About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
You know the story about that nice family of bears whose home is invaded, robbed and vandalized by some pre-teen female hoodlum? I have a vague feeling of how that poor Ursine family must have felt when they discovered their food missing.
Indeed, we all must identify with the bears these days. There is a huge Goldilocks in our midst, and she’s been nibbling away at everything! We’ve all seen the candy bars get smaller while the price gets higher. And that space-reducing dome at the bottom of most plastic containers gets bigger and bigger. Consumers purchase ever-increasing amounts of air these days.
This is brought home to me full force every time I open a container of raisins.
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16 Comments | tags: ginger cookies, Goldilocks, humor, product packaging, raisins | posted in Life, Rant
Another quickie today (makes a nice break, right?), mostly just dropping by to show you my (work in progress) TARDIS. I think you’ll agree it’s looking a lot better than it did yesterday. I’ll show you that in a moment, but I have a mildly amusing story to relate first.
At least I find it mildly amusing, but then I find it mildly amusing that my fingers insist on typing “amuzing” every… single… time. One of my mental block words apparently (or a sign of encroaching senility). It (by which I mean the story, not my spelling) reminded slightly me of a similar story.
A time when I participated in events that led to Blast Damage!
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10 Comments | tags: blast damage, camping, diet mountain dew, Dr Who, ice, TARDIS | posted in Life
This is a bit of a drive-by posting. (Look at it this way: “Oh, goodie: more pictures!”)
I confess part of my distraction these days is being caught up playing with POV-Ray (which I’ve described quite a bit recently). Boy with a toy, I guess, but it’s just so much fun! It does open some great doors for blog illustrations down the road, so it’s worth building some degree of skill. (Plus, did I mention the fun?)
So just to keep my hand in posting-wise (it is so easy to get out of the habit), here are some pictures of what I’ve been working on while I’ve been ignoring you.
Bonus points if you know the post’s title reference!
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4 Comments | tags: planets, POV-Ray | posted in Computers, Life
Feeling a strong sense of blog ennui. Work is part of it. After five months of largely fruitless effort, my trees are showing signs of budding and maybe eventually bearing fruit. After a holiday slow down, things are heating up, so my attention is focused there.
And as I’ve mentioned before, this new position has a lot of communicating — it’s really a combination of architecture and project management — and it tends to dry up my usual urges to communicate. Sculpting a blog post too closely resembles the careful sculpting of work communications.
So this post has a bunch of pictures instead of words.
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25 Comments | tags: cute, pixels, rainbows, sunshine | posted in Life
By all indicators (page reads, Likes, comments), most of my readers don’t find POV-Ray quite as interesting as I do. That’s too bad, because I’ve finally decided on a theme for this blog. It’s going to be all-POV-Ray all the time! Think of the fun we’ll have!
Yes, of course I’m kidding. Anyone who knows me at all (hello, have you met me?) would know better. Me, one topic? It is to laugh. Out loud. (Honestly, I don’t know how mono-topical bloggers do it.)
But I do promise this is the last post — for now — about POV-Ray. We’ll just swing by the gift shop, and then move on to other things.
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5 Comments | tags: bar stool, BOOL Engine, EPS conduit, pool balls, POV-Ray, ray tracing | posted in Computers, Sideband
Take a seat! (click for big)
As promised last time, my simple tour of POV-Ray continues with some examples a bit more interesting than an abacus stone or a box with holes in it. Time to move beyond a bunch of teal-colored spheres! (How about a bunch of hunter-green cones?)
I think it’s nice to have a place to sit while I lecture, so I’m going to use my digital woodworking set to provide a bar stool (and maybe a beer). The beauty of the virtual world is that , well, free stools (and maybe beers) for everybody.
Because I don’t just make a stool. I make a thing that makes stools.
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Leave a comment | tags: bar stool, constructive geometry, POV-Ray, ray tracing | posted in Computers, Sideband
Recently I took you on a tour of a virtual theatre I “built” to help illustrate a post about light and color. It’s virtual because it wasn’t built with wood or metal or rock, but only with 100% natural electrons grown in the U.S.A. (free range; no pesticides or antibiotics).
I also showed you some smaller objects I built with the same tool: a freeware ray tracing application, called POV-Ray. The application is a “rendering engine.” It takes your design and renders it as a 3D image, complete with textures, shadows, reflections and a variety of other life-like effects.
Today I’m going to take you down into the engine room!
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3 Comments | tags: constructive geometry, POV-Ray, ray tracing | posted in Computers, Sideband
In Monday’s post I started writing about light and color. I described how white light can be created by adding three primary colors (red, green, blue), and how mixing any two result in secondary colors (yellow, cyan, magenta).
I went on to describe how subtracting two of the secondaries gives you the primary color they have in common, and how subtracting all three filters out all color, giving you black. The secondary combinations are the negative of the primary ones (e.g. blue is “anti-yellow”). I also touched on how color is the “pitch” (frequency) of light and that X-rays, radio waves, microwaves and gamma rays are all forms of light.
Today I continue the topic by exploring some details and nuances.
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5 Comments | tags: blue, cyan, green, ink, light, magenta, primary colors, red, secondary colors, yellow | posted in Basics, Science
Back on my first Sideband post, I wrote that, “Sideband posts are miscellaneous thoughts that accompany the main thread of posts. Think of them as small paths that meander off the main road. Some branch off, go a short ways and die after a short while. Others are scenic trails that follow along the main road.”
They never quite achieved that vision, so this year one goal is getting Sidebands back on track with that original “mission statement.”
And I’m going to start with fun topic: computer-generated 3D images!
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12 Comments | tags: 3D, 3D images, abacus, bar stool, CGI, computer generated images, POV-Ray, ray tracing | posted in Computers, Sideband
This is a post I began quite some time ago thinking it would be a quick and easy one, since it concerns a topic I know very well.
But — perhaps due to my own inability to be brief — it turned out to be more involved than expected. Maybe I just have a hard time leaving out all the details. In any event, I set it aside until I had more time.
Then I had an idea for making this post a bit more fun (at least for me). The problem was: I needed to build a theatre! You see, this post is about color and light.
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10 Comments | tags: blue, cyan, green, light, magenta, primary colors, red, secondary colors, yellow | posted in Basics, Science
Logos con carne 
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