Adam Norwood: Tumblr

Album art recreated quickly for the Windows 3.1 era:

The drawings in this collection were made by various users in a discussion forum on the website www.foreverdoomed.com. Using MS Paint, and other rudimentary computer drawing programs, users attempted to recreate their favorite album covers and let others on the forum guess the band and title from the artwork. […] Some gave themselves a limit of five minutes to recreate the most recognizable essentials.

I sort of like these. I’d forgotten the subtle charm of MSPaint’s spraycan, though I’d always envied MacPaint’s patterns.

(Via Coudal Partners)

The Stanford Frankencamera

To help further the field of computational photography, a team at Stanford is working on a homebrewed, open source digital camera that they can sell at-cost to other academics in the field. Right now it’s pretty big and clunky-looking, but a camera that can be extended with the latest image processing techniques coming out of the labs would be very sexy indeed. There’s a recent press release that’s worth reading about the team, along with a video and an animation or two to explain the project.

Those that want to tinker with their existing store-bought cameras might want to check out the firmware hacks that are floating around out there, like the excellent CHDK software (GPL’ed, I think) that runs on most modern Canon digital point-and-shoot and dSLR cameras. With a little bit of elbow grease and some free tools you can add a lot of professional(ish) features and scripting support to your low-end camera.

(Via John Nack)

The Xerox Star 8010 OS, an early GUI from 1981. I wish my desktop looked a bit more like this today. More interface awesomeness from this system on the DigiBarn Computer Museum site.

(Via)

From “Dramatic Increase in the Number of TOR Clients from Iran”, an O’Reilly Radar interview with the executive director of the TOR anonymizing onion router, software definitely made for times like these. Hopefully the new users know to keep their transmissions encrypted, especially given the likelihood that their government is keeping an eye on all outbound Internet traffic.