Today I stumbled upon this link to a couple of remixes of the classic “afterimage” optical illusion. Apparently someone decided that plain old nationalist was not enough and decided to create an image of their country’s flag that basically gets burned in your retinas for a short time. As opposed to the classic Jesus afterimage, these flags are in full-color, not just black and white.

Of course I couldn’t stay back, so I decided to create an image of the Mexican flag which will give you a full-colored afterimage:

To view this, just stare at the eagle in the center of the flag for about 20-30 seconds trying not to blink, then quickly look away from your monitor (preferably to a white surface) and you’ll se the Mexican flag in full-color! You might need to blink a few times before the afterimage sinks in. Alternatively you can mouse over the image after staring at it, and it will disappear, leaving you with a white background without having to turn away. Unfortunately the eagle in the center of the flag is not very clear, but at least you can see that there’s something brown in the center of the flag.

On a more technical note, in case you’re wondering how it works, here’s the explanation: There are three types of color receptors in your retina, each type is more sensitive to either red, blue or green. When you stare at an image with one of these colors for too long the receptors for that color get “tired”. Since the receptors are “tired”, when you look away from the image those receptors don’t work as well as they should and you end up with an afterimage of the opposite colors from the ones in the original image. Enjoy!

• If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines… is a funny analogy of what airlines would be like if they were like certain operating systems.
• Visual HTML Jokes is a Flickr set of pictures with different HTML tags in them. Some of them are extremely funny However you should only venture to this link if you’re familiar with HTML, otherwise you probably won’t get the jokes.
• The Gaffer is a flash games where you are a gaffer who needs to load certain boxes into a truck. This game starts kinda slow, but it gets more interesting as time goes by, and both the graphics and the music create a great mood for playing.
• Anamorphic Coffe Cups is a group of pictures of some very special coasters which shows some messages when you place a reflective surface on them such as a glass or a cup.
• Frenzic is a Mac OS X game where you need to complete as many “pies” using different pie parts which are provided. It’s a fast paced anf fun game, and it’s made by the Iconfactory so graphics are quite nice too. Also, be sure to press ‘b’ while playing, it’s quite funny.

• The first BitTorrent is a very funny webcomic. I usually try not to post links to webcomics, but I found this one very funny and I had not heard of Extralife before, so I figured it was worth posting.
• Romanesco Cauliflower is a type of cauliflower that grows like a fractal. Apparently it’s quite common in some places, but I had never seen it before.
• Zelda Reorchestrated is a collection of songs from various Zelda games that have been re-orchestrated. Some of them are quite good, unfortunately downloading most of them in MP3 format for your future listening pleasure is a bit complicated, although not impossible. Hint: If you’re using Safari just load a song and press Cmd+Option+A.
• Meet the World is a campaign that attempts to make people realize what the reality in our world is be using country flags as graphs. VERY clever.
• Pac-man is my attempt to lighten the mood after you see the previous link.

While going over my site’s stats I noticed that several people reach my site searching for walkthrough for Eyezmaze’s mini-game Neighbours (actually most of them come looking for “Neighbors walkthrough” probably because Neighbours makes no sense and it’s quite easy to accidentally ignore the ‘u’). And since I believe that people should get what they came looking for, I decided to write a short walkthrough for those of you that are unsure on how to solve it. Before anything else you should know that I will not give to the correct order in which you need to place the hairy guys to win. The correct order changes every time you play the game, so I can’t tell you what the right order will be, however I can tell you how to figure it out yourself.

First, I’ll start with the basics. The objective of the game is to place the 9 different “hairy guys” so that they all “like” the hairy guys around them (hairy guys only care about who’s above them, below them, or at either side; they don’t care about who’s sitting diagonally from them). If you place two hairy guys who don’t like each other together, they will shake their arms in complaint.

The first thing you should note is that there are three different types of places where a hairy guy can be placed. Hairy guys placed in each one of these types need to like a different number of hairy guys. The hair guy in the center needs to like 4 other hairy guys. Hairy guys in the sides need to like 3 other hairy guys. And finally, hairy guys in the corners only need to like 2 other hairy guys. Now that you know this you only need to find out how many other hairy guys each hairy guy likes and you’ll know where you should place him.

The best strategy is probably to try to figure out which hairy guy goes in the center first. To do this, just place one of the hairy guys in the center and then try placing one by one each of the other hairy guys next to him. When you’re done you’ll know if that hairy guy goes in the center, side, or corner. Chances are the first hairy guy you pick won’t be the center hairy guy. So you just need to keep trying. If the first hairy guy you picked is a corner hairy guy then you know that the two other hairy guys he likes are both side hairy guys; then, any candidate to be the center hairy guy must also like those two hairy guys. If the first hairy guy you picked is a side hairy guy, then you know that one of the three hairy guys he likes must be the center hairy guy, and you only need to figure out which one it is.

