Coke is IR transparent

Some time ago i made a blog post explaining how to remove the IR filter from a webcam in order to turn the webcam into a IR camera, or at least NIR (Near Infra Red).
Link here to the original post:
turn-normal-webcam-into-ir-webcam

Now i recently came across something interesting. It turns out that Coke is actually IR transparent. It's rather mind boggeling how something so dark in color can look like water with a NIR camera.

Here are some photos:

In the background you can see the webcam feed, seeing the glass as transparrent

How a normal camera sees this glass

Taken with the modified web cam

Another one

You can see thru the whole Coke bottle

Side-scroller skateboard game with C# and XNA

This summer i was reading this book on game development, and even tho i did make a couple fun projects, i forgot to post them here.

But these past few hours i've been trying to clean up my messy folder structures and import all my repos to GitHub. And going thru all my stuff i found a few nice bits of code.

And this little skating game i made with C# and the XNA framework. The game is called ScrollinBackground.

Skate, avoid the obstacles and grind the rails.

Arrow keys to control the skater.

Space to jump.

Arrow up to grind rails.

GitHub repo available from this link

Gameplay footage

Update on the GIF creator (sharpGIFs 2.0)

Okay, so the last bit of code i wrote had the flaw of not letting the gif's loop.
It seems that for a gif to automatically loop you need to set some custom metadata for the file containing "NETSCAPE 2.0" for some reason. This probably dates back to looping gif's being first introduced in that very browser (GIF89a support).

The most intuitive fix for my program would be to just add this metadata to the GifBitmapEncoder before saving the file. However, for some reason this throws an exception "The designated BitmapEncoder does not support global metadata." Ironically it seems the GifBitmapEncoder is the only BitmapEncoder that doesn't support metadata.

So i was unable to actually fix my program. But luckily i found some code that works, using a different aproach to the problem (using MemoryStream and BinaryWriter).
The original code bit was found here, i haven't really done much in terms of changing anything. Just removing a reference to Response out and changing the delay time to something reasonable. Then i threw in the resizing bit from the last project.

So anyways, here are the code zipped as usual.
sharpGIFs 2.0.zip

And here are the final gif (same images as the post below, just looping this time around):

Create animated GIF's with C#

I got a brand new camera this christmas, a GoPro Hero3+. The camera shoots amazing Full HD video at action-enabling framerates. And the waterproof casing and small form factor makes this the best damned piece of gear i own.

And after spending hours on hours of tumbling in the snow videoing myself fighting with the dog and jumping off cliffs skiing i started exploring the various other functions the camera has.

One of wich is the ability to take 30 pictures in 3 seconds.
Combined with a handy wifi-remote makes for alot of fun shots.

Then after having 500+ still frames of action recorded on the SD card i realized it would be fun making animated GIF's with them. A quick google search gave me lots of online-sites for just this purpose, but the first one i tried gave me a "picture too large" -error.

And being  the programmer i am, and having a few hours of post-christmas tranquility i immediately decided that i would rather make my own GIF-converter than manually resize my images to fit the online-converter.

Granted, the next few search results would probably solved my problem, but im allways trying to keep my coding skills from decay, and this presented it self as a good opurtunity.

So here is the result of a couple hours of dabbeling i Visual Studio:
The VisualStudio project can be downloaded as a .zip from this link

And a .gif example:

For some reason the gif will not loop, but im working on a fix for that.

It really works

Comic from xkcd. Brilliant

Finally got Skype to stop quoting my conversations

For many years i used MSN Messenger for instant messages. And with it i have tried alot of the alternative programs that connected with the MSN protocol, like Kopete, Pidgin and aMSN. Microsofts client was always full of ads and banners and retarded popup's. Along with unwanted features like nudges that made the whole screen vibrate and was particulary annoying if you had friends running any of the competing clients that had a reduced nudge-delay allowing them to spam your computer with shaky windows and twelve dosin doorbells going off.

All the competing clients worked well, had added functionality and no ads. But none of them ever got the emoticons right And while that's not a big deal for me now, it was very important when i was 13 and ended every line with a corresponding facial expression. Kopete had such bad smileys for a while that i got unsure about my friends actual attitude in the conversation. Like, "is he really smiling, or is that sarcasm. Shit that smiley lookin like John fuckin waterhead Kerry".

Microsoft then introduced Windows Live Messenger. A great example of shitty software.
First off all, the program it self was just a rebranded MSN Messenger. No added/fixed nothing.
New commercials now using Flash instead of gifs providing another 50mb of wasted RAM.
The installer was a new Windows Live installer. Wich was a great improvement. This way you would get 5 pieces of rubbish with every install, and shitty toolbars and bookmarks with your shitty Messenger.
The new installer also featured the ability to waste upward of 10 minutes on the install process, even with quad core computers. The installer also managed to rise to a size just shy of 120mb. Amazing, simply amazing.

I quote some random dude:

"Anyway, went to install this Windows Live messenger thing on there and it took absolutely AGES to install, and by the way I mean ages, nearly half an hour in fact it was so slow"

To compare, the latest version of pidgin is 9.1mb, supports 14 other protocols and installs in about the same time is takes to sneeze.

So as a last "fuck you" from Microsoft they terminated the entire Live Messenger and bought Skype as a replacement so they could ruin that as well.

Now i never really used Skype in the past, but i do now, and yes. It does kinda suck.

But now to the point of all this:
As i frequently discuss code with people on Skype i have been really annoyed by Skype's shitty attitude towards me copying text from my messages. Skype obviously thinks im a real journalist, and not just a dipshit blogger, and therefore types up the text as a quote like: "08:30 Sunday: Dick says: #1c3923 " when im really only after the color green.
I have been going on rants about this for weeks, thoroughly giving this software the finger, but then...
Turns out, it is possible to change this

Fuck i feel stupid.

Surgon simulator 2013

Just recently tried out this game. It's available from Steam for download.
This is not a good game, but an amazing joke!

Experience the thrill of doing doubble kidney transplants and heart transplants while in the back of a speeding ambulance!