As I Xi It

I’ve been playing with SketchUp this afternoon. I dunno why it pauses between the key frames, I’m pretty sure I’ve set it properly.

Unsatisfied with the botched mouse test. I did another using something more complex (Mini replica of the Fat Lady statuette found at Hagar Qim) and with more consistently exposed frames and the result I’d say is pretty neat! If I really wanted to, I could manipulate it and have the resulting object 3D printed.

Further to my previous post, 123D Catch is also available as a webapp.

Over the past couple of days or so, I’ve been fiddling around with some 3D drawings and came across 123D Catch. It’s available as an iPhone or iPad app from the US iTunes store or you could download the PC version from their site and use pics from your camera. In a nutshell, it takes your series of photos and generates a 3D model out of it. A bit like Photosynth but in 3D. The nitty gritty processing happens in the cloud which is pretty neat, but it does take a while.

My first test was of a dental floss container using my iPad and the results looked like an amorphous blob. I gave it another whirl using my G11 and the PC app with my mouse as the test subject. It’s still not brilliant and shows dents that’d rival my car but an improvement over the dental floss one.

Botched attempt

Ahh, retro games on the iPad. Love it! I wonder if Nintendo will ever bring something to the App Store.

Arkanoid (Arkanold App Store)/Space Invaders (Space Inversion App Store)

Is that a SNES controller I see?

Hours of entertainment

…there’s always The Sims!

Ever since I read about “Alice and Kev“, it reignited my interests in The Sims. Many moons ago, I’d had intended to purchase a copy but it sat on the “To Get” list for so long that I lost interest and forgot about it.

So, this weekend I obtained a copy and found it rather entertaining. Not quite GTA but it has its fair share of nonsense. I simmed my animals, Cici and Cuzco who lived in the quiet town of Sunset Valley. Cici was part of the military while Cuzco worked in organized crime. Unfortunately, Cici caused a fire when he was trying to make waffles, it was all very dramatic.

Culinary disaster

I also created Randolf and Ilsa Schmidt, an evil pair who did, well, evil things. But for some reason, they always had a wish to donate to charity. Go figure. They got on to start with but the relationship very quickly went downhill and Ilsa beat up Randolf after she’d cut ties with him. At the moment, they’re still living in the same house, but on different floors with their own amenities (there’s a set of stairs that leads directly to the upstairs area, much like a maisonette) so they could avoid eachother. However, Randolf often goes upstairs to use the dishwasher. During their time together, they were also robbed of their bath tub! Even the sleepy town of Sunset Valley isn’t safe from looters.

One thing I’ve noticed about the land of The Sims is that they’re more or less equal opportunities employers. Repair(wo)men were more often than not female, and blokes were maids too (in various different phenotypes).

Fiendish plotting

It doesn't end well for the Schmidt's

Given my rather short attention span these days, I managed to play it on and off for three days. Unfortunately, it’s also sucked up a lot of time I could’ve been doing other, more productive things like clean out the fishtank and that open book assessment paper.

While clearing out my Downloads folder on my desktop, I came across F.lux. I’d downloaded it a while ago after reading this entry on the Lifehacker site.

In a nutshell, it adjusts the colour temperature of your screen in response to the time of day. I wonder if the warm glow of the monitor will make me sleepier earlier on in the evening.

Having returned from my travels around Sweden and with many other trips in the pipeline for the rest of 2010, I thought it’d be appropriate to review my top three travel apps for the iPhone. A must have feature in travel apps is the ability to have them run offline without having to use data roaming which can be pretty costly (at the time of writing, O2 charge £3/MB for data roaming in Europe and £6/MB for the rest of the world).

When planning a trip, it’s always handy to have all your flight details and confirmations at hand. To keep organised, I recommend WorldMate. It’s free and the cool thing is that you can just forward your confirmations and booking details to either your unique WorldMate email address or the generic WorldMate email address (having linked your email address with it) and it’ll pretty much set up your trip itinerary for you. You can also manually tweak your itineraries for things like meetings or visits to museums and whatnot.

If you really want to travel light (no such thing for photographers hauling kgs of kit), you could leave your Lonely Planet and Rough Guide at home and replace it with TripWolf. Just select the city or country that you’ll be travelling to and download the guide before departure. Since TripWolf is based on integration of info from the Marco Polo guides and user generated info, it’s pretty much a constant work in progress so you should have the latest info everytime you update it. Most of the guides are free to download within the TripWolf app, but there are some places for which you can download a premium guide for a price, I think it’s something like £4/5. I assume it has more detailed info than the basic guide.

There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the local culture by learning the local lingo. To save on having to bring a separate phrasebook, I recommend Lingopal. Unlike the traditional paperbacked phrasebooks, it speaks to you! You can download individual language apps, a few are free and most are paid (only 59p each), there’s also a dedicated app to help you flirt in all their different languages as well as the complete bumper pack of all the phrases (travel, essentials, flirts, insults etc) in 44 languages. It has some pretty humerous phrases including Sophie’s favorite “Oj! Jag tappade glassen… Kan du slicka upp den?” and some of their insults are quite priceless like, my favourite, “Om jag skulle vilja höra från ett ashål hade jag släppt mig”.

I’ve just been testing the voice search on the Google app for my iPhone and I can’t say that it’s as good as I’d expected. When I asked it to ‘search Xiyu’, it returned with ‘sexy z’. I also tried ‘Xiyu online’, but got nowhere close. Now, granted that those aren’t very standard things to search, so next I tried ‘Applied Environmental Microbiology’ and it returned with ‘applying for men to microbiology’. Now, while it’s fairly close phonetically, it’s not really close enough to be of much use. Nice try Google, but I think I’ll stick to good old typing for the time being.

One more thing before I go – I’m actually posting from my iPhone using the WordPress app. It’s fairly capable for blogging on the go. I think other blogging platforms have their own apps too. I love my iPhone.

Now I thought seamless integration of my iPhone with my computer as a remote was cool, then I came across Apple’s own app which lets me control my iTunes via wifi! Works mighty well too, I’m almost tempted to get a Macbook Pro now.

See here for more info.

Today I came across the coolest app ever for my iPhone, it works pretty darn well and best of all, its FREE!! It’s the Logitech Touch app which allows you to control your computer like a touch pad over wifi. All you need is the software for the computer you want to controll here and install the Touch Mouse app onto your iPhone. If you search for “Touch Mouse”, it should be the first app that comes up.

It was surprisingly easy to set up, all I did was install the software on my computer and then opened up the app on my iPhone, selected my computer which it automatically detected and voila, all done. So now I can use my computer with ease while I’m on the exercise bike! How’s that for multitasking?