Monday Links from the Bench vol. CXXX

[NickFitz]

******* immense!
Are the other links any good?

Roy Orbison in clingfilm is all anybody really needs. I believe it's what TBL had in mind when inventing the web

[Spacecadet]

Big Roy Orbison fan?

******* immense!
Are the other links any good?

[NickFitz]

Dammit

This was a particularly good week of links as well!

Big Roy Orbison fan?

[Spacecadet]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to NickFitz

Dammit

This was a particularly good week of links as well!

[NickFitz]

Wimbledon starts today, I am told. Luckily there's plenty of stuff out there that has nothing to do with it:

• The Roy Orbison in Clingfilm Adventure Game - "You are in a spooky cave. Lying on the floor you can see a skull covered with cobwebs and there are rats scurrying through the shadows bent on who knows what acts of unhygiene... just then there comes the faint sound of singing drifting out of the depths of the cavern. It seems... somehow familiar..." And so the adventure begins (For more on the whole Roy Orbison in clingfilm thing, see Ulli's Roy Orbison In Clingfilm Website.)
  
  
• Review: Up At The O2 - "It’s officially called Up At The O2, but everyone’s going to call it “That walkway on top of the Dome”. We gave it a try at the weekend. Here’s how we got on." This looks like fun, if you like climbing over tall buildings.
  
  
• Lou's Pseudo 3d Page v0.91 - "Now that every system can produce graphics consisting of a zillion polygons on the fly, why would you want to do a road the old way? Aren't polygons the exact same thing, only better? Well, no. It's true that polygons lead to less distortion, but it is the warping in these old engines that give the surreal, exhillerating sense of speed found in many pre-polygon games." Excellent guide to the techniques underpinning old school driving games. (Via Code inComplete - How to build a racing game - straight roads which applies these techniques to HTML5 canvas.)
  
  
• My Anderson Shelter - Stephen Geraghty moved into his new home recently and discovered that at the bottom of the garden is a buried WWII Anderson shelter. So he's been excavating it, and this is his diary of his discoveries: " I have a quick scan around the roof section and spot some brown paper sandwiched between the roof section overlaps... After some careful unravelling out in daylight it turns out to be a few pages from a May 1942 copy of the Radio Times!"
  
  
• Evolution of... Kryten's Costumes - "In the lead-up to Red Dwarf X, we're taking a nostalgic trip through the design elements of the show from Series I through to Back to Earth. This month, our thoughts turn to everyone's favourite service mechanoid..." Detailed retrospective of the Red Dwarf character's appearance over the years.
  
  
• The Steeps Of San Francisco: In Search Of The City's Steepest Street - "My inner Chivalrous Knight rose from slumber, knowing that he must canvas every corner of San Francisco, no matter how nondescript or unpleasant, for its steepest thoroughfares... Combining the National Elevation Dataset’s 1/3-second data with the Open Street Maps grid, I created the following map of the City, with streets colored by slope." Good use of open data and some wandering around by Stephen Von Worley.
  
  
• 13 Weeks Eating Nothing But White Castle Hamburgers, in the Name of Science - "What happens when you take a healthy young man and feed him nothing but hamburgers and water for three months? It sounds like the genesis of an edgy film — and in fact Super Size Me, a 2004 documentary, followed one man's 30-day immersion in McDonald's cuisine — but a real-life version of this experiment took place in the early 1930s." Apparently the subject of this experiment didn't eat hamburgers afterwards
  
  
• The Bastards Book of Photography - "An open-source guide to working with light by Dan Nguyen." Great online photography textbook/course, published under a Creative Commons license.
  
  
• The Many Pivots Of Justin.tv: How A Livecam Show Became Home To Video Gaming Superstars - "Five years, four complete shifts in business plan: Entrepreneur Justin Kan will try anything to make his business work. And that's just the way they like it in the tech world." In case you didn't know, "pivot" is the new word for "my business is ****ed so I'm trying something else" and it seems that the guys at Justin.tv are getting pretty good at it.
  
  
• Comparing Father’s Day and Mother’s Day Cards - "Your local store will inevitably showcase the so-called heartfelt messages about dad's flatulence, couch potato tendencies and unhealthy drinking habits, alongside Mum’s unhealthy shopping addiction and domestic slavery. Here are some typical examples."

Happy invoicing!