on the shore of the ultimate sea

There are a lot of reasons to love this, and the rest of the Kinect-hacking going on by a bunch of awesome like-minded types (@openkinect is doing a great job of aggregating) around the world. It’s open-source software iteration at the speed of human resourcefulness. I’d reckon the Microsoft engineers that built Kinect are chuckling to themselves at how quickly people are solving problems they had themselves.

But the reason I love it most is it feels like only a matter of days before someone puts together a fairly accurate motion-tracking airsoft turret to keep the cats off the couch.

(Also watch Theo & Emily’s Interactive Puppet Prototype.)

XBox Kinect running on OS X with source code on Vimeo on Vimeo

A nice short one from The Might Boosh‘s Noel Fielding (as the Impaler) and Richard Ayoade (who directed). And a great tune that’s dying for someone to take a stab at a remix. (Hardee har har)

About a month ago a forwarded email arrived.

It was so staggering, actions were forced.

The note, laden in artistic pronouncements and full-of-itselfness, begged for an extension; a dramatic reading was considered, but it turned out only a full video could to the thing justice. After all, a 1500-word yearly update email sent to dozens of people deserves the highest degree of satire you can muster.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m an earnest man. But even sincerity, in extreme, is funny as hell. (Viz. Kenneth on 30 Rock.)

Who was the sender? An unknown personage, but clearly a modern-day Benjamin Franklin, part writer, part political organizer, all full of Brooklyn potential and privilege and so indicative of our generation’s rampaging self-importance.

We christened him Eric Anton Schechter-Oblomov; this is his yearly update, verbatim, brought to life as best we could.

A Letter From Brooklyn from Eric Anton Schechter-Oblomov on Vimeo.

Read the original email

Israeli musician Kutiman decided to mix a ton of different YouTube videos together and make an album, Thru-You.

Here’s his explanation:

The project’s yielded some great results, like this number, which has Burial-ish qualities. YouTuber downwithtube has most of the videos posted.

“The unthinkable has become commonplace.” Rich Boehne, President & CEO, EW Scripps Co

Here’s another downer vid.

RIP, Rocky Mountain News, April 23, 1859 – February 27, 2009.

‘That was a good paper,’ they’ll say.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

It’s not always hysterical japes and fun videos around these parts.

Despite proximity to South Padre Island, the border town of Reynosa probably isn’t the right place to dip across for some tacos al pastor when you’re on Spring Break.

You might want to wait until after you’ve had your morning bagel for this one. (They were still picking up the unused grenades off the sidewalk a few days later.)

There’s some interesting analysis at Exiled Online but all you really need to know is these folks were likely involved and their recent tactics are far from the norm.

This doozy comes via the always classy Foggy Monocle and was originally posted at Everything is Terrible, a place you should visit as frequently as you can handle hilarity. Which, for me, like the rats in the above video, is 32 times in two and a half hours. Uncontrollable cravings, indeed.

Here’s the daily jam, and it’s not even noon!

Chairlift “Evident Utensil”

You should definitely click through and watch this in HD. Datamoshing!

Here’s how it works (according to teraflop on the MeFi thread): “video codecs like MPEG-4 use motion compensation to cut down on the bit rate. Only a few keyframes of the video are encoded in full, about one every few seconds; the rest (“predicted” frames) store a rough estimate of how much each block of pixels has shifted since the previous frame, along with just enough actual pixels to make up the difference between the estimate and the real picture. So if there’s a single moving object on a static background, all that needs to be stored is the area of the background that’s been uncovered since the previous frame.

In this case, what I suspect they did is encode their raw video clips with no keyframes (except the very first one), then spliced them together, so the decoder applies the motion vectors to the wrong original image. It looks like they also duplicated the same frame several times in some places, to get those swirls of color.”

The vid was directed by Ray Tintori of the amazing “Electric Feel” interactive video for MGMT. Tintori’s doing some really exciting stuff lately.