Impossible Figure: 2011-09-18

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

As I managed to make two illusions one month these posts sit around for more than a month before they are being published. It’s a nice time margin to have, but it also means what I have written about my life (if ever so seldom) might be old news. Right now I am still tired, because I’m still trying to take my motorcycle license before the season ends (snow and ice arrives), if there have been no post about it before this I failed :( or just got too tired, either one.

Note: I did manage to take my license on the 3rd of October :D My computer kind of chokes on editing together all the video material I have collected though.. hrm.

Levels
2011-09-18

Linework | Fillwork

Starting from the left one single floor turns into four floors, then into one floor again, and at the far right four floors again.

Posted in Illusions | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

I Love My GoPro!

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

The post title is also the name of a contest held by GoPro! Entrants get to caption four photos and/or creative entries and submit them for a chance to win an HD Hero 2 including mounting accessories. The top spot out of the top ten in each category also get a sponsorship, but that is entirely judged by a jury, that is later. First you have to get into the top ten that wins a camera :)

To sort out the finalists there is currently a public voting period where participants get to fish for votes in any way they can. Voting is done via the Facebook app so you need to have an account there. When you vote you get to sign in, and as that has made some people hesitant I contacted GoPro on their fan page about it and this is what they said:

You need to login to vote because otherwise it’s too easy for vote fraud to occur. We just want to keep things legit. We promise not to spam anyone.

I don’t think you have to worry about your privacy or personal information, and I GoPro has been very good to me when it comes to support etc so I trust them :) In any case, I submitted four photo entries which are displayed below. Sadly I didn’t have time to complete any artistic entries but photos would have to do.

So, if you like what you see, please vote for me on Facebook :) Thanks!

There are only two more days of voting left, it ends the 17th, so don’t hesitate ;) To fish for votes I spent quite some time yesterday chatting with people on Facebook which I hadn’t contacted in a long time. I have to say that this is something I should do more often, as I got quite a few nice exchanges.

As anyone who knows me can vouch for I’m awfully bad at keeping in contact, for some reason, I mostly get around to it if I have an actual inquiry to the person. It did feel a bit awkward to start most conversations by asking for a vote though, it’s totally not my style to ask for favors as a very manly manage-on-your-own man, but there are a few circumstances here that drove up my motivation. Allow me to elaborate.

If we read the official rules page we find the following text in section 2. Bolds added by me.

Entrants may submit entries in the following two (2) categories with the entry form (each such entry deemed a “Submission”): 

a. Submit a photograph (not a frame or screen grab) taken by you with a Sponsor camera (an “Entry Photo”) that made you think about Sponsor camera, We want to see that epic moment, the photo that you showed all your friends, that photo you could only get using a GoPro camera. Photo must be captioned “I Love My GoPro!”; or

b. Submit a GIF, JPEG, PNG or other supported digital ?le of an original work (such as a drawing, painting, sculpture, or the like) created by you that depicts a Sponsor camera (an “Entry Creative Work”) that you believe demonstrates what is unique, inspiring, and/or awesome about Sponsor’s products, fans, or the images they produce. Entry must be captioned “I Love My GoPro!”;

Each Submission that advances to the Final Round (defined below) will be judged against the other Submissions in the applicable category as further described in Section 5 below.

Submissions will be accepted only during the Submission Period. Up to four (4) Entry Photos and/or four (4) Entry Creative Works per person, household and/or email address are permitted, however, Submissions must be made all at one time as a single upload. Entrants submitting more than eight (8) total Submissions may be disqualified.

This is interesting because the majority of the submissions fail to meet these requirements. There are numerous photos that are clearly screen-shots or grabs; some even contain the media player or the entire OS, some are clearly not shot with a GoPro and almost none of the photographs has been captioned “I Love My GoPro!”. Actually, hardly any of the creative works have a valid caption either. There are also people that have submitted more than four photos.

In section 3 we can read:

c. If a Submission does not meet the criteria set forth herein, Sponsor will disqualify and discard the Submission either immediately or at any time during the Promotion.

This means that I probably have a fighting chance :) which is why I go to some lengths to gather votes, thus also, this blog post.

In closing, to be honest, one of my photos most likely does not meet all the requirements either. You are supposed to have written consents or releases for the people that can be identified in your submissions, and I think it will be hard to get that from everyone in the wedding picture. I do wonder when someone is seen as identifiable thuogh?

