I Am Seb

The BBC has just released Flash streaming for iPlayer’s 7 Day Catch-Up feature. This is just about the best news to come out of the fiasco that is iPlayer, and for those of us unwilling or unable to install the bandwidth-destroying Kontiki client it’s the only way we can get our on-demand BBC programming.

Unfortunately, the BBC only makes the streams available on their site. I checked the iPlayer terms and conditions, and there’s nothing stopping remote embedding, it’s just a technical hurdle.

Fortunately, the internet eats technical hurdles for breakfast.

So, in the half hour before I go out to the pub, I’ve knocked together a little WordPress plugin that will take an iPlayer URI, and embed the streaming video into your page for you.

Like so:

Streaming full-screen Doctor Who on my website. Excuse me whilst I geek-out a moment, this is the coolest thing I’ve played with all week!

I’ll tidy up the code and release it to the community as soon as I get back from a night of drinking and dancing!

Not as we know it, this cover comes from somebody who has their finger on the button.

Have loved this clip since I first saw it ages ago. The deadpan delivery has me rolling around in laughter every time I see it.

This video presentation from Siggraph 2007 has been popping up all over the internets the last couple of days, and the implications are truly astonishing. Algorithmically this is a remarkably simple technique, and easily implemented in real-time. It should be pretty straight-forward to write an implementation in ActionScript 3 (for Flash 9) or in IronPython (for Silverlight) and have this apply to images in webpages with a minimum of effort.

More exciting than simply just resizing images is that the weighting and treatment that can be applied manually to specific regions of an image. It’s easy to imagine a myriad of gaming opportunities that arise if you can hide data selectively in images across the web through this technique.

Dr. Shamir’s other research work is pretty interesting as well, covering as he does:

• Mesh Partitioning
• Skeleton Based Representations
• Multi-Resolution Models
• Object Feature-Space Analysis
• Digital Typography
• Visual Succinct Representation of Information

I loved Lego as a kid — spending weeks working on the most intricate constructions imaginable. Of course, these days it all comes in pre-made kits that barely require a functioning brain-stem to assemble. Well, apart from this remarkable machine, which might be the geekiest thing I’ve ever seen:

Yes, those first button presses are selecting the colours for the blocks that form the end product. The sheer amount of planning this must have required is mind-boggling. Vorsprung durch Technik indeed.

Take one aging acting legend, a video camera inside a racing car doing 160mph, and add some creative editing. Result? Comedy genius:

Brighton’s legendary human beatbox cooks up a storm in the kitchen.