Student reveals the origins of his real-life Portal turret. Making a working turret that tracks movement and shoots at its targets is challenging enough, but Penn State University student Kevin Swanson had an extra objective for his final Advanced Mechatronics project; it had to look like a turret from Portal, the popular puzzle game/shooter from Valve.
“My professor, who is obsessed with Portal, told us as a semi-joke [that he'll] only allow it if the turret looks like the Portal turret,” Swanson told GamesBeat in an exclusive interview. “I just kind of ran with it from there.” The robot uses an IP webcam to track targets and fire bullets. “The idea started with us playing with one of those USB desk turrets, and we wanted to automate it with a camera for our final project,” said Swanson.
Don’t worry, this machine isn’t deadly. “It’s not done yet,” Swanson told us. You can see the robot in action and learn more about how it works from Kevin’s video, posted below. [vb_gallery id=429686] Don't let cyber attacks kill your game! Start writing here… The Making of Octicons. Gstreamer and OpenCV for image stabilisation « Le coin à Guij. I am now back from Prague where I gave a talk on image stabilisation (and my holiday pictures).
Hopefully a video of the talk will soon be online. In the meantime, I would like to explain a bit my efforts in written form, with some details slightly updated from the talk (the code progressed a bit since then). UPDATE: The talk is now online. I got interested in the issues of image stabilisation through a helium balloon photography project in which I participated. I want to make a nice time lapse video from the pictures I have taken, but they were taken from a camera that was moving, which would make the result very shaky without some kind of postprocessing. Thankfully, I work at Igalia, which means that on top of my personal time, I could spend on this project some company time (what we call internally our hackfest time, of up to 5 hours per week). Original problem statement I have around 4h30 of pictures taken from a balloon 100 metres high. Standing on the shoulders of giants.
Mattwilliamson/arduino-sms-alarm. Japh(r) by Chris Strom: 366 or How I Tricked Myself into Being Awesome. Like most developers, I am an introvert, so it is hard to say this: I am awesome.
Fuuuuuu.... I can't even leave it at that. I look at so many amazing people in the Ruby, Javascript, and other communities that actually are amazing and I feel like I haven't done anything. But even so, looking back at the 366 days of the last year, what I did was, well... amazing. I wrote three books on very different technologies that I knew nothing about. I wrote The SPDY Book, which is still the only book on SPDY: Three months later, I co-authored Recipes with Backbone(.js) with Nick Gauthier: Three months later, I wrote the first book on Dart, Dart for Hipsters: Each of these technologies has two things in common:They are game changing (or at least possibly)I knew nothing about them before I started writing them.
How did I do it? Blogged every, single day. 35 Beautiful Landing Page Design Examples to Drool Over [With Critiques] A professionally designed landing page can improve your conversion rates. This post is all about showcasing awesome landing pages, to give you some inspiration for your next design. It’s worth stating that no page is ever perfect – or conversely, every page can be better. With this in mind, we’ll be offering perspective on what makes each page special or interesting, while providing some insight into what we would try out in an A/B test experiment to optimize for higher conversions. But what is it that makes a landing page design effective? There are many factors, but the principle reasons are an adherence to the fundamental rules of conversion centered design: Note: All of these landing pages were built using the Unbounce Landing Page Platform – huzzah! For this post we’re going to do something different. 1.
Critiqued by: Oli What I like It’s sexy: Predictable response? Things I’d change or test Site*: www.Manpacks.com 2. Site*: FluidSurveys.com 3. The form header: Apply now? 4. ChronoZoom. Taylor’s Nuke Site. Raspberry Pi Training Videos.