A quick tutorial in how to recover 3D information from your favourite 3D movies. In this example, we'll be using Star Wars - The Last Jedi. tl;dr? Here's the end result (this video is silent): https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/walker-text.mp4 Grab the code on GitHub. Let's go! Take a screenshot of your favourite scene. Something with a clearly defined foreground and background. The brighter the image the better the results. Split the image in two: mogrify -crop…
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Long time readers will know that the happiest day of my life was when I got married. Dressed as Darth Vader. The most expensive thing about our wedding was probably that Vader suit. After nearly 10 years of marital bliss, I got bored at having that gorgeous suit packed away in a box. So I bought a full-sized mannequin and set about dressing it up. Having a box of limbs delivered is a little disturbing. WHAT'S IN THE BOX?!?!? Beach Body Ready! After partial assembly, it was fairly easy to …
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This blog post looks at the 3D conversion process for The Force Awakens. Where it succeeds and where it falls short. Last year I managed to blag tickets to the premiere of The Force Awakens - in 2D. The next day, we saw it again in 3D. I've never been a huge fan of 3D films and, despite owning a 3D TV, think the format is a bit of a gimmick. But the 3D Star Wars was something else! Most of the scenes really didn't benefit - but some of the special effects just popped out of the…
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Just a bit of fun for a Friday afternoon - and spoilers ahoy! Star Wars VII contains the most magnificence dream sequence. When Rey lays her hand on a lightsaber for the first time, the world dissolves as a cacophony of audio hallucinations plague her. It's a short sequence - lasting just under a minute - but the sound design is beautiful. After seeing the fabulous Path of a Lightsaber video I thought I'd have a go at deconstructing all the voices which went into creating such a mesmerising…
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This isn't a review of the new Star Wars film, it's a diary entry about my experiences at the première. No spoilers, sweetie! I love Star War. Probably more than is healthy. When tickets for the new movie were released, I snaffled up a pair... for the next morning! Look, I'm getting old, and I didn't fancy watching a midnight screening full of screaming fans. So I booked a 10 am showing on the (entirely correct) assumption that the cinema would be empty and I could enjoy it in peace. My …
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A couple of months ago I noticed there was an auction of Sci-Fi related material in London. The catalogue was amazing! The original Leela costume from Doctor Who, costumes from Star Trek, gizmos from Blade Runner - and a whole bunch of Star Wars props! Sadly, I couldn't afford the original pieces of the Death Star (expected price of £10k-20k) nor the Millennium Falcon blueprints (a more reasonable £1k). I made do with scraping the images out of the catalogue. Here are all the gorgeous art w…
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OMG! Good Old Games has the amazing Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds available for a mere £3.99. That was the game which introduced me & my wife to collaborative gameplay, so I was incredibly excited to see it available again. This is a brief guide to getting the game working on Linux - including multiplayer and widescreen. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 - but the steps should be broadly similar on any distro. Install the latest version of WINE. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa sudo …
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There's something poetic about watching a film you know intimately being performed in another language. Like many children of my generation, I don't remember a time before Star Wars. My birthday cakes were sloppy green Jabba The Hutts, my brother always got the "baddie" toys and I got the "goodies", every cardboard tube became a deadly lightsabre in my hands. The force run strong in my family. I have it. My wife has it. I've collected every variant of the Star Wars movies there is. The …
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After an entertaining discussion at BarCamp Berkshire about video games, I decided to treat myself to an Xbox 360. After several happy years with a Nintendo Wii, I was keen to see what the new state of the art was. I picked the current top pick console and, I must say, while the games are great the console is somewhat of a disappointment. I picked the limited edition Xbox 360 320GB Star Wars Kinect Console with Kinect Star Wars - Limited Edition (Xbox 360). Yay! Star Wars! Hardware It…
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For reasons best known to themselves, certain sections of the entertainment industries seem to believe that bolting the stable door shutting down The Pirate Bay will stop all piracy. It's as though they think that people won't be able to use a proxy, circumvent the Cleanfeed block, or simply use a search engine to find another torrent site. Build Your Own Pirate Bay? Proxying is a very simple concept. Alice is forbidden from speaking to Bob. Alice can speak to Eve. Eve can…
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I am incredibly gratified to be in the running for Geek of the Year 2010. Thanks to The 405 for picking me as one of their favourites. You can check out the other entrants on Facebook - don't worry, you don't have to vote for me! You can also find GeekOfTheYearUK on Twitter. …
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A long time ago... Ten years ago, I posted on usenet that I'd watched a bootleg of The Phantom Menace. I discovered the post recently and it got me thinking about how little progress has been made in the digital download arena. The actual resolution of the bootleg Picture the scene, it's my first year at university and, like any good geek, I am obsessed with Star Wars - Episode I. So much so that I help run a fan site, ThePhantomMenace.co.uk. The guys on my corridor are similarly hungry f…
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