This portrait is only made with "flat circles" on a black background. Every circle has a single color, a single tone and a single size. I placed each circle one by one. It's a time consuming method. Please see some details, the work in progress and other portraits here below. If you wish, you can also view this making of my portrait of Elvis Presley (video) to understand how I'm exploiting this technique with circles. The above portrait was featured on "Cult Of Mac" in March 2012.
Entertainment
Happy 100th birthday, Alan Turing! 2012 is the Alan Turing Year, with celebratory academic events around the world all year. BBC News has a set of (brief) appreciations, including one in which two of Turing's colleagues share memories. Google has an interactive Doodle of a Turing Machine today (that article has some explanation and links to a useful video if the doodle's confusing). Alan Turing.net has original documents from Turing's life and other figures in the early development of computing. Turing.org is by a biographer of AT and has a timeline/bio and other secondary resources.
Infographic: A Look Back at 40 Years of Atari
The perfume that smells like a Macbook Pro
Minecraft Diamond Ore Server
Gadgets
The Phi is a PCIe card which turns your computer into a software-defined radio which "could record FM radio and digital television signals, read RFID chips, track ship locations, or do radio astronomy. In principle it could perform all of these functions simultaneously." While the Phi isn't the first such device available for purchase, it is the first to target hobbyists and eventually consumers, but how will the FCC handle software-defined radio?
Internet
CEO Of Internet Provider Sonic.net: We Delete User Logs After Two Weeks. Your Internet Provider Should, Too.
Reading & Discussion
5 signs that Apple is a cult
"Now we have three former NSA officials confirming the basic facts. Neither the Constitution nor federal law allow the government to collect massive amounts of communications and data of innocent Americans and fish around in it in case it might find something interesting. This kind of power is too easily abused. We're extremely pleased that more whistleblowers have come forward to help end this massive spying program." - the EFF announces that three former employees of the NSA have come forward to testify in their lawsuit against the NSA over the domestic spying program.
Resources & Utilities
Brackets: The Open Source Code Editor for the Web
on{X} is an automation framework that allows you to program and customize various aspects of your Android Smartphone using JavaScript. The developers at Microsoft have also provided a set of customizable pre-baked recipes for the JavaScriptially-challenged.
Want to take it a bit further? The on{X} Market contains a growing list of scripts created by other users, while SetOn{X} adds a few extra functions and commands to the default API.
Satellite Eyes is a free OS X app that automatically updates your desktop wallpaper with satellite imagery of your current location.
Software
John Goerzen, an IT development manager in Kansas and a developer for Debian, has been teaching his two sons, ages five and two, respectively, how to use Linux. Goerzen began with his older son, Jacob, at the age of three, building with him a computer out of spare parts and installing a command-line-only version of Debian. Surprisingly, Jacob took to the Bash shell with enthusiasm, particularly the word "bash". Since then, Jacob has learned how to use power cycling as a troubleshooting mechanism, how to make a steam locomotive with
sl, how to do text-to-speech with cw and some shell scripts, and how to IM with mcabber. Most recently, Goerzen introduced a GUI to Jacob, now five, and his other son, Oliver, now two, opting for tiling window manager xmonad as being most familiar to kids used to running a computer with a keyboard instead of a mouse. His reasoning? "It has not escaped my attention that children that used Commodores
or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on
average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS. I didn’t
want our boys to skip an entire phase of learning how their technology
works. I am pleased with this solution; they still run commands to
launch things, yet get to play with more than text-based programs."The Next Microsoft - A 3 day experiment in rebranding Microsoft by art student Andrew Kim.
Sci-fi policing: predicting crime before it occurs
Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself
Technology
"Maintaining this level of surveillance is very burdensome for companies. According to the letters, AT&T has more than 100 full time employees assigned just to handle law enforcement requests, Verizon has 70, and Sprint has a whopping 226. That’s a lot of people power devoted solely to surveillance." Mobile Phone Surveillance by the Numbers.
Time To Apply The First Law Of Robotics To Our Smartphones
Tutorials
How To Turn Old Car Parts Into A Video Game Controller
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