Slashdot Mirror

Swapping steganographic images with an acoustic coupler & Kermit could be fun.

Or perhaps create a fake conversation over a normal VOIP channel, using WAV / VOC files padded with data, using, for example:

http://www.heinz-repp.onlinehome.de/Hide4PGP.htm

http://www.winosi.onlinehome.de/Ravi.htm

First off, if you are wanting to teach, set aside time when you've learned the program to create some multimedia tutorials. Get camtasia studio and record tutorials, export them to flash. It's better and fast than writing a book with screenshots.

If you are wanting some linux movies, check out xvidcap.

It's a great idea to promote and use open source software. Some might say that those skills will have no marketability because the apps are open source and not industry standard. However, when teaching an art class and including computers, all you have to do is emphasize "Now this is free so you can use it at home. Photoshop is what most people in business use, but the same principles apply." Kids will remember that and they will pick up the right app if they are really interested in that field.

Save the money by using OSS and buy some really nice digital cameras for everyone to use. Have the kids go out and capture the world. They'll love it. Then bring the pictures into gimp, try different things from contrasts to layermasking, and painting. Create meaningful collages. If they learn the gimp, they'll pick up photoshop, and then freehand, etc. They'll be fine. I'd recommend gimp over photoshop elements any day.

Here are learning links I've found on blender. This is really a cool program to teach, but I know it will be difficult for some people to pick up. Teach them how to create a text object, write their name and render it with different light setups. Future filmmakers will really appreciate it I think.

http://www.bl3nder.com/tutorials/ http://www.ctr.co.at/swf/3ds_max_1_zb1_num_calc.ht m http://www.blenderama.com/index.php?id=276 http://www.vrotvrot.com/xoom/tutorials.html http://blendedmind.i8.com/tutorials.html#tutorials http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/htmlI / http://www.tutorialguide.net/software/blender/ http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Tutorials.243.0.html http://www.tltsu.ru/archive/blender/BlenderTutoria lPart3_.pdf http://project-blender.onlinehome.de/ http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mein/blender/ http://www.ingiebee.com/Blendermania/tutorial_list .html http://renderosity.com/ http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 4/30/217225 http://www.geocities.com/paulthepuzzles/aardvarks. html http://blender.excellentwhale.com/ http://www.selleri.org/Blender/ http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/index.html http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=11202 6#112026 http://vrotvrot.com/xoom/tutorials.html http://www.linuxgraphic.org/section3d/blender/page

I had a go some time back. The camera rays were pre-calculated. A bounding box was calculated for each triangle in image space. These were ordered by starting row and column. Lists of the possibly visible triangles were maintained as the image space was scanned. Groups of geometry had bounding spheres. I was getting around 15 seconds/frame.

However, there seem to be many open source real-time ray-tracing projects going on:

OpenRT, with it's own FAQ. This project seems to have several games written for it.

Rearview is another game-engine based on ray-tracing

There's also the Avalon Project. There was also an article discussing the use of SSE Instructions. The Source code to a demo is available at RAVI-Demo. Other projects include RealStorm.

It certainly seems to be an active area.

Done the right way:

http://www.spinheaddev.com/?id=crescentd
http://www.shadeless.dk/3d/?site=darksquad.htm
http://project-blender.onlinehome.de/
http://www.brainstorm-studios.net
http://zerooneentertainment.org/blengine/sachi
http://project-blender.onlinehome.de/
http://www.tudbzd.com/

Done the right way:

http://www.spinheaddev.com/?id=crescentd
http://www.shadeless.dk/3d/?site=darksquad.htm
http://project-blender.onlinehome.de/
http://www.brainstorm-studios.net
http://zerooneentertainment.org/blengine/sachi
http://project-blender.onlinehome.de/
http://www.tudbzd.com/

For those who are interested here are six games that use the blender game engine:
Crescent Dawn
Dark Squad
Dracolith
Sachi Soup
Twilight Quest
Vertigo

Warning.... Check the rec.outdoors faq before you start pouring any chemicals in any tanks:

http://www.amelunxen.onlinehome.de/drofaq/kocher.h tml#ih3

( I can't find the english one anymore )

Actually, you might see quite a benefit upgrading to 2k or XP, since they both have much better power management support. Win98 doesn't even support the HALT instruction, so your system is sitting their running at pretty much 100% CPU usage all the time. I upgraded to WinXP on my 5 year old laptop with a K6-III+/400, and the battery life went way up, and the system runs much cooler. Win2k/XP are also much better at handling frequent PC Card swapping, something I find myself doing quite frequently.

There are 3rd party apps that added the CPU idle feature win9x/Me, such as CPUCool.

Information and discussions for blind SuSE Linux users (english)

Software for Blind Linux Users: Brass - Braille and speech server

To wit: where the fuck is our electonic paper already? I've wanted it ever since I saw Captain Kirk using an computer tablet some 35 years ago.

PDAs aren't it. Except for a few people who can do 40 WPM without concentrating using Fitalystamp or something similar, there's no practical input for plain text, never mind math. And how can you possibly keep track of your notes on such a small display? (Even the Newton was too small for this purpose. And of course too big to put in your pocket. The worst of both worlds.)

IBM was on the right track with the Thinkpad 700, which folded flat so you could use an electronic stylus instead of the keyboard. Alas, the 486 processor just wasn't up to serious character recognition, and IBM abandoned this option in later Thinkpads.

(The Transnote is interesting, but I don't quite like the idea of having a separate input device.)

Here's what would make Captain Kirk smile. Somebody comes out with a mass produced pad device. Minimum requirements:

• At least VGA-resolution display
• Stylus input
• Enough processing power and RAM to do serious handwriting recognition
• Mass storage of some kind (hard disk uses too much juice, but anything else is probably too expensive)
• Some kind of comm/expandability option. USB 2 would suffice.

Ok, what about something now? Well, if you can't spring for a Transnote, there's always the Crosspad, which was an attempt to market the Transnote's input device as a separate product. No longer in production, but you can get them on ebay for about $150.