It’s a Christmas miracle!  There’s a new post!  Or maybe not, but take what you can get.  Here are some fun links.

• It’s hardly a secret that LEDs may also be used as rather poor photodiodes, but this paper from Mitsubishi Research Laboratories goes into great detail in how such properties may be exploited for short-range wireless communication with only a few parts on a microcontroller.
• Boing Boing has a neat gallery of technology in use at the US Library of Congress to digitize collections.
• A ridiculously nice panorama of the Milky Way as seen from the summit of Chimborazo, the highest peak in Ecuador.
• I feel like the esoteric language Petrovich could be implemented amusingly with a genetic algorithm to come up with pseudo-random actions.
• I take a bit more of an interest into computer graphics than other things which I don’t consider my actual field of expertise, so neat things like the seam carving scheme for image resizing/retargeting are of particular interest, especially when they’re as clever as that one.
• Rediscovered sketch2photo while browsing things related to seam carving, which is also worth checking out.
• Knowing a bit of information theory is very very useful for anyone working with software, especially when data compression is concerned.  David MacKay’s book on information theory is an enlightening bit of work (although I have yet to get far into it) and you can’t beat free digital copies.
• Okonomiyaki sounds tasty.  Will have to keep it in mind for sometime when I’m actually cooking.

That’s it for the links I’ve stockpiled here.  Some ideas on chording keyboarding and image processing for personal amusement will hopefully materialize into a coherent blog post sometime soon.

With that, here’s an interesting bit of wisdom from the hacker community which I can’t recall where it came from:

The virtual adept does not own the information it creates, and thus has no right or desire to profit from it. The virtual adept exists purely to manifest the infinite potential of information in to information itself, and to minimize the complexity of an information request in a way that will benefit all conscious entities. What is not information is not consequential to the virtual adept, not money, not fame, not power.

Am I a hacker? No. I am a student of virtuality. I am the witch malloc, I am the cult of the otherworld, and I am the entropy.

I am Phantasmal Phantasmagoria, and I am a virtual adept.