Lucius 郭暉

10 December 2011 • 1:58 am

It’s Sakamoto-san to you. #nichijou

5 October 2011 • 9:12 pm

342 notes

philnoto:

R.I.P. Steve Jobs - a true visionary.

(via traceyjohn)

#Steve Jobs #Apple

5 October 2011 • 12:35 pm

5 notes

I just checked here to see how much it will be to upgrade to the iPhone 4S, and it looks like I’ll be waiting until November 25. If I upgrade before then, I have to pay $250 extra for the iPhone 4S. (See the chart above.)

Another reason to wait until November is that the release date is 10/14, just days before I leave for Japan, and I don’t want to be setting up a new phone a few days before I go on a trip, and be using a new version of iOS. Even if there aren’t any major bugs in the OS, a lot of apps probably don’t work that well with iOS 5.

There’s also the option of switching to Verizon and paying the early termination fee to AT&T, which is calculated this way: $325 minus $10 for each full month that you’ve been on contract. I got the iPhone 4 when it came out 13 months ago, so the fee works out to $195.

So if I really wanted the new iPhone 4S, it would be cheaper to pay the $195 early termination fee and switch to Verizon than to pay an extra $250 to stay with AT&T.

As to why I think AT&T knows exactly what they’re doing, I think there was at least one high-level meeting on the pricing, and they figured that they could profit from people who want the new iPhone but won’t or can’t switch carriers, maybe because AT&T is the only carrier with service in their neighborhood. Price it just high enough above the termination fee so that the increased revenue offsets the people switching.

3 October 2011 • 2:44 pm

10 notes

I made this over the weekend.

#atari #2600 #stella #kernel

24 September 2011 • 4:55 pm

3 notes

Azuma Kiyohiko (あずあきよひこ), author of Yotsuba&! and Azumanga Daioh, has a blog, I just found out.

#yotsuba azumanga neko cat

19 September 2011 • 5:46 pm

2 notes

2011-09-19 Monday — Arduino

10:32am I got up about half an hour ago since I was up late last night reading about the Arduino and thinking of things I could do with it. It’s kind of hard to do much because I don’t have a soldering iron with me right now, and most of the stuff I got is in kit form, so I’ve only been able to play with things I can breadboard.

One thing about the Arduino is that since it’s a microcontroller, you do a lot of programming to get it to do interesting things. While you could hook up a lot of smart equipment with its own processing built-in, the fun is buying a cheap kit with a lot of dumb parts that you hook up to the pins on the Arduino, and let the microcontroller do a lot of the hard work through programs that do things like output NTSC video for a TV, or display things on a large grid of LEDs.

This got me researching the Atari 2600 and how it worked. The Arduino Uno, which is what I have, has a 16 MHz 8-bit processor, and it’s much more powerful than the 2600’s CPU. The 2600 did have a custom chip called the TIA, which created the color video and 2-voice audio output for the TV. The Arduino can only output black and white and 1 voice of audio without special circuitry, and it does it all through software. Obviously, the TV interface of the 2600 is a specialized thing and most Arduino units don’t need that kind of stuff.

The Arduino is pretty cheap, at $35 for the Uno, so there’s the possibility of connecting several of the together. I did find a SID emulator that runs on the Arduino CPU, and that’s all it does, so it needs another Arduino to control it.

15 September 2011 • 2:20 am

309 notes

In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don’t really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that’s called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time.

Gert Dumbar (via banquethall)

(via viafrank)

#gert dumbar #quote

15 September 2011 • 2:10 am

2,351 notes

(via itsinsamity)

30 August 2011 • 6:25 pm

34 notes

theinternetisfullofwonder:

This is awesome - Jesse Eisemann, who illustrates and writes for CollegeHumor and Dorkly.com, created an interactive map of New York City based on the style of Super Mario World!

My favorite bits are the ghosts floating over old landmark places that are either graveyards or presumably haunted by their former occupants. Also, the mario bridge representation of a real bridge is pretty cool.

Oh, and that Mario at the top? He’s Hipster Mario in Jortveralls.

You can explore the interactive version here.

(via thecoolnews)

#Super Mario Land #super mario bros #super mario #NYC #New York City #map #8 bit #pixels #pixellated #art #artwork #illustration #design #graphic design #cool

29 August 2011 • 2:34 am

15 notes

merlin:

Affordances

The “car stereo” in our Zipcar. Over 25 buttons and knobs—not including modes.

Tight.

I just finished reading _Design of Everyday Things_ by Don Norman again, and in it he said something about mapping, where if each button is limited in what function it does, and it maps one-to-one to features in the conceptual model, it’s a better design than something with fewer buttons but lots of modes. Also, affordances.

29 August 2011 • 2:30 am

28,035 notes

(via pikalachan)

23 August 2011 • 1:17 pm

141 notes

(via steffraven)

(Source: ivorytwilight)

#MY CHILDHOOD #Sailor Moon