Thanks again if you voted for me :) It will be interesting to see how this goes!

Posted in Photography | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Google Reader is Awesome

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

Or well, it was awesome. Now it’s just a popular RSS feed aggregator.

Early this week Google pushed the new version of Google Reader onto users. The fact sharing would be removed had been announced a week prior to the update, but really, that had sounded like a bad nightmare and too illogical to be true. Why would they remove such a wonderful feature? To keep my sanity I just assumed that they would get their senses together or that it was misinformation. But alas, here we are, the new version is out and I will explain why I think the product is so much worse now.

Disclaimer: I love most things Google, am an avid and advanced user of many of their services and I convert people to Gmail and Docs as much as I dare. Perhaps I am overly negative here as I am used to their updates being, you know, improvements.

New Spacious Interface

Usually I really look forward to Google’s service updates, it normally brings more and better functionality, usability and streamlining! But lately the general Google interface has gotten fairly unoptimized. There is a ton of whitespace mostly everywhere, large margins, overly simplified graphics and void of color. In Google Docs I instantly changed to the Compact display mode to get more onto the screen at once, that actually makes it look usable again. The upcoming Gmail interface will have the same display option but oddly enough Google Reader currently lacks it.

In addition to wasting lots of screen real estate the new interface has hardly no distinctive separation of areas, has colored just about everything in tones of gray and it feels slower. Though, the speed issues might depend on the service as a whole as the update seems to have introduced a few issues.

As well as making everything float together by removing any kind of borders or boxes around different areas they also hide the vertical scrollbar for your list if you don’t hover it, this means your eyes have no guidance and the page is harder to use. And for some reason they make the already read posts very visible by making the entire row a stark contrast gray while unread posts are white and like most other things melt into the background. New content is where I want to have my attention, now I get distracted by the read posts instead! And I also missclick the title for the feed because I think it’s an unread post! Gah, too much white everywhere!

The last thing I have to comment on regarding the interface are the icons for folders and tags (what’s the difference really?). They are now dully gray instead of happily yellow. Actually, as I mentioned above, mostly everything is gray, even titles and links are black instead of blue! The entire site feels dead, lifeless. I have only read one university class in the subject machine-human interaction and interface, but going away from very old conventions about how hyperlinks look and work should be a big no-no. If you want to be user friendly, use what people are familiar with, even if it might be a bit uglier.

Enough about the interface, they can always be worked around, this next section is what really bombed the entire service.

New Integration with Google+

You know, what I was waiting for was for Google+ to get integrated into Google Reader. I wanted a special feed for the stream(s) on Google+ so I wouldn’t have to constantly monitor the site, which is how I currently get to use Facebook and Twitter, it’s far from time efficient or convenient. This integration should have been possible as Google+ and Google Reader both are under the Google umbrella.

But, Google did it the other way around. Instead of accessing features of Google+ in Google Reader you now have to go into Google+ to access features that were previously found in Google Reader. They completely removed the ability to share items and likes internally in Google Reader and replaced it with the ability to +1 and share posts via your Google+ stream. In addition to removing the actual shares, they also removed all your followers and who you were following. You can download the data so it is not completely lost, but the question is how many another service can actually use the data?

The entire concept with using RSS feeds for me was to get site updates in an inbox, like email, you have unread and read items, you have it all collected in one place, you can easily browse what you want to read by titles and you can choose to read at any point in time. None of these features exists for shares when using Google+. Nothing in a stream is marked as read or unread, to see what different people have shared I have to browse to their profiles, everything in the streams is mixed with other content, if you don’t keep up with the streams posts will quickly vanish down the bottom of the page where you will never discover them.

How is this an improvement? It makes sharing stuff just like sharing on Facebook, and guess what, I shared at least 100 times more things in Google Reader than I do on Facebook. A social network is the venue for personal updates, pictures and all that kind of fluff, and spamming the stream with videos and news would quickly get obnoxious and people would be hiding all my updates or unfriend me. In Google Reader when I spammed YouTube videos people could easily pick out what they found interesting and skip the rest, mark all as read.

The last thing about sharing is that it is no longer casual or inviting to get access to someone’s shares. Previously you could follow someone and you would get their shares in your Google Reader. Now it’s the other way around yet again, the person that shares would have to add you to his/her reader circle. Instead of opting in by yourself you have to personally request to be included. It changes the experience of sharing from that of listening to a street musician to trying to get into a disco.

