Matt Nelsen

But it is a pretty nice picture.

Office Sunset

• Viridian Design –
  Tagged with: design environment brucesterling @toread
• How an Indie Musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter | Music Business and Trend-Mongering – Some interesting ideas of how to turn Twitter notoriety into profit.
  Tagged with: webfame twitter auctions
• 100% Custom Shower Curtains? – Photo Shower Curtains – Print your own shower curtains
  Tagged with: shower curtain photo
• MANHATTAN 1609 vs. 2009: Natural Wonder to Urban Jungle – Pictures of what Manhattan island used to look like compared to today
  Tagged with: history picture newyork cool
• Search for Recipes by Ingredient – Recipe Puppy –
  Tagged with: recipie utility
• M!ханя – Нетрадиционная Кулинария – Spaghetti and Hot Dogs
  Tagged with: spaghetti hotdog recipie weird
• Gantter.com – web-based project management alternative – Free web-based cpm software
  Tagged with: schedule projectmanagement software cpm gantt
• illustration style render test – Blender Artists Forums – Very abstract style of rendering in Blender
  Tagged with: npr blender render
• Japanese Nostalgic Car – Blog » Blog Archive » Japanese Road Trip in Transforming Toyota Truck –
  Tagged with: rv cool
• andreapontalto-sorplefui – Interesting underground house, and interesting ways to render it.
  Tagged with: architecture render
• CG Cookie » Blog Archive » Efficient Preview Rendering in Blender –
  Tagged with: tutorial blender rendering
• aM laboratory –
  Tagged with: music instrument
• Yard Sale Treasure Map – A Yard Sale Planning Tool –
  Tagged with: map garagesale utility
• Jam Out With Your Clam Out | Craftastrophe –
  Tagged with: @toblog dress fashion suggestive
• The Zipper Dress (A Sebastian Errazuriz Design) | Britannica Blog –
  Tagged with: @toblog dress fashion zipper
• The Quiet Coup – The Atlantic (May 2009) –
  Tagged with: article economics finance government oligarchy

Dropping off Ducks or Geese Is Prohibited per Statue 42.092

Huh?

Full of all kinds of awsome.

Nice way to do a sign-off.

3DMagix is a package that appears to sell Blender (free software, $0.00) along with tutorials for about $50. This is OK, according to the term’s of Blender’s licence, as long as copyright notices are not changed and the source code is provided, but the pitch on the 3DMagix website is pretty skeezy. The wording implies that the seller created the software, although it carefully skirts saying that outright. It’s possible that he has created the tutorials himself, but given that there is so much of other people’s artwork on his page without attribution I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the tutorials are just rips of free material from the internet.

My suggestion, if you are interested in good 3D modeling and animation software, is to download a copy of Blender and check out some of the tutorials available for free on the intarwebs.

And to the seller of 3Dmagix, if you really have created tutorials for Blender why not just sell them as such?

More information here.

UPDATE: Looks like the site selling 3dMagix has come down.

Recent experiment with Apophysis 3D Hack.

We do a lot of stupid crap law-enforcement-wise here in the US of A, but this article has renewed my hope for the system.

Police officers in Florida have reduced illegal drag racing by pitting their cars versus the kids in a controlled environment at a local race track. The kicker? The people who used to race illegally on public roads now *pay* $25 a pop to race the cops. Here’s a police program that increases safety, builds goodwill in the community, and brings in money. Good job guys.

“Florida Officers Battle Drivers in Legal Street Races”

When Apple announced that the iPhone would use a software keyboard on a touch screen people went nuts. How could you get the precision needed with big thumbs and a  little screen? I was pretty sceptical too, until I tried it out in the store. There’s some software on the iPhone that looks at the words that you are mashing out on the screen and tries to figure out what you are really trying to say. For instance, if you type in “ftog” the iPhone recognizes that “r” is near to “t” on the keyboard and that you must have meant to type “frog”. It also gives you an option to ignore its suggestion if you really meant to type “ftog”. There are some other flourishes as well, for instance typing a double space shows a period and a single space (I believe that this might have originally come from the Blackberry devices – has anyone gotten sued yet?).

The iPhone system is actually pretty good for input on mobile devices, better than Grafitti for the old Palm systems, anyways. I use it enough that I sometimes stumble when I am behind the PC keyboard. No double spaces to close out my sentences, and nothing to automatically correct dumb mistakes.

I looked around, but I can’t seem to find software that would implement the iPhone keyboard autocorrect system on a Windows box. Is there something out there? Seems like a winner to me. Could even be improved with the resources on a PC, with some intelligence to context. I know that some MS Office stuff already does something like this, but a general solution might be better.

I’ve gotten interested in fractals recently. This one I produced using Sterling 2.

Blue Fractal

My dad sent me a couple of pictures from the family farm near Braddock, North Dakota, taken before WWII. I used Hugin to stitch them together into a small panoramic shot:

Edholm Farm prior to WWII, near Braddock, North Dakota