Domain: pomakis.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to pomakis.com.
Comments · 8
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Re:If...
Sure, here it is.
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Re:If...
If you only show up as a 'blurry fleck,' how are you supposed to do something obscene?
Well, I was part of this arial photo, in which the stick figure near the centre of the photo was composed of several thousand people. This particular image isn't obscene in any way, but it very well could have been!
(Bonus points for those who can name the event that this was part of!)
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Re:Hmm not that impressive.Awesome photo!
Here's a photo I took of the eclipse (coincidently also in Ottawa, and also with a Canon PowerShot G3). It's not a timelapse composite, but I think it's still pretty neat:
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low light photography - personal tipWhen I'm taking a photo of a non-moving subject (i.e., not a person) in low light, this is what I tend to do:
- disable the flash
- set the ISO to 50 to minimize "grain"
- enable the timer (2-second preferrably)
- place the camera on a rock, fence stump, hood of a car, whatever (in leiu of a tripod)
- press the shutter release and stand back
Results will vary, of course, but I've taken some awesome low-light shots this way. For example, this one. This technique isn't limited to digital photography either (with the exception of the setting-the-ISO part).
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Re:The C64 was the best
It was the last computer I ever programmed that you could understand top to bottom.
Same here. I think we grew up in a very unique generation. Children today don't stand a chance in hell of understanding computers in their entirety, of being able to visualise the running of a program right from the op-codes pushing the bits through the registers to the end product of what they see on the screen. There's no choice today but to specialize on a certain aspect of computers and remain naive about the other aspects. Of course, even our generation has to specialise when working with modern computers, but we have the unique advantage of understanding in a very real sense the framework in which our specialization sits. That, I believe, makes us (in general) better programmers, because it gives us the intuition that a lot of newcomers lack.
When I have children I'd love to be able to teach them 6502 assember because I think it'd give them a good appreciation of how computers work, but realistically I know they're not going to give a damn, and they probably can't afford to give a damn if they're going to be useful as higher-level programmers in tomorrow's world.
As an aside, those of you that still have a working C=64 or VIC-20 (or an emulator), check out the Connect-4 game I wrote in assembler about six years ago. It's very lean (only 1520 bytes), and plays quite well. The source code is here, and the load-and-run executables for the C=64 and unexpanded VIC-20 are here and here respectively.
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Re:The C64 was the best
It was the last computer I ever programmed that you could understand top to bottom.
Same here. I think we grew up in a very unique generation. Children today don't stand a chance in hell of understanding computers in their entirety, of being able to visualise the running of a program right from the op-codes pushing the bits through the registers to the end product of what they see on the screen. There's no choice today but to specialize on a certain aspect of computers and remain naive about the other aspects. Of course, even our generation has to specialise when working with modern computers, but we have the unique advantage of understanding in a very real sense the framework in which our specialization sits. That, I believe, makes us (in general) better programmers, because it gives us the intuition that a lot of newcomers lack.
When I have children I'd love to be able to teach them 6502 assember because I think it'd give them a good appreciation of how computers work, but realistically I know they're not going to give a damn, and they probably can't afford to give a damn if they're going to be useful as higher-level programmers in tomorrow's world.
As an aside, those of you that still have a working C=64 or VIC-20 (or an emulator), check out the Connect-4 game I wrote in assembler about six years ago. It's very lean (only 1520 bytes), and plays quite well. The source code is here, and the load-and-run executables for the C=64 and unexpanded VIC-20 are here and here respectively.
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Re:The C64 was the best
It was the last computer I ever programmed that you could understand top to bottom.
Same here. I think we grew up in a very unique generation. Children today don't stand a chance in hell of understanding computers in their entirety, of being able to visualise the running of a program right from the op-codes pushing the bits through the registers to the end product of what they see on the screen. There's no choice today but to specialize on a certain aspect of computers and remain naive about the other aspects. Of course, even our generation has to specialise when working with modern computers, but we have the unique advantage of understanding in a very real sense the framework in which our specialization sits. That, I believe, makes us (in general) better programmers, because it gives us the intuition that a lot of newcomers lack.
When I have children I'd love to be able to teach them 6502 assember because I think it'd give them a good appreciation of how computers work, but realistically I know they're not going to give a damn, and they probably can't afford to give a damn if they're going to be useful as higher-level programmers in tomorrow's world.
As an aside, those of you that still have a working C=64 or VIC-20 (or an emulator), check out the Connect-4 game I wrote in assembler about six years ago. It's very lean (only 1520 bytes), and plays quite well. The source code is here, and the load-and-run executables for the C=64 and unexpanded VIC-20 are here and here respectively.
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Re:Ultima was the best seriesI found both Ultima III and Ultima IV very enthralling. Like most of the people reading this, I blew many many hours playing these games on the Commodore 64, eventually completing both.
I found that the later games, however, didn't have the same attraction. Perhaps it was just because I was growing up (*gasp!*), but I think it was more that the first few games left more to the imagination, whereas the later games tried to compensate for imagination by adding more graphic realism. Don't get me wrong, I think adding more graphic realism is a noble goal. But it doesn't actually improve game play. Ultima III fit on one 180kb disk, but the world of Sosaria within was very rich. The secret to achieving this was to let the mind fill in the details as to how things actually looked and sounded, etc.
(Although I'm sure at the time the designers were just thinking "shit, this is the best we can do in 64K of memory, oh well!".)