KJH World » Cool

Cal Marching Band Sends Up a Tribute to Video Games

kjh — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:00:53 +0000

The Cal marching band has obviously put in a great deal of practice into pulling off this really well choreographed tribute routine to some well known video games over the years. They start off with the very well known and obvious Pong, then Tetris and a few more including Super Mario. Of course, the music also matches the video games being portrayed. If you’ve ever played any video games and enjoy creativity in its various forms, this is worth a look.

Gorgeous photos of Earth’s Islands as seen from Space

kjh — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:00:14 +0000

Here are some beautiful photographs of some of the world’s islands as seen from space.

My favorite photo is this one of the Maldives. May I have a small one please?

A rather unorthodox guitar ‘duet’

kjh — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:56:54 +0000

This is simply amazing. I thought there were 2 remarkable things – stop reading and just watch if you don’t want me to give it away. First, they picked parts that could be played on different strings (at least it looked that way to me) and then their amazing timing when one was picking what the other one was fingering.

Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

kjh — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:47:56 +0000

Today’s presidential inauguration has been covered thousands, possibly even millions of times in various ways, my own entry is but a blip in the media coverage. This blog entry is mostly for my own benefit, for my future self, the one that will look back and remember how much of a historic day this was in my lifetime. Our lifetimes.

If you haven’t seen President Obama’s inauguration acceptance speech, then thanks to YouTube and citizen journalists, here is but one version.

The lines that resonated with me the most were:

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

We will restore science to its rightful place.

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth;

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

Covering CES 2009

kjh — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:55:25 +0000

Just a quick update. I’m in Las Vegas again covering the Consumer Electronic Show once more. How to follow: one or more of these:

Gizmos for Geeks’ RSS feed
Gizmos for Geeks’ Twitter feed
My FriendFeed

Ron Howard asks you to take 5 mins to consider Obama

kjh — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:15:00 +0000

Ron Howard shares his view of the upcoming election by getting back into some very old TV characters and recruiting some of those shows’ stars. Nice mini-movie – take a look (4 mins).

VR Display/Head Tracking using Wiimote

kjh — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:48:07 +0000

Sometimes, technology begets technology. Hand a hacker/creative/smart person some cool technology and watch them take it apart and/or create something new out of it. In this case, researcher, CMU Ph.D. student, Johnny C. Lee, has taken a Wii remote (Wiimote) and used it to create a desktop virtual reality head tracking system. Words don’t describe this as well as the video, so watch the video already. Obviously, this is the future of video games and possibly a precursor to immersing entertainment.

Mr. Lee has described the whole project on his website as well as provided software that he wrote for downloading. The page also describes other projects he has put together using Wiimotes. I wonder how long it took for Nintendo to come knocking on his door?

One of his other cool side projects was taking photos of bottles being smashed with a hammer and capturing a frozen split-second of the action in mid-smash. Click the picture for a blown up, clear photo.

“Rock Band” Rocks

kjh — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 21:27:09 +0000

This weekend, I had a chance to play the latest music play-a-long video game, Rock Band, which is the natural successor to the Guitar Hero line of games. Now, don’t get me wrong, Guitar Hero is an amazing game, but Rock Band blows it away because it’s so much more fun to get a bunch of your friends together collaborating on a game. It’s also more diverse, because now you get to try to master 4 different instruments/vocals. You’ll want to keep switching up so everyone gets a chance on everything (guitar, drums, bass and vocals). You’ll soon figure out who’s good at what.

Available for Xbox 360 and Playstation (2 and 3). Make sure you get the bundle with the drums, guitar, bass and mic if you don’t already have any instruments.

By the way, for those of you non-musicians who have played Rock Band already, you know how hard the drums can be (and they say drummers are the dumbest in the band…) Take a look at this video of a drummer playing Metallica’s “…And Justice for All”. Ah, so that’s how you do it… Right, just a few years of practice and I’m so there.

The kind of Scrabble game you want to have

kjh — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 18:36:18 +0000

There I was losing pretty badly at a Scrabble game, and with a last ditch gamble, I pulled it out on the last play of the game!

Click the image above to see the larger size of the game board at the end.

Here’s the post-mortem: 3 tiles left in the bag, I have [RUSHIS, blank] in my rack. Lots of words if I can turn that I into an E, and at least 1 place to play them. So I take a count of the Es on the board and decide to gamble.

I play the I in a 2-letter word, and pull. Got it! Got the E. My worthy opponent plays 3 tiles and empties the bag. I lay down ‘CRUSHES’ on the next turn. Game over right then and there. Yes, I intentionally chose ‘C’ for the blank tile. Hehe.

CRUSHES was worth 86 points, so you can see how far behind I was.

YAPTA – Track Your Flight Prices; Get Refunds

kjh — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:52:07 +0000

As you are well aware, airlines change prices all the time. What you may not know is that if after you’ve bought a ticket, and the price drops, you’re actually eligible in many cases to get a refund or perhaps a voucher. Since you’re probably not willing to go (re-)checking flight prices every day or even more often, it was just a matter of time before a bunch of folks just like you thought it was time to automate that dang thing. Enter YAPTA. Weird name. Great service. Just sign up for a free account, and every time you buy a plane ticket, just enter that info and YAPTA will track it for you.

Oh, but you want even more automation you say? Have no fear. There’s the YAPTA Tagger, which is essentially a browser add-on that displays a little button next to your flight when you use a major travel site (like Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, etc.) so you can quickly add it to your account. My (minor) slap on the wrist to YAPTA is that there is no Firefox version available. Yet. I’ll let you know when it’s out or you can sign up for their alert yourself.