So right before the movie hits the theaters, I decided to mash up and picture of how the characters appeared in my imagination. I stopped reading the Potter books right after I saw the first movie. It brutally murdered my feelings for the characters. I’d hate to see Ender’s Game movie come out and I managed to skip all the trailers for the HG film.

Feel encouraged to do the same! and may the odds be ever in your favor.

You guessed right, the screengrab is taken from Shaun of The Dead. In this scene, Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his band of survivors, bump into Yvonne (Jessica Stevenson) and her gang of Doppelgängers.

Not long ago, I discovered Black Books. It provided me with the most wittiest and funniest moments I had with my tv. When checking the characters, I was drawn back to this scene in Shaun of The Dead, a movie I’ve seen some five years ago.

• Nick Frost (1) played the security alarm installer in Black Books S1E5 – The Big Lock-Out
• Lucy Davis (3) was Becky, Fran’s high school friend in Black Books S3E2 – Elephants and Hens
• Dylan Moran (4) was Bernard Black. Created, written and performed in every Black Books episode.
• Simon Pegg (6) was Evan, the evil manager from Goliath Books in Black Books S3E1 – Manny Come Home
• Jessica Hynes (8) was Yoga teacher Eva in Black Books S2E5 – Hello Sun (who’s up for some rice cakes?)
• Martin Freeman (9) was Manny’s doctor in Black Books S1E1 – Cooking The Books.
• Tamsin Greig (11) – Oh, Tamsin Greig, the lovely Fran Katzenjammer. Performed in all Black Book episodes.
• Peter Serafinowicz (not in these grabs) was Howell Granger, sexy sexy Howell Granger in Black Books S1E5 (with Nick Frost).
• Matt Lucas (13) was not in the series, but his other-half, David Walliams, was a customer in Black Books S1E6 – He’s Leaving Home.

What a great re-union! But it also makes one wonder about the size of the talent crowd in the UK. Every British comedy I see has to do with one or more of the guys in the screengrab.

Thanks for reading!

Get Black Books from Amazon!

The Neverhood

Although a sequel called Skullmonkeys was released on the PSX, the game was pretty much forgotten and Dreamworks stopped future development (including a film that was in the works.)

I have always loved Klaymen and the magnificent soundtrack. I thought of taking some time off to rewrite the game using ScummVM framework and make it available for modern platforms.

The progress I made is available here. A script that unpacks the BLB container files. Each BLB contains background graphics, audio, music, sprites and video (in smk format, supported by ffmpeg). Another script will extract background graphics and convert them into PNGs. The file formats of any of these files is unknown, so you’ll see lots of guesswork in my code.)

See a full collage of all background graphics from The Neverhood.

Growing up, we had a colour tv at home. My parents had a betamax video player and an 8mm reel projector. Fast forward time. In the past 2 decades I’ve owned: betamax, 8mm, vhs, vcd, svcd, dvd, bluray, crt, lcd, tft, 2400 bps, 14400 bps, 28800 bps, 57600 bps, 10mbit, apple2, amiga, 8086, 286, 386, 486sx, dx2, pentium pro and list goes on.

I enjoyed my 14k4 modem more than the 10mbit of today. Surely it wouldn’t play any YouTube videos (barely even ansimations), and would most likely take 25 minutes to load a Facebook page, but how about this — constraint made me browse no more than 3 sites at the same time, I would seriously consider before downloading anything, and words had meaning: I would read, rather than skim around, see the images and skip to the middle of the video just because there’s no time, I must do more more more!

I still consider my Sankyo 8mm projector as the best piece of equipment I ever owned. Films rare had any audio, and that would also be mono. Considering the loud noise of the rotating gears, you couldn’t hear anything even if you wanted to!

So why all of this? The never-ending flame war between audiophiles. Are audio tapes really better than cds? Here’s my take.

When I asked around, the term “soul” came up often. Wikipedia’s definition is so broad that I wonder it’s definable. My opinion on this subject is that inanimate objects seem to have soul when they degrade in time, as their owners.

Oxygen wrinkles my skin; my 8mm reels desaturate for the very same reason. Audio cassettes, floppy disks, vinyl records, kodak film, they all grow old, they all evolve, change, die. Maybe that’s the `soul’ ingredient — these things aren’t forever.

Optical medias, MP3s, digital video, these are immortal. They are plastic, not real, they are like the soda bottles that you throw away and hope they will decay in the new 10,000 years (give or take). Take a moment to sit back and contemplate on the subject for a while. I will stop right here and give you some space, I’m not here for long either

Photo by streetpreacher

I am releasing a sprite ripper, which extracts all background graphics and game sprites from the PC version of the game. You have been warned, even the gfx are totally hideous , but alas, it makes a cool release. Again, code has been written by trial and error, merely by looking at hexdumps of the binary files. Enjoy!

Download: Python script (requires PIL), Game graphic files (PC)

Stuxnet is a very sophisticated worm that was (most probably) designed to attack the nuclear power plants in Iran. As an Israeli, this means the world to me. In this lecture, I will show the highlights of the worm, how it works, propagates and launches its attack.

Link: Stuxnet Lecture Slides
Link: Stuxnet Lecture Video (Hebrew only at the moment)

Stuxnet is an awesome conversation starter — give it a try!

My first encounter with Condor was in 1992, while on vacation in Euro Disney with the family. It was in a display set for future of gaming platform, featuring the CD-ROM. It’s been on my mind ever since.

Without an apparent reason, I figured it’s time to extract all sprites and audio banks. The version I chose was the CDTV, but the code works with DOS version as well.

Condor comprises over 200 .RTF file, each contains a CEL sprite, (optionally) a palette and (optionally) an audio stream. Sprites are 32 colors (5 bit palette index), and audio is 14700 hz 8bit mono.

Game logic was implemented in C++ and is in the executable file in full. The following script was rewritten without reverse engineering the game, with pure trial-and-error.

Owners of the CDTV copy are more than welcome to download the python script at extract-condor-assets.py. It will dump all sprites into separate PNG files, and all audio in Microsoft .wav files (requires PIL and sox). Released under GPL license.

Alternatively, you can view all sprites in a kickass collage online.

And remember: Means, Motive and Opportunity!

Mod of the day. Click for full size.

On the back of the payment slip, there is a registration form for EDI, a foundation for transplants & organ donations. Yes.

Is this the most tactless time and place to recruit new members, or what? I figure the great exposure and the association between the two, but come on! Why push it in my face that I’m going to die? Is by paying the fee, I’m concluding my life, signing the dotted line and wishing doom upon myself?

Hmpf!

So, here is my list. 2009 has been the most diverse and crazy year I’ve lived through. I have seen a lot, accomplished a lot, experience a lot, and most importantly, learned a lot about life.

2010:

* Less Tweeting, more blogging
* Less running, more meditating
* Less talking, more listening
* Less flickring, more photographing
* Less computer time, more drumming
* Less computer time, more time reading books
* Less computer time, more playing guitar
* Less dreaming about it, more doing something about it
* Less tv, more movies
* Less coding, more outsourcing
* Less micro-managing, more peace
* Less beginnings, more completing
* Less technical, more artistic
* Less doing, more thinking
* Less online, more offline

Less is more

Happy New Year 2010!

(Cat meditation photo by Green Explorer)