Another Fallon clip - Lost Parody preview, looks funny, at least if you're a Lost fan...

Pants on the ground - the original

(If this link disappears, just search the Internet, it's everywhere by now!)

And the Jimmy Fallon/Roots/Randy Jackson version

A fun little time waster, found via Download Squad

Pulsus game

Drag the dots to the screen to repel particles. You want the "sinks" to fill up with particles before "source" is all out of them.

Colored dots attract like-colored particles and repel all the rest. Colored sinks attract all the particles, but only like-colored particles help them fill - the rest lower their meter.

There's 20-some levels, only a couple really challenging ones, but fun all-around.

WebGL draft released...

Yesterday, the Khronos group released a draft Standard for WebGL, a shader-based API for browser-based 3D. So, now that there is a standard for plugin-free 3D, we should see some really amazing web-based 3d apps. Ones that will blow away the Flash based (meaning software rendering) apps built on top of APIs like Papervision3D, Away3D, Sandy 3D, etc.

While Chrome and Firefox already had some capabilities for hardware rendering, a common standard will mean faster app developments. The WebGL page mentions Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Opera as members of the Working Group, noticeably omitting Microsoft.

While I am happy that this will allow web 3d applications to take advantage of 3D hardware, I could see that it could also lead to vastly different experiences across machines. At least the experience with the 3D flash apps was similar from one machine to the next - we could see a much wider performance gap between netbooks and desktops when trying to run on 3D hardware.

I am hoping for a quick and easy way to import Collada files, so some of my data sphere work can be retained (demo embedded in this post, hit the read more link below).

For all those folks whose job is better shown than described - here's a 4 step process for getting a pocket-size picture book -

1. Gather about 8 pictures of your work
2. Layout in Word (or google docs or acrobat.com) on exactly 8 pages and use Save As PDF
3. Download and run the Windows-only PDF to PocketMod converter from PocketMod.com
4. Print and fold (see the video from Pocketmod.com, embedded after the break)

Now, when you are mingling (say, at a Christmas party) and people ask you what you do, you can pull out a credit-card sized 8 page booklet and show them.

Notes -
I first tried to use PowerPoint to layout everything in landscape, but the PDF to Pocketmod converter changed all the aspect ratios - it expects Portrait - so I found Word to be almost as simple to layout. If you want Landscape oriented pictures, it's easiest to rotate them in your OS first then drag them into Word. If your version of Word doesn't have Save As PDF, you'll have to use gdocs or acrobat.com - they both can download as PDF.

Try to tell your same story that you would otherwise when you are asked what you do, but this time you'll have pictures. If you have to put words in the document, make sure to use a large enough font to be read at 1/8 the size.

Epix HD is still giving away weekend invites at The Invite Page. I got one within 10 minutes of requesting it, to be activated over the long weekend.

I couldn't find any way to just get a text listing of their current movies, so I tried to generate one. These links will all say "Watch" even though you can't watch them all, but it just goes to their page.

Is there anything there worth watching? We watched Benjamin Buttons a couple weeks ago on their site, the Picture Quality was very high.

Full List of movies (as of 11/25/09) after the break...

Check out this video from a PhD student at Cambridge:

He generates a point cloud from a moving 3D model, tesselates, and textures it in real time. I guess the studios all do that too, but if it can be done with a cheap-o webcam, then anybody can do it. For more, get the paper from his site

I've browsed through Amazon's free downloads section previously, I think I even tried to get their interface a couple years ago, but it required some huge download from Microsoft that I didn't feel like installing at the time (possibly .net 3.0?).

It may be worth checking out their MP3 downloader again for some of the free stuff that's there now. I'd imagine by now they've got the kinks worked out...

Or maybe I'll just stick with whatever's free in iTunes this week, to avoid downloading more software.

According to Netflix's site, they'll soon be offering streaming through the PS3 via a BD-Live disc to be sent for free to Netflix subscribers. The service has been offered to XBox live Gold members for a long time now, but this will provide a much cheaper option to folks who don't game online (the Gold service has an annual fee, PSN does not), or for cable-ditchers.

Seen on blu-ray.com.

Previously "limited" to several Blu-Ray players, some Bravia tv's, home computers, TiVo Set-top-boxes, or dedicated streaming devices like the Roku, this provides one more option for Netflix to get in the living room. For folks with a playstation already, it keeps the cost of admission relatively low.

Saw this article on DownloadSquad.

Ninite looks like a great way to batch-download all the Free downloads you need on a fresh system (for instance, that new Windows 7 machine). They call themselves the "easiest way to get apps," and can set up download of a lot of commonly downloaded software, both free trials of commercial programs and full versions of open source equivalents. Most of my most common tools are part of the options -

Firefox (and all the other browsers), Notepad++, OpenOffice, Audacity, iTunes, Picasa, Paint.net, Gimp, Flash, and even some not-so-common ones that I use, like the great Filezilla ftp client and Eclipse, the highly customizable IDE.

So, if you've got a clean slate, this may be a good starting point!