How to fix it

So, how could Google make this update less emotionally distressing for affected users? Just integrate Google+ with Google Reader as well! Give me a special folder in Google Reader with all of my friends’ shares, include a comment system that bumps all comments back to Google+. Even if everything else like status updates and pictures were included in the folder it would be closer to the old Shared Items than nothing at all.

In the end, If I do like Google wants me to and start to share everything I shared in Google Reader on Google+ instead, that would be the only thing the service would be good for because my stream would be too cluttered for normal updates to stand out. How is this solution even a good alternative?

Reactions on the Internet

During the few days after the update there has been a bit more news about this than anyone would expect. Looking at twitter I am far from alone missing the sharing function or criticizing the interface. Brian Shih, a former product manager for Google Reader, shared his thoughts. Kevin Fox, a former Google Reader lead designer has offered his services. I will also provide links in random order to The Atlantic Wire, William Toll, Googlesystem, TechCrunch, Andrew R H Girdwood, Business Insider, Robin Sloan, The Atlantic, Adweek, Garrett Guillotte, Forbes.

Even if it is a free service that I am very thankful for it is hard to ignore the senseless removal of functionality. I still love you Google, just not as much :/

Bonus: I got an unexpected outcry from a friend. Buzz is gone! Apparently she followed my blog, youtube uploads and tweets via Buzz! See, it was actually used by someone!

Update: You can still access and manage your followers and who you are following through the Google Dashboard. There are also extensions for Chrome and Firefox to access shared stuff again, it’s not perfect as it does not attribute shared items to users in the list and comments are not there yet, but it’s better than nothing! As it was made in just a few days I think more features might be coming soon. As long as Google doesn’t shut down the backend stuff, I guess we can expect that at some point but as long as they allow users to download their data they might keep it alive…

Posted in Internet | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Tower Defense Graphics

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

This will be a really quick post, as the project itself was done in a hurry.

I have always liked tower defense games, not sure why. It’s not like I play them all the time, but I enjoy them whenever I bump into (a well made) one.

It so came to pass that my brother and his friend were coding a tower defense game as a university assignment and they needed someone to make more graphics for them, as their first slave had kind of quit. I decided to whip something together and it was actually fun :) It took me a few evenings but it felt refreshing.

In the game the monsters start at the spawning portal and try to find the best way to the end castle. As in any tower defense game you build offensive towers, earn credits when the towers kill monsters and the challenge is come up with the right strategy to survive the level.

I made the monsters below from scratch and while I did not make the original towers (green and red) I butched together a blue tower and added the different upgrade stages. I also drew the spawning portal and the quite weird end castle.

Wohoo, they are running like crazy! The animations are made either by reversing a single picture  horizontally or simply by cycling two separate frames. The different color versions represent different amounts of evil, as the monsters turn more evil (dangerous) the further you get in the game!

 

The towers have five levels where fire power, range and fire rate are upgraded sporadically. The obvious graphical steps are bare, iron, bronze, silver and gold where gold really is a bit illogical as it is a fairly soft metal, but it looks nice :P

I think the castle gave me the most trouble, this is version two. In contrast the portal was quite straight forward to make. In addition I also made some particle graphics and projectiles, but they’re so few pixels I will leave them out :)

If they eventually put the game online I’ll provide a link!

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Impossible Figure: 2011-08-30

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

I made this one in a very mentally exhausted state. The week prior I had taken a driving test which failed (more on that later) and there was also the farewell parties (yes plural) of our pastor family at church, they were moving away as they got work someplace else, after 8 years. So yeah, my mind was in turmoil and very worn out. Perhaps that explains the color scheme I picked this time around, fairly desaturated.

Cage
2011-08-30

Linework | Fillwork

In the bottom left corner green is up top, while in the top right corner it is at the bottom. And in those two corners the three layers are spaced by pillars, while in the other two corners they are intersecting so that green and red actually touches.

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Impossible Figure: 2011-07-25

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

This one took way more time than I had anticipated… and looking at the thumbnail now the coloring might make it a bit confusing. Looking at the Linework version might make it easier to understand. It sure is the most color rich piece so far though!

Steps
2011-07-25

Linework | Fillwork

Even though the material folds over itself in the middle, the outer border of it is perfectly level and flat.

