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sovok

86 karma · joined August 1, 2009

https://robsite.net
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sovok··on 3D Object Manipulation in a Single Photograph using Stock 3D Models
It would be cool if the position and rotation would be synchronized between the two, so I could choose a nice view in the Real-Time tab and switch over to Photo Realistic to get the raytraced version.
sovok··on Floppy Bird: A Flappy Bird clone in 16-bit x86 assembly
It's probably just used to create the .tga images loaded in https://github.com/icebreaker/floppybird/blob/master/src/gam...
sovok··on Show HN: Unicode glitch art iOS app
I made http://lunicode.com, which does Zalgo, Flipping and other things.
sovok··on Introducing the ‘mozjpeg’ Project
Or try ImageOptim, which bundles these and other tools with a nice GUI: http://imageoptim.com/
sovok··on Your best passive income? (2014)
A silly project for playing with Unicode (sıɥʇ ǝʞıl) and ASCII Art. About 900 visits per day, 10€ per month income. Almost pays for the server.

http://lunicode.com

sovok··on Show HN: noteZilla - Interactive sheet music
Really nice. Now I know the meaning of those squiggly lines. I also like the sparse full screen layout.

A few minor things: While jumping to time points works, scrubbing does not. Instead, the notes image gets dragged. You could embed the image as a background-image instead of an <img> to prevent that. Or catch the dragstart event on it and return false (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4211909/disable-dragging-...). A custom Rails error page or better error handling would also be nice (http://notezilla.io/bla). And there are a few console.log's left (TIME!!!! :)

Did you match the music to notes by hand?

sovok··on Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs
The "Stop Autoplay for Youtube" Extension helps with that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stop-autoplay-for-...
sovok··on CSS 3D Clouds
I remember them from Super Mario 64. They used sprites do give the impression of high-poly spheres: http://i.imgur.com/59T0Kqj.jpg
sovok··on Germany orders changes to Facebook real name policy
Maybe not that big of a deal. If Facebook doesn't comply, they only have to pay 20000€: http://translate.google.de/translate?twu=1?sl=de&tl=en&#...
sovok··on Free VMs of Windows to test older versions of IE
The Unarchiver works for me: http://unarchiver.c3.cx/unarchiver
sovok··on Red Bull Stratos Skydive Rescheduled for today
It went as high a 8 mio viewers, so ~488 GB/s. Maybe a new record for Youtube?
sovok··on Google Homepage Size Over Time
I found only estimates: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ 40-50 billion pages. From the site:

"The size of the index of a search engine is estimated on the basis of a method that combines word frequencies obtained in a large offline text collection (corpus), and search counts returned by the engines. Each day 50 words are sent to all four search engines. The number of webpages found for these words are recorded; with their relative frequencies in the background corpus, multiple extrapolated estimations are made of the size of the engine's index, which are subsequently averaged. The 50 words have been selected evenly across logarithmic frequency intervals (see Zipf's Law). The background corpus contains more than 1 million webpages from DMOZ, and can be considered a representative sample of the World Wide Web."

sovok··on Welcome To Life
> I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity.

Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :>

If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died.

So instead, I get my neurons replaced with artificial ones, one at a time. If I drink a few beers, brain cells die but I'm still conscious. So gradually replacing my neurons one by one should be no problem; there clearly is no loss of continuity, I'm still me.

But what's the difference? Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one. But, the faster you do it, the more it approaches "instant". And instantly replacing all my brain cells is the same as replacing my whole brain. Thus, I'm dead and my copy lives on...

sovok··on Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.
Looks quite similar to Curl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_(programming_language)), although Curl only runs on the client and needs a plugin. It got a lot of press ten years ago but is now mostly forgotten.

Opa runs on the client and server and compiles to JS, so it got that advantage over Curl. But it's still a kitchen sink wrapper around existing technology, from a single vendor. Those seem to never work out that well.

sovok··on Google can be used as a graphic calculator
Grapher does this quite well. It comes with Mac OS X and plots various things, 2D and 3D: http://www.google.com/search?q=grapher+mac&hl=en&tbm...

It also formats the equations nicely and lets you copy them as PDF. Makes a decent formula editor for Pages (with simple formulas).

sovok··on Cracking Siri
But according to this article, the server seems to only translate speech to text, with the whole natural language processing and AI happening on the device.
sovok··on Lytro cameras are ready for preorder.
The german Raytrix lightfield cameras* have ~1/4 effective resolution. If the Lytro is comparable, then its "11 Megarays" could mean about 2.75 Megapixel.

* http://www.raytrix.de/index.php/RX_en.html

sovok··on Seven Minutes in Ubuntu: A Mac user's first impressions
I think it follows from Fitts' Law or rather is its reverse:

If the cursor is outside an area, the bigger and closer this area is the easier it is to purposefully hit. ⇔ If the cursor is inside an area, the bigger this area is and the farther away its borders are, the harder it is to accidentally leave.

sovok··on Raphaël 2.0 is available
Thanks, now I'm stuck at slide 16. A simple changelog would be better...
sovok··on You can't google 9999999..99999999999999999999999
A problem might be that as soon as you discover that number, you can't tell anyone on the web about it. This for example has no results as of now: http://google.com/search?q=813115181452319
sovok··on Google Translate adds easter egg that recognizes the beatboxing hack
I didn't see the Beatbox button first and thought she now sings the letters, like http://translate.google.com/#de|en|pvpvpvpvpvpvpvv%0A

Other languages yield interesting sounds too http://translate.google.com/#de|es|pvpvpvpvbvbvbvbvpvpvpvpva...

sovok··on Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us
They have been acquired by LastPass: http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=2033
sovok··on Khan Academy + Instant Search = Khan Instant
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=instant+search+something
sovok··on Icon search engine
Nifty. Only the info window is 38px too far left in FF 3.6.11: http://imgur.com/M7546.png
sovok··on Show HN: I finally released that sheet music app I keep yammering about
Great app. I struggle reading notes while playing and the small keyboard is really helpful.

There's also a bug in Für Elise, it ignores the repeat signs.

sovok··on Whatever happened to programming?
Curl tries to be this. I remember reading articles about it years ago, but it never really took of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_%28programming_language%29
sovok··on HTML5 Canvas based fast painting app
This is amazing. I'm building a little canvas drawing tool myself (http://kritzl.robsite.net -> 'Mal was') and this is great inspiration. Very slick interface and really fast, impressive.

Although the fill tool seems to have a very high tolerance. Fills the whole screen everytime. You could also add line smoothing for the drawing tools. There are reasonably fast algorithms you can use with bezierCurveTo (http://robsite.net/posts/smooth-path-in-canvas).

sovok··on German Government: Stop Using Internet Explorer
No, they just recommend using alternative browsers and to switch often. Although the BSI warned against lots of things in the interest of privacy, mostly Google products (Chrome Beta, Google Wave, ...).

On the other hand they have the power to intercept and analyze the complete data- and phone communication without anonymization. They of course use it not only to find malware and security risks, as was intended in the bill, but to provide 'suspicious' data to the police and intelligence services (http://www.golem.de/0901/64639.html).

We also have data retention for all communication data for six months and have planned a nice censorship infrastructure to block domains (against child pornography for now), not unlike Australia or China.

But at least IE has only 40% market share... (http://www.browser-statistik.de/)

sovok··on German Government: Stop Using Internet Explorer
The "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik" advised users to avoid IE at least since 2004: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
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