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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

This is Chrome’s Newest Easter Egg. And It’s Awesome

The Wi-Fi at the coffee shop I work out of most mornings is, like most public internet hotspots, patchy and prone to temporarily ‘drop out’.

We’ve already seen how Google plans to make intermittent connectivity issues less of a hindrance through cache page loading malarkey.

Helpful as this may be the latest Canary builds of Google Chrome comes with a little extra sweetener. Hidden within the browser’s new-look ‘Network Error’ page is a cute, endless running game. It even features the ‘lonely t-rex’ character used to illustrate the browser’s error pages.

This button-mashing game certainly helps me ~~channel my frustration~~ pass the time while I wait for the network to solve itself. If you use Chrome Canary on Windows or Mac (or run Chromium from trunk on Linux) here’s how you can try it.

How to Play The Endless T-Rex Runner Game in Chrome

Turn off your Wi-Fi connection (or use the developer tools in Chrome to simulate this). Then, open a new tab and load up a website. You’ll see the standard (though redesigned) Network Error page, topped by the lonely T-Rex glyph created by Google designer Sebastien Gabriel.

Typically at this point you’d close the tab and tut loudly, gesturing for the nearest barista to go and reboot the router. Instead, tap the space bar on your keyboard.

The lonely T-Rex at the top of the page will suddenly bounce. A stretch of land will appear before him. And then…he’ll start running.

Like other endless runner games the goal is simple: run as far as you can, for as long as you can, until you crash. You’ll need to keep mashing the space bar on your keyboard to help the T-Rex clear the conveyor belt of variously spaced, differently sized cacti.

Every 100 points marker is punctuated by a screeching high score blip.

As hidden novelties go, this is a welcome one. A fun way to fill in idle time.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Vassilis Tangoulis - an art photographer (black and white)

Vassilis Tangoulis leads a double carrier as an academic teacher-Lecturer and a fine art photographer. He is a physicist working in the Chemistry department in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and despite his full time carrier has also found success following his lifetime passion of photography. He has been a recipient of international award for his Black and White long exposure work.

Photography is a 4D object leaving its footprint, its “trace,” in a 2D layer. When this happens for a 3D object, it is easy for a mind to visualize its 3D morphology. In order to envision a 4D object, however, one needs the power of Fine Art photography.

Mediterranean sky

He was born in a small Greek town –Karpenisi surrounded by mountains and was really lucky to be a “village” boy. He had the opportunity to see sceneries that influenced his viewpoint and perspective and maybe unconsciously defined the absolute meanings of words like “sunset”, “snow”, and many others; all important ingredients of a landscape photographer. He left Karpenisi at the age of 11 and spent some 20 years in different towns and the last 10 years Vassilis lives in Patras, a beautiful town near the sea. Neutral density filters came into his life and a new surrealistic world has been revealed…From that moment he gives all his creativity to elaborate and explore this new world.

For him Fine Art photography is an alternative way to express a common subject so that each individual artist can reveal secret aspects about it. In order to do this, each artist experiments with light, time, and spatial coordinates– and then through one’s processing, one reveals a subject framed in a transformed world in which its dimensions can be easily described and visualized.
He always try to leave a message behind his photos. For him every photo has symbolic meanings and sometimes he leaves the symbols to speak for themselves but there are times he has to give a guidance and this is usually the title he chooses for a collection. He works with collections of photos (sets of 5 or more) and this because he always needs a concept when he takes photographs. Taking a photo is always a serious matter for him and if there is no concept or no message prefers to stay silent. After all Ansel Adams said it much better : “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”