Ernest Borgnine, the vivacious 92-year-old actor who stars in the film on which I’m working ( The Genesis Code), dropped some impressive words of wisdom on a Fox News reporter a while back when asked for his anti-aging secret.

What he said.

“Things just seem to happen to people who don’t drink Wilkins”

So says the character “Wilkins” just after his best fiend “Wontkins” once again meets his maker after proclaiming a distaste for Wilkins Coffee. Who knew Jim Henson could put together such a psychotically violent set of advertisements?

There are many more compilations of wilkins coffee ads up on youtube. They’re all worth a look. These 8 second TV commercials are the work of Jane and Jim Henson, with Jim doing both the Kermit-like voice of the character “Wilkins” and also the Waldorf-like voice of the grumpier “Wontkins”.

If these commercials ran today, they’d be very effective. I’d eschew water for Wilkins Coffee, wear the T-shirt, buy a gun¹, and “convince” everyone I knew to drink Wilkins. Yeah.

1. Other weapons used in the ads: cannon, club, explosives, arrows, motor vehicles, trees. [↩]

It’s a lovely evening here in Studio City, and the sunset inspired me to attempt a quick sketch in Brushes. I got lazy after a while and stopped sketching in streetlights, there were hundreds more. More interesting to me were the sky and smog, and it was fun to try to evoke their colors through the application of tons of overlapping semitransparent brushstrokes.

I added this .brushes file to my gallery, along with a full-resolution and a quicktime export. Here’s its entry:

16.brushes
Jul 23 2009
Brushes (77.56 K)	Tiff (15.8 MB)	MOV (13.2 MB)

I’ve posted a few sketches I’ve made using the fantastic iPhone app “Brushes” to this blog, usually by exporting the images at iPhone resolution to the iPhone’s photo album, then emailing the images to my posterous blog using the phone’s built-in mail application. It’s a fun and seamless workflow.

But in the process I sell Brushes short. The application is capable of much higher quality image exports.

12.brushes
Jul 21 2009
Brushes (52.56 K)	Tiff (15.8 MB)

As one paints, Brushes keeps track of each stroke as a vector, not as a series of altered pixels tied to the screen resolution. While painting, one can undo and redo a massive number of strokes (all of them, I think). When finished, one can transfer the resulting “.brushes” files to a Mac, play back each and every stroke to watch the painting form onscreen, and most importantly can have the strokes rendered to several different image file types at much higher resolution than the iPhone’s screen –all using the free “Brushes Viewer” application.

If you’re curious what a Brushes file looks like when rendered at high resolution, or would like a Brushes file to test with the Brushes Viewer app, I’ve placed all my Brushes sketches in this gallery, formatted as in the example at right. Each sketch is available its original Brushes file and an exported 1920×2800 TIFF file.

And here’s a time-lapse movie of one the creation of those sketches, rendered out of Brushes Viewer. I’m having too much fun with this stuff.

Yesterday I watched a movie, and it was the future. The details of the process by which I watched a movie are a little complicated and hackneyed, but the spirit of filmwatching future was in the room right there with me in so many ways:

1. The film: The King of Kong. This surprisingly riveting documentary film focuses primarily on an intense rivalry between the world’s two best players of the classic arcade game “Donkey Kong”.

   Why this is the future? Professional video game journalism has taken off¹, and professional video gaming will follow. One day its popularity will eclipse that of football². Howard Stern and friends may laugh at some of the wackier folk on display in The King of Kong, but video games are starting to move away from the sorts of repetitious action that favor people who these days get classified socially as geeks or diagnosed by professionals as OCD, Aspergers, &c. Nerds have already ascended to create the information economy³, next they’ll take over the world of sports, and the jocks who adapt and survive will be or become a little nerdier than those of today.

2. The player: I watched the film in Mac OS X’s built-in media center application Front Row, using the Understudy plugin to allow me to use the simple Front Row interface to browse to and watch films using Netflix’s instant streaming service. Movies and TV shows, streamed over the internet, at high quality, for a low monthly fee; This service is already good enough to start beating out premium cable subscriptions for geeks on a budget. Streaming entertainment has begun to slip from the future⁴ category into the present.
   
   Imagine this image displayed up on a large-screen TV. That’s what Front Row’s main menu looks like after the Understudy plugin is installed. I’d show what Understudy’s menu looks like, and a netflix queue displayed in Front Row using the plugin, but Netflix is down at the moment so I can’t do so.
3. The controller: Since my mac lacks an infra-red receiver, I could not use Apple’s simple remote control to navigate my way around Front Row. But why use an infra-red remote when my phone itself is a portable touchscreen device connected via wifi to the same network as my computer media center? Instead of ancient tech, I used an iPhone application called Air Mouse Pro, which communicates with a server application running on my computer⁵ over the local network. With this application, I could not only send keystrokes from my phone that were equivalent to the arrows, volume, and menu keys on the normal Apple remote, but I could also launch and exit Front Row, move and click the mouse pointer, and type anything at all on a virtual keyboard. All this without worrying about my distance from the media center or a need to maintain a line of sight between and IR emitter and receiver.⁶ Fortuitously, in my hour of need it came to pass that Air Mouse Pro was on sale for $1.99 (down from its normal price of $5.99, for one week). If it’s still on sale at this price, you can find it here: Air Mouse Pro SALE. Here’s a randomly-selected video review of this app from youtube, in case you’re curious how it works.

   So I streamed video to my media center and controlled playback over a network using a wifi touchscreen device. This is the slightly kludgy present, and a sign of things to come. You and your grandmother will all be watching movies and TV this way in a few years.

