News You Can Bruise for 2004 August 12

There are cameras that take a 360-degree panoramic picture. I assume there are also panoramic videocameras for filming IMAX movies. What if you got one of those videocameras and strapped it on a helmet around your head, and then wore goggles so that what you saw was a full panorama?

Your eyes already know to invert an image (since an image hits your retina upside-down), and how to merge two 2D images into a 3D image. Unless this is an inate ability, your brain must learn to do this by coordinating your sight with your other senses over time. So unless this behavior is fixed in childhood, it should be possible to change the way your brain processes your visual input. It should be possible to wear such goggles all the time and eventually adjust to having full-circle vision, perceiving things as though you actually had eyes all around your head.

Simpler experiment: If you wore lenses all the time that inverted everything, would your brain eventually learn to process the image exactly as it appeared on your retina?

More complicated experiment: could you also add cameras above and below the ring of cameras that formed the panoramic camera, creating a near-complete sphere of vision? At what point would your brain be unable to handle the additional information?

Who will volunteer for my monstrous Beholder-Man experiment (funding request pending)?

By their own admission these are not games. They are toys. But you know what I always say: a toy is just a game with no win condition. Wait, that makes Color Lines a toy. Well, there's some difference between a toy and a game, but not enough difference to keep me from my obsessive rounding-up. Here we go.

• Tea Cooker: This is a timer. It is preset for various types of tea steeping. Has a little, hard-to-read pie-chart display in the deskbar window (is deskbar a word or did I just make it up?). You can choose your own custom time. As a timer, it's not bad.
• KDE World Clock: Displays a geographic map of the world with the in-daylight portion shaded. You can add flags to various cities, which would be nice if you were homesick or separated from your loved one. The best feature is the ability to change the map graphic to an irrelevant false-color map of the earth that shows eg. the amount of rainfall.
• AMOR: The only in this series of Roundups to which I have made an (unofficial) contribution. AMOR creates a little animated icon that wanders around the active window and does tricks. My favorite is the segmented worm; it's cute.
• Mousepedometa: an odometer for your mouse. It measures how far (in inches or centimeters) you've moved your mouse pointer. The help claims the next version will be USEFUL, which I assume means it will have a keystroke counter as well. Has a trip odometer, just like the odometer in a car. Old-fashioned analog flippy number graphics, not the harsh digital graphics of the modern era. Would you believe I racked up 10.8 inches on the mouse writing this review?

  Oh, also if you had your WACOM tablet pen acting as the mouse, you could use it to do things like see how long your signature would be if it were a straight line.

• Moon phase indicator: The moon is new right now. That's all it says, so that's all I'll say. Lets you see the moon from any Earthbound angle, not that it matters at the moment.
• KTuberling: A Mr. Potato Head for KDE. Hacker Abstraction Syndrome (henceforth to be abbreviated HAS) has added "penguin" and "aquarium" modes, but has yet to turn it into a KidPix like collage/drawing program. A lot of fun. To the right you can see Sheriff Tater, my own creation.
• xeyes: The sailor's favorite. This classic demonstration of non-square windows in X (this used to be a big deal, but I think everyone has it now) is a pair of googly eyes that follow your cursor. It would be kind of funny to have a background be a famous painting and put xeyes on top of it so that the painting's eyes really did follow you (r cursor) across the room (screen).
• xlogo: It's the X logo. Useless! Except, I suppose, as an example X program.
• xearth: This doesn't come with enough systems. It pretty obviously inspired the thing in Snow Crash that's exactly the same but fancier. Like KDE World Clock, but shows the earth as a globe in space. Has lots of options (with or without starfield, markers, etc.). Good clean fun.

  PS: if you are interested in this sort of thing, check out Fourmilab's Earth and Moon viewer. I think I've mentioned that the Fourmilab website is what Crummy merely aspires to be. On that happy note, we end this roundup.

Did I miss something that came with your system? Let me know and I'll review it, unless it is not a game or (catch-all) I don't want to review it.