Elephants Dream is another great short from the Blender Foundation (the guys behind Big Buck Bunny) about two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protégé Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect”.
Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.
Blender is an open source 3D modeling software, and to help promote the fact that it is a suitable environment for professional level 3D animation, Blender created an animated short called Big Buck Bunny.
Big Buck Bunny is a big rabbit with an even bigger heart, but when three rodents start to harass him, something snaps, and he enacts his revenge in a typically cartoonish fashion:
If you’d like to see how they did it, then check out the Big Buck Bunny website, where you can download the source files for the movie and more.
CHDK, or Canon Hacker’s Development Kit, is a firmware enhancement that turns your Digic II and Digic III camera into a high dollar impersonator.
Because it’s a firmware enhancement and not a firmware modifier, CHDK is also non-permanent and non-destructive, so even those with a fear of killing their camera can give it a go without worrying about the long-term consequences.
To install, simply copy a few files onto a memory card and then start the camera like you usually do. The software will automatically activate, and then de-activate when the camera is turned back off again.
So what does CHDK do for you?
Enhanced Image Capture (RAW)
Additional Information On-Screen
Additional Photographic Settings
Support for Small Programs/Scripts
Plus, because it’s open source and still in development, CHDK is still being actively developed, and new features are still being added.
Ready to take the plunge?
Then check out Lifehacker for a full rundown of what’s involved.
10 MPH is “a comical documentary that follows a pair of aspiring filmmakers as they quit their jobs and turn a friend’s ludicrous idea into a movie. The impulsive purchase of a two-wheeled Segway scooter sets this story in motion when the two friends decide to travel from Seattle to Boston at 10 mph in an attempt to change their lives forever… What ensues is a road trip like none other with a haphazard cast of characters you could only find on a zany 100-day trek through America’s back roads. Each poignant story the two friends discover along the way inspires a craving inside to go out and do that thing you’re supposed to do.”
What’s interesting is that they’ve taken this film to the indie extreme, making money through a partnership with OurStage, and going open source by showing you how to make your own movie with the 10 MPH DIY Manual.
The entire film is shown below, but be sure to check out the 10 MPH site to help support the cause.
The Wiinstrument is an application that allows you to connect a Wiimote and Nunchuck to your Mac via Bluetooth, and turns your Mac into a MIDI controlling machine.
After syncing the controllers to your Mac, you make music by simply moving them around. The buttons and directional pad select instruments, and the software even taps into the Wiimote’s motion sensor to vary the sound depending on the speed of your swing.
It’s still in Beta, so there are bound to be a few bugs, but with an open source code, they should get squished quickly.
Wikia Search wants to take down the Google giant with a freely licensed (open source) search engine.
Since Google is now a $200 Billion company, it’s easy to assume that they’re going to be a bit guarded with regard to their search technology; as it is, after all, the driving force behind most of those billions.
However, Wikia Search feels that by putting users in control, they can create a search engine that works faster, is more accurate, and is more informative.
How is it going to do this?
By using the power of a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, and public way.
Their belief is that “search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and that it can and should therefore be done in an open, objective, accountable way”.
Though it’s currently only an Alpha release (meaning the results are pretty bad because there is no user feedback data), as that data starts to roll in, expect the results to get better at an impressively quick pace. (At least that’s the hope.)
It’s definitely an interesting project, and I hope it’s successful too, because if it can do for search what Wikipedia did for the encyclopedia, then Google definitely needs to keep an eye on this David.
Google has finally released details about their phone plans, and despite rumors, it’s not going to be a Gphone.
Instead, Google announced the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, and specifically Android, “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.”
While it’s not an iPhone killer that most had hoped for, it does present some interesting opportunities for the mobile world, so stay tuned to see what they do with it.
TV-B-Gone is a small electrical device that turns off any TV with the push of a button from up to 100 feet away.
Now, with an open source hardware kit from Adafruit and a bit of soldering skill, you can make your own TV-B-Gone.
The kit comes with everything but the tools and the batteries, and is supposedly a “very simple kit and great for people who have never soldered anything before.”
The White Glove Tracking Project is trying to find each and every white glove in all 10,060 frames of Michael Jackson’s 5:34 performance of Billy Jean. Similar to the search for Jim Gray, this project is using the power of crowd sourcing, which means that it is getting humans to perform “tasks that require human perception and common sense, but may not require a lot of scientific training”.
In addition, the project is open source, so you will be able to see both the source code and the resulting data, and the satisfaction of doing a good deed is being handed out by the bucket full for participating trackers. So today, if you’ve got nothing better to do, track a few white gloves and contribute to the project, because the crowd is becoming a very powerful thing.
The Digg button is a beginner’s electronics project that is designed to teach you the basics of soldering and programming microcontrollers in a fun and innovative way. With just a few simple tools and some time, you can put together your very own Digg counter. Just push the button, and the word “Dug” flashes on the screen, followed by an incremental increase in the number. The project is open source, so you can piece together everything yourself, or you can buy the complete kit from the Adafruit webshop for just $15. Plus, $1 from every sales is also going to the EFF (Electronics Frontier Foundation), so you can give a little just by buying one. Future plans include new colors and the ability to interface the button directly with Digg.com, so stay tuned.
