Do you feel like it’s time to seriously pimp your avatar image and come up with something really cool and easy to make? Join the 1-2-3 creation process of FaceYourManga, and turn yourself into a super funky manga character. Suits really fine as
I look like this:
What’s your manga face?
Kudos to MinorIssues
The second week of the GotW show. There’s too much cubicle humor out there to ignore it all, so I’ll line up the best one of the week, every week again :) What better way to kick off a Monday than with a comical graph made in Microsoft Office Excel?
Source: GraphJam - Pop Culture for People in Cubicles
Fun! There’s new goodness that came out of Research! The UnWrap team (Alex Rav Acha - Weizmann institute of Science and Pushmeet Kohli, Carsten Rother and Andrew Fitzgibbon - Microsoft Research Cambridge) introduced a new representation for video which facilitates a number of common editing tasks. The representation has some of the power of a full reconstruction of 3D surface models from video, but is designed to be easy to recover from a priori unseen and uncalibrated footage. By modelling the image-formation process as a 2D-to-2D transformation from an object’s texture map to the image, modulated by an object-space occlusion mask, we can recover a representation which we term the “unwrap mosaic”. Many editing operations can be performed on the unwrap mosaic, and then re-composited into the original sequence, for example resizing objects, repainting textures, copying/cutting/pasting objects, and attaching effects layers to deforming objects.
In short, it’s a technology that allows you to play around with video footage and adjust the images by using an over-flowing layer. Pretty fun to try out :) I’ll post links to download files for the software as soon as I can share them.
Site: Microsoft Research | Check out the video
I have stickers like this too :) maybe I should put them on my laptop to evangelize a little more. :)
Truth be told, too few people at Microsoft use live.com as their search engine of choice. I mean, I know we’re a little behind, but we’re only gonna catch up at a face pace and take the lead even sooner when everyone sends in their feedback to help make our products better. Eat your own dogfood. No better way to state it. I often tell people to switch when I see them using google, just because I think that if you work somewhere, you gotta stick to the products. And more and more, I find relevant results listed on top. It took some tweaking and twisting, but I’m pretty convinced the guys of the team are getting it. Especially since the Findory guy, who ran one of my favorite search engines, Greg Linden joined the Live Labs. I have great hope for the near future. :)
thx, Maarten
Kicking off a new topic, the GotW. There’s too much cubicle humor out there to ignore it all, so I’ll line up the best one of the week, every week again :) What better way to kick off a Monday than with a comical graph made in Microsoft Office Excel?
Source: GraphJam - Pop Culture for People in Cubicles
One of the funniest time-wasters I’ve seen in the latest year is the quite popular LineRider app. A very simple thing, but still oh so fun to try out. It’s been turned into a real art form by some, who’ve taken the design of their own game to the extreme (as shown in the clip below):
And to top it off, LineRider even got it’s own moment of glory as it was fully integrated in a MacDonalds commercial:
A few days ago, an email got sent around in the company that said the LineRider.com website was now running on Silverlight technology, which is an even better reason to try it out and promote it. And so, here we are :)
Yes, it’s Friday, it’s sunny outside and it’s time to glance back at a cool Microsoft clip from a few years ago. This one is called “Extreme Makeover: Server Room Edition” and it’s about Phil. It’s ALL about Phil. Quote: “Phil began his IT career with just one NT Server that we, of course, just destroyed.” :)
Bert Simons has upped the ante in the field of paper craft. Seriously. I remember when I used to fumble around with my little Origami books, folding swans and other cute animals. It always took so much time. Then yesterday I saw an email fly by on an internal alias about this guy in the Netherlands who makes 3 dimensional pseudo realistic paper portraits and sculptures, and all I could say was WOW! This is waaaay cooler than any paper art I’ve seen so far. Check out his site, and try the DIY thingy. Might take a couple of hours to finish it though. :)
These are papercraft sculptures made in the same way as the familiar papercraft houses and animals. Bert Simons rules.
If you’re familiar with mash-ups and you’re into gaming, then this is the rocking fun zone for you! As the name suggests, this release builds on Popfly’s current set of mashup and Web page authoring tools to add support for easily creating and sharing casual games. There are 2 ways to get to the Game Creator. On the landing page, you have the “Create a Game (Alpha)” link, or if you select the “Create Stuff” dropdown, you will see “Game” there.
Here’s a tutorial and walk-through to get you started:
See you in the next level :)
Related:
I stumbled upon this very old commercial that announced Windows95. Hah! I remember the day my dad got rid of our 3.11 and I was really pissed about it. Then we got a new computer with 95 on it, and all of the sudden I was exchanging PC games with my class mates, in a time where viruses were still something you wrote yourself starting with ‘echo on’, and the baddest thing to do was adding a line of text that said: deleting all files, then when they pressed a key it would read ‘ha ha fooled you’ :) Those were the days. Long story short: here is an old school commercial:
