Posts Tagged ‘Geeks’

The client says ‘I need a picture of a man throwing a frisbee and a dog jumping to get it’

Normally that would either involve hours of stock photography searching, hiring a photographer or trying to comp things together, which again would take lots of time. Imagine if you could just do a rough sketch of the composition and somehow it would magically turn into the image you need.

Enter Photosketch, a system developed at Tsinghua university. Sketch your image, label the elements and wait for the image.

At the moment there’s just this video although an online demo is promised.

A little update to my last post about Geocaching. Simon and I have found all the caches within walking distance around the office and a fair few beyond. Simon’s cache count is 35 found, I’m not too far behind with 31.

We thought it was about time that we created our own cache with a twist. This week we posted  ‘The Fallen Few’  which is a three stage ‘multi-cache’. Should anyone interested care to attempt it you can either visit the global geocaching website or use the information here; if you don’t have a GPS you can borrow one of ours.

N 53° 27.813 W 002° 17.341

The above co-ordinates will take you to the start of the quest, it is around 1 mile from here to the finish (nice easy walk).The cache itself is the standard clik lok box containing the log book, pencil and the usual variety of goodies!

The journey starts with 3 sporting heroes.
On the plaque beneath them are just six words.

Count the number of characters in each word and then use those numbers:

1st word = A
2nd word = B
3rd word = C
4th word = D
5th word = E
6th word = F

N53° (B -D) (C) . (C – A) (B + D – C – E) (F – B)
W002° (D – A) (A + D). (C) (A + B) (F)

Following the new co-ordinates will take you to some more heroes of another kind. On the large centre plaque there are columns of names. You will be finding surnames and again, count the number of characters in each name and use those numbers. You will also need to keep the results from the first task to help you solve the second.

1st column, 4th name down = G
4th column, 1st name down = H
7th column, 5th name up from bottom = J

N53° (J – G) (C) . (H – A – B) (G ) (G + A)
W002° (G – D) (J). (J) (J) (B – D)

These last set of co-ordinates will take you to where the cache is hidden.

Found it!

This lunchtime Simon C and I went ‘Geocaching’

If you’ve never heard of it before, the idea is simple; some people go out into the world and hide stuff and then other people using handheld GPS receivers go out and try and find it.

Basically Geocaching utilises billion dollar military satellites to look for Tupperware boxes hidden in woods, parks etc.

Using a handheld GPS, you key in the latitude and longitude coordinates of a geocache and then just follow the arrow. A GPS is accurate to just a few feet but once you arrive at the location the fun of the game is putting yourself in the mindset of the hider. Some geocaches can be very hard to find, as obviously they don’t want to be found by random, non-geocaching people. Non-cachers are called Muggles, (a term borrowed from the Harry Potter books where a ‘muggle’ is a non-magical person) if a cache is discovered and destroyed by non-cachers it is said to have been ‘muggled’

All caches will contain a log book for you to sign to say that you’ve successfully found it and depending on the size of the cache will typically contain small prizes, nik-knacks etc. The etiquette of geocaching is that if you remove an item from the cache then you should replace it with something of equal or greater value, that way there is always a treat for someone else to find!

If you visit www.geocaching.com enter your postcode, you’ll be amazed at just how many geocaches will be hidden in your area. There are currently 844,397 active geocaches spread all over the world. Caches range from the smallest, known as micro-caches to very large ex-army 50 caliber ammo crates that can contain lots of goodies.