1. As the career of videogaming journalist and The Daily of the University of Washington alumnus Jason Ocampo can attest. [↩]
2. by “football” I mean the sport played with a truncated icosahedron or the other sport also called football that uses a prolate spheroid [↩]
3. I typed it, but I’m not actually sure what it means. Maybe one too few buzzwords? Information Economy? “Hey farmer, I’ll trade you this metadata-encrusted search result for that pound of soybeans…” [↩]
4. There’s just something so delightfully obnoxious about the capitalized phrase “the future”, don’t you think? [↩]
5. The Air Mouse server application is available for both Windows and Mac [↩]
6. I probably could have accomplished much of the same with a vnc application, but most of them are more expensive, and I wasnt sure how the vnc application would interact with applications that play hardware-accelerated video such as Front Row. [↩]

Since I don’t live in Europe, I often miss out on the better music that hits the charts over there. I’m not saying they listen to better crap than USians in general because that generalization doesn’t¹ ring true (case in point: Crazy Frog didn’t go nuclear over here, thank god).

But every once in a while I hear something awesome from across the pond, and am surprised it got a massive amount of airtime elsewhere and is completely unknown here. The songs of Soko, a French singer/actress, fall into that category. Here’s her demented folk-rock hit “I’ll Kill Her”:

I ran into the song because it was the inspiration and soundtrack of this great motion graphics piece:

http://motionographer.com/2009/07/08/joerg-barton-ill-kill-her/

Worth a listen and a look IMO. Broaden your horizons, listen to songs about murderous impulses from across the pond².

1. I nearly wrote “…that generalization doesn’t always ring true…”, meaning to imply that sometimes the generalization is true. But since a generalization that is sometimes true is by definition not a generalization at all, I left the original statement unqualified. To be clear, I think there’s plenty of great music all over the world, and plenty of crap. [↩]
2. After all my larger-world talk and attempts at drawing sweeping conclusions, I should point out that Soko has apparently moved to Los Angeles. So I guess that makes her yet another singer who lives in the US but is for now only well known and popular as a recording artist and performer in Europe, like David Hasselhoff or Steven Seagall. [↩]

Posted via web from Zachary’s posterous

A funky vertical panorama shot and stitched from 3 photographs on my iPhone with the AutoStitch app. The monitor at bottom is my DIY Cintiq, which has yet to be encased and prettified.It’s fed VGA (!)¹ from a USB-DVI adapter.

This non-hardware-accelerated display works fine as extra space for displaying bins.

1. the monitor was an ancient model that a friend was throwing out [↩]

Whereas, I like zombies; and

Whereas, I like short films¹; and

Whereas, I like film festivals.

Now, therefore, I do hereby proclaim that I am duty bound to also like the just-announced “Zombie Short Film Festival” and I do hereby urge all filmmakers to take due note of its existence.

1. Well, I like short films that happen to be awesome. Such are unfortunately in the minority. [↩]

Sorry to seem to be pushing this camera so frequently, but enough people have asked me to keep them apprised of deals on it that it’s easier for me to just mention it here than contact each interested party individually. This post is for them, or you as well if you’re looking for a solid-state camcorder.

At the moment, Amazon’s page for the Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder doesn’t list a price, and you have to place it in your cart to find out that it’s $129.99 with free shipping. I expect this price will last Amazon’s sold out again and then subsequently their page will list the higher price of the item from one of the other vendors who sell the camera on Amazon.

I posted my impressions of the camera the last time it was on sale at this price. You can also read more about the deal on this camera at the Fatwallet Hot Deals forum, and that forum thread includes comparisons of the camera’s image quality to other solid-state camcorders as well as links to reviews.

Several people who have seen me grab the occasional bit of video footage using this tiny and relatively cheap solid-state video camera asked me to let them know the next time a good deal popped up. It seems that every couple of months Amazon sells the “Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder discounted to $129.99 (down from $229.99)¹. Now is one of those times.

The camera captures 2 hours of video to its 8Gb of internal storage as 1280×720 AVI files. Image quality is surprisingly good for the price, and this model distinguishes itself from similar cameras with its wide-angle lens² (and its price when on sale).

It’s small, fits in a pocket³, and doesn’t draw a lot of attention to itself when in use⁴.

The camera shows up as a drive when its built-in USB connector is connected to a computer and files can be easily copied off of the camera. It also charges its internal battery over USB. I’ve also used my Vado HD as a USB flash drive to ferry large non-video files between computers. It’s a very convenient device, and at $129.99 is about $40 more than Amazon charges for the older, 2Gb, standard-definition (640×484) version of the device.

I’ve uploaded a non-spectacular but representative sample clip to vimeo. You can watch it below as an embedded flash clip, or you can download the original full-resolution clip directly from vimeo⁵. if you’d like to examine it more closely. There are a number of other clips shot with the Vado HD also available for perusal on Vimeo.

If you’re looking for such a thing, you know who you are. Here’s another link to the product.

post-finish cool-down from ZachFine on Vimeo.

Runners stagger around in mylar blankets after finishing the 2009 San Diego Rock and Roll Marathon.

1. Perhaps the periodic discounts occur when Creative Labs needs to improve their quarterly sales figures? [↩]
2. Its wide-angle lens makes it easier to fit friends into a shot when in a small room, or to hold the camera at arm’s length to shoot myself. As an aside, I’d recommend against bothering to “zoom”. This and other cameras in the category have fixed lenses and do a useless “digital zoom” which just blows the captured pixels up larger. [↩]
3. Well, it fits in my pocket. It’s small enough that I can carry it through an entire marathon without complaint. [↩]
4. The Vado HD looks a lot like a cell phone. [↩]
5. look for the “Download AVI Version” at the lower-right corner of the Vimeo page. [↩]