attempt to fruitlessly inject into your grind fest? Fear not, all the irrelevant information pertaining to what your quest is actually about will be helpfully segregated off to one side of the quest log, leaving you, the treasured player, to be free to easily scan the objectives and determine how many of what you have to whack with unprecedented ease.

Area of Azeroth, More Conclusions

After the last sessions of analyzing the lengths of Azeroth, I still had no concrete values as to how big Azeroth really was in terms of its area. Proceeding from where I last left off on measuring the length of Azeroth, I took the pixel-length measurements and ran with them. From last time, I had determined that one pixel on the scale of the map I had been using at the time was .034706 kilometers to one side of a pixel. So, the area of one pixel should therefore be 0.0012045 kilometers². The next step was to remove the pixels from the map that weren’t navigable land or water, so basically just the oceans. This proved a bit trickier than it first appears, since the minimap has lots of different colored water and gradients to take out. Once that was done, the following outline emerged.

Google Trends

Or: Data Mining for Everybody

Stumbling through the internet today and trying some new things, I began to realize the power of Google Trends and what it’s capable of showing. The unique situation of Google as a search monopoly has given it the position to monitor what the majority of people are looking for on the internet at any given time. The Hot Trends page shows recent events with an almost stunning similarity to news feeds and blogs, although searches aren’t intended to reflect what’s the news. This might seem like old news, with things like NPR proclaiming the power of Google in detecting flu pandemics and the like, but it didn’t fully hit me from things like that that these tools aren’t just available to researchers, the Google Trends page allows anyone to compare the prevalence of a search. Setting out on my own scientific endeavor, I looked for what G. Trends would have to say about Cake vs. Pie.

(cake = red, pie = blue)

Wikipedia Freeware Galore – Terragen / Sterling2

Recently I was lucky enough to discover the application Terragen while navigating through Wikipedia. Its render quality is absolutely fantastic for an application that is both free and several years old, and while mucking through it I thought that it might be fun  to import a few heightmaps from games and render them into near-photo quality images. This was easier said than done, however, and after exporting heightmaps from Fallout 3 in a myriad of formats (RAW 8/16 bit, Targa, Gif, Png) I finally got an accessory application for Terragen to properly import the bitmap version of Fallout 3’s heightmap. Originally, the map was much too flat in Terragen, but after scaling it up and changing the colors to be a little bit muddier, the following result was yielded:

From Terragen

Liberty Prime

Recently I took the task upon myself to make an image in dedication to Liberty Prime, chief among the most awesome of robotic companions. After editing different parts from my Fallout 3 screenshots (it’s hard taking something from Fallout 3 out of a background, because you have to guide the magnetic lasso between brown-grays and other gray-browns), I assembled together the following image attempting to depict Liberty Prime in all his zealously patriotic glory.

I can hear him in my head, "DEMOCRACY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE"

The only thing left, naturally, was to make an appropriate satirical caption poking fun at both  how ridiculously over the top his pro-American slogans are, while mentioning how his pseudo-cold era mentality still applied during to the last administration. Unfortunately, after conferring with the co-writer of the blog, the conversation took an unfortunate turn and this came out of it:

Sometimes the creative process makes great things . . . other times it fails

This, unfortunately, is in the latter category. I’m afraid it falls upon you, the valiant readers, to apply a more suitable caption. Suggestions are welcome!

Crysis Wallpapers

Bleak winter skies getting you down? Remedy your blues with tropical wallpapers, conjured courtesy of the Crysis Sandbox 2.0 Editor.

Full moon? No, we've never heard of 'island werewolves'

WoW Spells: How they might work

Multiverse Mana Theory: Making Sense of Respawns

It is undeniable that many strange things happen on Azeroth; things that should stay dead come back to life, and events that should be world-changing have no impact, and things generally remain at the status quo. But thanks to the magic of SCIENCE, or in this case more guesswork than actual science, one might find an explanation for these strange events! I call my explanation the Multiverse Mana Theory!

What the frak does that even mean?

Mirrorboard for Windows

*updated 10/31/09: new non-broken download links*

A while ago I ran into the blag post at xkcd about Mirrorboard, where you push caps and it flips the orientation of the board so that the left hand keys are remapped to the right hand keys. Why, you might say? So that one might fully operate the keyboard and mouse at the same time! A stunning idea, only the file was for Linux/Unix. Thanks to the mysteriosity of the internets, I found the Windows Keyboard Layout Creator and whipped together a version for people like me too lazy for Dvorak and Linux to use.

How it works:

The catch is, the layout changes in this version when you press AltGr / Alt + Ctrl, which is either awkward or on the right hand of the keyboard. So, this version is really only works best when you do a second remap of the Caps key to Alt Gr, which is kind of redundant, but an easy work-around on a programmable keyboard.

Alt-Gr Version

However, option 2 is that Ctrl alone changes the layout, which is easy to reach but messes up keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-c and such. I would reccommend this option being used only when it’s needed. It’s easy to change the keyboard layout in Windows if you have more than one installed, usually just hitting Ctrl-Shift will change the layout back to the usual.

Ctrl Version

For a more seamless and comprehensive key layout modifier, I suggest Auto Hot Key.

Suggestions, problems and rants to: Ampaire1@gmail.com

Bollywood is great

Self explanatory.