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Company Photo Book

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

This April 1st the company group I currently work for allowed for employees to take photos during the workday, because the date was the 20th anniversary of the group, and the reason behind this exception was that a photo book would be created out of all these pictures. To motivate people to take pictures they arranged a photo contest where people could submit their best pictures for a chance to win weekend trips or a restaurant visit. The theme was “One Day at Swedwood” and the single rule was that “The photo must represent Swedwood according to the employee“, where Swedwood is the company group, and well… I did my best to represent what a workday at Swedwood means to me!

Here I had propped the camera on top of a fire proof cabinet inside our tiny server room, the shutter was set to 30 seconds. For me it was almost entirely dark in the room, as my night vision is kind of sucky, and the lighting you see is generated by the status LEDs on various equipment. A fun fact is that the screen was set to just 1/100 in brightness, the lowest setting before it would turn entirely black!

In the book my picture was featured on the cover (!!) and as picture #6 on page 17. Unluckily only the five first pictures out of all 136 were rewarded with prizes, but I was close! And interestingly the picture which won the first prize was not featured on the cover, only two out of the five winning pictures were! Perhaps they won due to what they represented and not because of how they looked :)

To my surprise they also included my picture description, unedited. I was kind of mocking the entire concept of representing a happy company by making a very dark and lonely picture. The description reads:

“This picture represents how it feels to be the sole member of the local IT department, which means doing most work in solitude with mindless machines as your only company.”

Posted in Photography | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Impossible Figure: 2011-06-28

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

I forgot to upload this right when I made it, like I usually do, so I have little memory of what I did at the time! Oh yeah, it was during the weeks before my vacation and work was super stressy so I had hardly any brain juice left… I didn’t want to remember that -_- I really do like the look of this one though.

Rocket
2011-06-28

Linework | Fillwork

From the right to the left six bars turn into one bar and two shapes.

Posted in Illusions | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Jumping the Rocks

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

My neighbor and friend randomly said that we were going to Lysekil the next day, he proposed this quite late in the evening. I was first and foremost added to the group as they needed a sober driver on the way back, or at least that is how it appeared ;) In any case I got talked into it and packed some stuff so I could enjoy the cliffs, like you might remember I did two years ago! (Wow, time sure flies… and I had no beard back then, shocking!)

This time the weather was much warmer and sunnier! Before going to the cliffs we walked around town for quite a bit, so I managed to get dehydrated and my body temperature was probably higher than normal, as well as my energy somewhat depleted… so when I got started on running around the rocky landscape I got exhausted really quickly. This was not ideal, but I figured as I had brought all the gear with me and dressed up for the occasion I would have make do as good as I could manage. The gear I am talking about is a bunch of protection as well as my GoPro HD Hero on a chest harness, to document my escapades. Sadly I managed to scratch the lens of the external shell while trying to survive, but it’s quite economical to replace, I just have to find a good place to order replacements from.

After my run I took a few swims with my friends, who had stayed sunbathing where I started out from, and when we were going back to the car it was much easier to run around on the cliffs. I think my main problem before was that I was simply too hot. The sun shone very brightly this day.

As you might have noticed I managed to crunch up my fingers when I did an careless jump. They are still sore and a bit hard to bend, but I hope they’ll be OK! What surprised me (in mid air) was that the surface I was landing on was actually at an angle and not horizontal, which was what I was expecting. This also explains my panicky shout :)

Will I do it again? Hopefully, if I don’t get into even worse shape than this time! And perhaps with a different camera placement, though it is quite interesting to see the arms like that, I think. We’ll see, perhaps in another two years!

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Ryds Grottor

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Andreas Aronsson

I was supposed to blog this a month or more ago, but I’ve been very distracted… but now I am motivated as this will prelude another blog post :)

About 1½ months ago I accompanied two of my (crazy?) friends, which you might recognize by now, to check out a pretty local cave system, which apparently had no real caves. It was created in a land slide ages ago. I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, but I figured I would exaggerate so I put on knee and elbow protection, gloves and brought a skating helmet! Though, as I would discover, it was actually the right thing to do!

I had imagined we would have a quiet walk around the area looking at rock formations, but the terrain was a bit rougher than that! I will leave you with a number of pictures with explanatory titles :) I have to say I did enjoy the climbing, not so much the cave exploring, but I might get used to that eventually. The camera I used was my always-in-my-pocket camera, a Casio, I can reveal that it doesn’t feel so well after this adventure… sadly I have lent my weather and bump proof hiking camera to the very people I was adventuring with, but they had not brought it this time :x

Posted in Real Life | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments