This weekend I went both Friday and Saturday out to clubs with friends. In both cases up until about 5AM. I guess it’s fun overall. Although it can be frustrating at times. Namely, on dancing floors with lots of Japanese. With some kind of songs, men will start chanting in groups. OOOOOOH YEH YEH YEH !! ODORE ODORE !! (dance dance) ..it seems to never stop. It’s supposed to galvanize and involve everyone, but it’s actually quite frustrating !
On dance floors with Rap/Hip-Hop, there are a lot of sweaty people packed together. Overall also the scene of seeing men trying to assert their presence on women, is a bit sad. But that’s how it works I guess !
Sunday (today) I went with Sergio to watch an exhibition about multimedia/interaction/whatever. Was somewhat interesting. There were a lot of projectors involved (I’ve got one recently thinking about those kind of things myself !). Particularly interesting was a large room where a distant projector would make people case shadows on a wall. Another projector would project on the shadowed area some info. Namely a crosshatch individuating the center of the shadow. This position would change the tuner of a radio. So basically it’s a way to interact with silhouettes of people in a room.
Shouldn’t be too hard to do something similar with a video-camera and a projector. I have both, so, maybe someday !
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 11:48 PM EST
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Today (well, yesterday night). I put some effort in redesigning the template. I modified so that it looks more like kazzuya.com . It was actually quite a bit of work, trying to figure out how to place all the tables, etc etc. Seems to work now, more or less. I notice that dates in the posts are sometimes missing.. ummm !!
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 12:27 PM EST
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I’m officially 72Kg !! That’s about 10 kilos down from when I left the USA 3 years ago. Also quite less than a few months ago. I’m pretty proud of myself. Thank you !
Today I finally installed the software that came with Aibo. It’s basically 2 programs. One program is a nice interface to build a WLAN configuration file in plain text, that goes into the Mind2 MemoryStrick. Many suggest to use an official Sony MS reader/writer, but I tried with my Elcom Multicard Reader and it all went well. I then put the stick back into Aibo, turned it on, and I saw it on the network 8)
After that, I installed and ran the Entertainment Player. The program has a nice interface and some cool features. It allows to see what Aibo sees, to make it play motions or music and to have a real-time display of the 3D model of the dog in action !
Right now I’m listening to a Japanese Internet radio which the software is streaming into Aibo which, in turn, plays through its speaker.
The Entertainment Player also allows to take full control of the dog and move it around with direction buttons. There is also an option to schedule events. Could possibly work as an alarm ?
One thing I noticed, is that the camera quality of Aibo is really poor. I looked into the memory stick to see what pictures it took. Looking at the picture that he took when I registered as the owner, I think that it must believe that its owner is one dark-ugly-motherfucker ! I’m planning to re-register myself in a better lit environment. This could well raise the self-confidence of the dog and push it to new limits 8)
bau, until the next time.
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 11:01 PM EST
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Today I finally encoded the Aibo movie (~60MB !) of the footage taken during the first 2 days. First I edited with Pinnacle Studio, then I converted to progressive-MPEG2 (interlace removed) with TMPGEnc, applying de-interlace, noise reduction and color correction filters. The final DivX encoding was done with DrDivX, from divx.com.
My next camcorder should probably be one that avoids interlace altogether !
I also did some research about programming Aibo. It seems that I may need a separate, programmer’s Memory Stick (MS in short) if I want to write code that runs directly on the Aibo CPU. This also mean that I would have to remove the Mind2 MS, the one that gives it the personality. So I can code directly on the CPU but only on a “blank” dog.
There is otherwise the option to run software on the PC and remotely control the dog over the wireless LAN. The Mind2 MS apparently already has the functionality to support this kind of programming. This also enables me to do things with the dog while it can keep its personality. Not sure how all of this works, but I’ll find out I guess !
So many things to do, so little time !
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 12:27 AM EST
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Today a few good things happened. Finally !
At the office I received some new hardware to test. It’s always fun to try new hardware. Then for dinner, Sergio invited me a restaurant along with some quite resourceful people involved in the field of information technology, design and research in general.
It’s quite nice to be able to take a break from the mundane life and actually get into those places where one has to turn on the brain. The world generally pushes people to avoid thinking too much. The mass is what dictates it, and sometimes I almost fall for that.
Then at home I did some research about tools for video encoding. I have edited a small movie about the first day with Aibo and I’m planning to encode it in DivX.. but I need to deinterlace it first. If all goes right, I should have the movie on line by tomorrow.
It features me swearing after the dog, with English subtitles 8)
I’d like to translate this in Japanese as an exercise, but it’s 2AM and I think it could easily take me a good couple of hours !!
Oyasumi !
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 1:45 AM EST
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TGM3 should be shipping this month in the arcade centers all around Japan.
So watch out and go pour all your 100/50 yen coins on the machines.
Thank you !
今月、日本中にゲーム・センターへTGM3は送りそうです。あなたの１００と５０円コインを注ぐしてください。
ありがとうね！
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 8:36 PM EST
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Couldn’t quite make it to the station to recharge, somehow. I never understood what happened.
I guess that’s the beauty of it !
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 8:29 PM EST
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So what should I say here ?
There is hardly anything that one can say publically without causing some sort of trouble to somebody else !
Lots of people need lots of privacy. Most people need to hide something. I don’t generally need to hide anything (single 8) but I can’t just take pics and post them publically.
But I see that Picasa has the feature to blur things out and that I can probably post on here through Picasa.
Geez.. google is becoming like a mom !
Mammaaaa !!!!!!!
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 7:13 PM EST
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