I have a new favorite iPhone application and it’s not a new game or a clever utility—it’s the National Film Board of Canada’s app. Sure, there’s YouTube but the NFB has put together a really slick collection of thousands of short films that has made this animation nerd and new commuter very, very happy. iTunes link

While we’re on the topic, the very first film I looked up after installing was Neighbours by Norman McLaren in 1952. Let me type that again for emphasis: 1952.

“In this Oscar®-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower.”

The film was created to speak against anti-militarism and against war, but I was first taken by the style of animation, dubbed ‘pixilation’ by Grant Munro (one of the two men in the film.) According to the Oracle:

The majority of the film is shot with variable-speed photography, usually in fast motion, with some stop-frame techniques. During one brief sequence, the two actors appear to levitate: this effect was actually achieved in stop-motion; the men repeatedly jumped upward but were photographed only at the top of their trajectories.

Fun fact: the soundtrack of the film was made by McLaren by scratching into the edge of the film.

Full disclosure: it gets a little disturbing towards the end, so click through to watch.

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Everyone knows that when you start commuting to work in a new city you make a web app to assist in planning travel your travel to and from said city, so when I began commuting to Chicago last Thursday I put my nose to the grindstone and produced this little beauty.

I know what you’re thinking: so what? A little website that helps a very small handful of people who take the BNSF Metra between Naperville and Chicago, all of whom will probably never know it exists? And you’re right: it really is just only for me but what makes it interesting in my eyes is how it works. Using some fancy techniques from this excerpt by Jonathan Stark I was able to assemble a little page that caches itself to your iPhone and will load from the cache without the need for cellular, 3G or WiFi connectivity and persists after reboots or resets. This is perfect because my building, despite having a large AT&T office within its walls, gets very poor AT&T network connectivity.

Oh and in the future if I ever need to change things or add features a little javascript is in place to check for any changes on the network and download anything that needs to be updated. So if you take the train between Naperville and Chicago, go ahead and add this little site to your home screen. I even made an icon from the train symbol in Google Maps!

BNSF Naperville Train Schedule (Optimized for an iPhone, but should work in any browser.)

Update: It looks like I neglected a couple of details. Under the “Day” tab you’ll find the Naperville to Chicago train schedule and under the “Night” tab is the reverse trip. The times are also ranked according to travel time with green representing 30-40 minutes, yellow representing 40-50 minutes and red representing over 50 minutes. In other words, greens are express trains and the others aren’t. I’d like to ultimately turn this into a less specific tool and accommodate additional data and maybe even turn it into a free little app but I need to do a little more research first.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a little while now, but I think its time to share:

Barack the Barbarian is one of many prezploitation comics that have popped up in our local comic book store since President Obama took office. It seems to me like one of those novelties that is somewhat amusing on the surface but just feels weird if you dig very deep. From the summary:

In the distant future the story of Barack Obama has become a little… distorted. According to THE MADDOWIAN CHRONICLES he was the one destined to save the great republic of America and dethrone the overpaid despots of the time. Join Barack, Sorceress Hilaria, her demi-god trickster husband Biil, Overlord Boosh and Chainknee of the Elephant Kingdom. Who can the lone barbarian trust, if anyone?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for political satire, but I get the feeling that things like these can easily be misconstrued and suddenly become the hot topic in a hotel conference room shouting match between angry, middle-aged imbeciles and a congressperson.

If anything, Barack the Barbarian makes me pine for the days before I was aware Sarah Palin was a human being.

A few days ago we found ourselves at a Lego Store and stumbled across one of their augmented reality kiosks. The premise is simple and awesome: hold up a box in front of a camera and a 3-D representation of the fully assembled model is projected on top of it. You can rotate the box and the model moves with it.

Despite getting the stink eye from one of the employees, we managed to take a video of the kiosk in action:

As you can see in the video, the camera tracks the box really, really well. Unfortunately, the setup was limited to a handful of Lego kits—I would have loved to have seen some of the Star Wars sets in action. Nevertheless, I haven’t been so excited about ‘futuristic’ technology since the unveiling of the iPhone. I, for one, welcome our new augmented reality overlords.

I’ve been noodling around with some new designs for the site and in doing so I became increasingly annoyed that the cycloptopus (as he exists now) isn’t the most anatomically correct—as far as cephalopods are concerned anyway. I’m going to continue to obsess over it, as I am prone to do, but I decided to share up a desktop picture for those who might be inclined to adorn their computer with this cryptozoological wonder.

The desktop image comes in three sizes: 1920 x 1200, 1280 x 800 and 1024 x 768 and can be downloaded here.