Once you know who the center hairy guy is, you’re almost done. The four hairy guys he likes are the four side hairy guys so the only thing you need to know is the order in which you need to place them. You also know that the remaining hairy guys should all be placed in a corner. Try placing one of the corner hairy guys in one of the corners and see if he likes his neighbors. If he likes one of them, but not the other, then just change the one he doesn’t like for one of the other two side hairy guys. If he doesn’t like any of them, then that hairy guy goes in the opposite corner. After that you just need to place the rest of the corner hairy guys where they don’t complain (depending on your situation you may also need to switch some of the side hairy guys), but by now your possibilities are quite limited, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find the right order. Good Luck!

• Jetspeed is another fun game where you control a small ship that has to avoid traffic and destroy some trucks.
• Ford Billboards is a pictures of some new Ford billboards. It’s a great idea and produces some very nice results.
• Kid-Sized Tetris – I should get some of those…
• Citizendium is another project created by Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) which aims to have “gentle expert oversight”. I registered and was browsing some of the Math articles, and while it seems like a great idea it’s just too new and lacks a lot of information. I think everyone should read “What mathematics is not” in their article on Mathematics, especially where it says: “Mathematics is not accountancy”. Never ask a Mathematician how much is 34*56, they probably don’t know, and I doubt they care.
• Neighbours is a mini game from eyezmaze, it’s very short and not too hard, but I’m a big fan of eyezmaze’s games, so it had to post about it.

• Red is another very simple but very fun game. The music is kinda nice too.
• Speed Cluster is a very simply yet very fun game. The link goes to the jayisgames review where you can find instructions on how to play (since the game itself is in japanese). Have fun!
• jmtb02 Studios – The other day while I was playing WarioWare: Smooth Moves, I remembered Four Second Frenzy, and today I decided to go see if there was a new version, and I found Four Second Firestorm, along with some other great games in this site.
• Super Mario Brothers Theme Song – Homemade Versions is a collection of YouTube videos of people playing the Super Mario Bros theme in several different instruments. I had already seen a few of them, but there were also some very cool version I hadn’t heard before.
• Is 17 the “most random” number? is a blog post that talks about how when you ask a group of people to pick a number between 1 and 20, the most common answer is 17. I even tried this with a few people and several of them answered 17! The article compares this with a random number generator he ran in his computer, which to me doesn’t make much sense, but if you ignore the “Computer” part in the charts then it’s all very interesting information.

I know I promised to post this last weekend, but I ran into some new bugs and decided to postpone its release. It’s still not perfect, there is at least one bug that I know of, but it’s not a big bug (in fact I doubt anyone will notice it), and since I’m not sure of what is the right way to fix it I decided to leave it around for this version. There’s also a lot of features I still want to add. Up to now you can generate and view fractals, but there is no way to save them or export images with the generated fractals. Ever since I started working on Chaotica I’ve had plans to add saving and exporting features, but I can’t get myself to actually do it. The problem is that opening and saving is a mess to implement since right now Chaotica is not document-based. Cocoa does a lot of stuff for you but there are still a lot of details you need to take care of, so I’m waiting until I have a lot of free time and I’m in the right mood. Anyway, without further ado, here‘s a link to the download page for Chaotica 2.0b1.

Earlier this week I posted a link to Hard ‘N Phirm’s video of “El Corazón”. In my post I mentioned that I didn’t understand why they chose to do the song in Spanish. Luckily for me, Chris Hardwick from Hard ‘N Phirm stumbled upon my post and decided to answer my question. Here’s a quote from an email he sent me:

Anyway, just wanted to post about this in case anyone else was wondering why they decided to make the song in Spanish. Thanks Chris!

This week has been a bit crazy. I’ve been trying to get some things done (like the Chaotica release I’m always talking about), but I been spending quite some time everyday answering questions regarding Postalicious and fixing bugs. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind helping people and fixing bugs, it’s just that my vacation is running out and I still have a lot of things I want to get done before it’s over.

Anyway, a few notes to all Postalicious users:

• Please update to the latest version. I’ve been fixing some pretty serious bugs this week and if you’re stuck with pretty much any version before 1.08, chances are you’re going to run into some sort of problem, most likely getting posts claiming to be your bookmarks from 1969.
• Please read the FAQ, chances are Postalicious doesn’t work like you expect it to work. I’ve received several comments from people who say that nothing happens when they click the “Update Now” button. It does work, it just won’t do what you think it does. Because of this I decided to add a FAQ which explains how Postalicious works and the reasons why I decided to make it work that way.
• Feel free to contact me if you have any problems with Postalicious, I’ll try to do everything I can think of to fix your problem. You can use the contact link at the bottom of my site or simply post a comment in this post.

Finally, this is a link to the Postalicious page where you can read the FAQ and download the newest version. Also, I would like to thank Martin from admartinator.de for letting me know about several bugs earlier version of Postalicious had.