After reading yesterday's post on Creating the Software Art In Tron Legacy I started thinking about the limited way I was using the shell in my day to day work. I was thinking that there has to be a better way, some sort of middle ground between the shell and GUI. I don't want to give up the power that the shell provides, I don't even want to take my hands off the keyboard - I just want a richer more contextual display. My computer is capable of rendering very slick graphics but my shell makes no use of it. Does anyone know of any projects that are working towards a graphically enhanced shell?

Check out this video where a guy has taken the model from the kinect and replaced the points with variable sized blobs. Looks cool. Fat Cat

I was just reading about something similar on the RiAus On Demand site:

I'm more concerned that the intrusion alarms were offline. I wonder if they bothered to check that the warheads are still there?!?

I dunno, if glow in the dark yoghurt makes my poop glow too - that'd be awesome!

Does that make slashdot a social network?

Hey lewko, I read your sig:

Tell me this 24/7 monitoring installation is not designed to monitor people snoring..?!?

I've been reading through lots of the posts here and there seems to be quite a few instances where people have spent a lot of time and money designing systems that ultimately don't get used. My suggestion is this: Start simple. Get a working system up and running and do it with budget to spare. Once your team has been using it for a while ask them what they want.

You don't need to make it more interesting, you need to make it part of your routine. It's like waking up at 6am to go for a run. The first few times you do it it'll be hard, but if you stick to it and do it every single day it will become just something you do. Start small - don't try to run a marathon in your first week, just don't make any excuses or invent reasons to skip it just this once. The fact that you care enough to ask slashdot suggests that it is important enough to you to make the effort. If you can make the change and stick to it you will probably find more fulfillment in your work.

I have a son who existed as a frozen embryo for a few months thanks to IVF. I wonder if we could thaw out an embryo that has been frozen for 50000 years...

What if you do it bit by bit... Replace each organ as it wears out. It wouldn't take too long to replace your entire body.

I suppose you could look at a bit like source code. Selling the MP3 is like selling the pre-compiled app. Selling sheet music is more like selling the source code. It allows users to re-brand it as their own and sell it again via live performances. Of course there's more to it than that, but I think it's a good analogy for this audience. Sheet music might be a less refined product than a neatly compiled app/mp3, but it gives you access to every little secret the author used to make their product so awesome.

You probably don't want to copy him directly, but I was impressed by Thomas Scovell's Obfuscated C Code Tattoo.

It's a Swept Surface Volumetric Display A friend and I actually built one in my shed. We removed the colour wheel from a DLP projector and replaced the bulb with a green laser. We projected from below onto a translucent spinning helix, which gave a better volumetric image than the flat surface used by these guys. We then animated a helical slice of a scene and interlaced the frames so that the red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow projected sequential slices of the helix. It worked quite well, although with a pre-compiled animation we had some vertical sync issues - the scene would move up or down through the space like an old TV. I've started writing a graphics engine that will take a normal 3D model and slice it up it in real time synced to the rotation of the helix via a hall effect sensor.