upr00ted

These ideas come to me at the oddest times, thoughts about how to make the world just a little better, or more often, how to make a piece of technology a bit more fun. My latest one happened when I was at MASS MoCA with a few friends. We were in a dark room where there was a video playing of a car full of fireworks exploding super-imposed over Times Square. At the end of the video it faded to black before repeating. But the room was still lit by the LCD projectors that couldn’t quite do “black.”

My million dollar idea would make LCD projectors go all the way black. It seems like a simple task, yet hasn’t been done to my knowledge.

If anyone manages to use this theory, I’d appreciate some credit, or royalties, though I know that by putting this out on my public blog, for all 2 readers to read, I’m essentially giving my idea away.

Here it goes.

Take an idea like those sunglasses that get darker when you walk outside and lighter when you go inside. As far as I know those are just a photo sensitive skin placed on the lens. If there were a way to tell those glasses to go totally dark immediately or totally light immediately you have just created an electronic shutter. All you need is some material that when electrically activated (or deactivated) goes completely opaque. Then you simply have to test the incoming signal to the projector and see if it is supposed to turn on any of its pixels. If the answer is no, then you activate the shutter. If a single pixel is supposed to be on, then you deactivate it. The benefit over a real shutter is simply that it shouldn’t increase the internal heat inside the projector where a physical barrier would.

Alright, time for bed for me, I’ll see if this still looks good in the morning.

Just a quick not to all million of my visitors, I’m in the process of switching servers so there will be some down time of parts of this site. From now on it will be mainly the gallery and the older stuff that is not available.
Thanks for your patience.

If you have visited here over the past few hours you probably noticed a few odd things popping up and moving around. I’ve been updating. I have changed over to Movable type. I like the interface and features much more than phpoxom, though the setup was actually much harder since I was just using php to curl the blog section in the previous method. In the longrun the features and flexibility afforded by movable type will be quite useful I think, and now people can leave feedback right on the page. Expect at least one more style soon as I continue to dink around with some CSS. I realize that none of these designs so far are extraordinary, but they will come.

Domain name has been set to www.UpR00ted.com, note zeros not o’s.
Simple explaination: I love root vegetables, I move quite often, there are obvious conotations of roots and trees and the like in what I do in my free time, mainly program and dink around on the web.
This site will eventually become a repository for all things CSS, Mac, etc. that I find/figure out.

After battling CSS bugs for almost a week as you can see I finally have a site re-design. I’m pretty happy with the end result, but as you can see here it isn’t quite what I wanted. It seems there is an odd bug (or perhaps pilot error) in some part of CSS or HTML that stops the links in my right side menu from being usable in any browser besides IE Win. I only have 6 installed so I don’t know if it also works in older versions, but every Mac browser seems to render it nicely, but uselessly.
If anyone has an idea on how to fix this problem, I would appreciate hearing about it.