Tanaka Isson (1908-77) was a Japanese painter who was rejected by the art establishment. In 1958, he decided to leave the Japanese mainland and moved to a small tropical island named Amami Oshima – halfway between the main Japanese islands and Okinawa.
Take a look at these otherworldly paintings of island wildlife:
To see the lush nature of Amami Oshima, I recommend watching one of the videos below. They’re by TV Treasure Peter Barakan and you can watch them without ads on NHK:
I found it interesting how someone so good was in complete obscurity from the world. He was only “discovered” after his death in 1977 – when it turned out that his modest house was stuffed with artwork.
I read an observation that people who got famous became famous because that’s what they worked for. They didn’t work on “becoming good”. The observation was that being good and being famous are completely separate qualities that a person could optimize for.
To learn more about Isson, you can search for his alternative names: Tanaka Takashi (田中 孝) and his art nameTanaka Isson (田中 一村).
So, a while back my wife caught a cat demon and many readers wrote in to find out how the demon is doing and what came of it.
I haven’t written back because, frankly, I had no clue. Until now.
Yesterday I was scrolling on the socials, when I saw a familiar face come up on the feed. As you can see, Cat Demon is all growed up and having fun at the seaside:
But she doesn’t always make good choices. Here she is with the same guy playing some game called “Stinky Sleeve”?! (Japanese readers born before 1900, hit me up if you know what the youths are doing here)
Utagawa Kuniyoshi also created a print of this guy with fantastic wide-leg pants. Great wild hair. Just like the wolf in the internationally beloved cartoon Nu Pogodi:
There are very dynamic images of samurai in battle. I especially like the ones that include warfare with gunpowder, because it’s not what you’d expect from samurai.
She would wait by a stream. When a samurai would happen to pass by, she would ask them for help getting across. The samurai would carry her over on his back – while crossing, she would take out a blade and slice his throat open.
It’s possible to buy some pretty neat ukiyo-e prints just like the ones above. Just be careful on e-Bay, it looks like people are selling modern reprints (using the original wood blocks) and not making it obvious – if it looks too good to be true, then think twice about buying it.
I was convinced that if you build it, the people will come. I assure you, no matter what you are building, they will not.
I find that building a great product is predictable. A solo-developer generally knows that putting in X effort will predictably lead to a Y outcome (a functioning product). Sales and Marketing are unpredictable. Most solo-founders underestimate how chaotic customer acquisition is… and they often deal with it by ignoring the risk. I highly recommend Eric Ries’ Lean Startup book for anyone who wants to de-risk customer acquisition before investing energy into fully building a product.
Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform – the Cloud is transforming the world of computing. We use the Cloud. But when I saw the chance to eatthe Kloud I jumped at the opportunity!
Come along this tasting journey with me to find out what is the Kloud? Will my bowels survive it? Have I finally found a ridiculously-named snack that also tastes good?
Reader, this is “The Kloud”:
It’s not a digital server farm somewhere in Utah. It is a “dried pollack snack”. Little dried fish covered in a salty batter.
Opening the pouch, the first thing that hits you is the smell: intimidatingly fishy. Like Asian shrimp crackers but with a stinky garbage finish.
Then, you’re struck by the stingy portion. The bag is less than half full:
The fish nuggets have an anaemic yellow colour, kinda like fries. The outside is made of batter with visible crystals – probably salt or some additive. You can see brown bits of the fish flesh peeking out of gaps in the batter.
When you bite down on one of these you get a very crispy crunch. The fish itself is totally dried so the crunch is from the flesh and bones, not from the batter on the outside (something I actually liked!).
The biggest taste is sweetness – like sweet snack crackers. The fish flavour is very mild. I was looking forward to a funky fish punch, but it never came. Mascarpone cheese is listed in the ingredients but there was no cheese punch either.
Ingredients of Kloud Original flavour. I have no Klue how these ingredients end up tasting soooo sweet.
Unpunched, I went on with chewing down the fish bits. Each piece tastes different depending on its size and fish-to-batter ratio. Small pieces are too sweet and salty. Big pieces are tolerably salty and have a bit more fish flavour.
There is surprisingly little aftertaste. Like a salty little nothing that came and went, just like that (wait… are you that fish snack from Vacation Bible School?)
Eating them with beer:
According to some Kloud pouches, this snack is best enjoyed with beer. So I decided to try out the Kloud Knuggets™ (the ™ is mine, I invented the name just now) with some Sapporo beer. Just in case they are optimized for a great beer experience.
Real Men™ drink from the strawberry cup
Dear Reader, they are not.
Their subtle flavour is drowned by the beer. Which is… good? I guess? If you hate sweet fish crackers?
These Knuggets™ would’ve tasted better with beer if they had more spice or a stronger fish taste.
Verdict
I give the Kloud two fish out of five: 🐟🐟
This treat reinforces the main moral of “Jacob Eats”: you shouldn’t pick your food based on a jokey name. If you want a funky treat to eat with your beer, stick with the tiny dried shrimp you can find at Chinese supermarkets. They’re meant for stir-frying but taste quite good raw*.
* By reading this statement you acknowledge that the author of this blog shall not be held responsible for any food poisoning or gastric parasite infestation you may develop as a result of eating dry, uncooked shrimp.
So in the end I went as the real me, a normal guy who was in the process of becoming a wacko, like a caterpillar who had snuggled up inside his cocoon and was soon to emerge as a, I dunno, a teeny tiny walrus in a fedora.
The idea of a normal person transforming into something more wacky and delightful really resonates right now.
Deeper in the piece, Adam’s actual point is that conforming and sticking to tradition are very valuable survival traits. This reminds me of Episode 6 of the Drew & Natalie Have A Normal Conversation podcast:
D: I've gone feral a little bit. N: A little bit. I mean, you've always been like a lone wolf, though. D: A lot a bit. N: Yeah. D: I know people have talked about this, and I've seen people mention this, the idea of lone wolf. It's like it sounds very cool. It sounds like Airwolf, which was a very cool helicopter. Right. N: Sure. Sure. D: But one thing people point out is that wolves are very much pack animals. So if you're a lone wolf, it's not so much you're cool. N: Well, that means you're a wolf with no friends. D: Oh, that wolf is... Hey, check out that wolf. He's very sick. N: He's been ostracized. D: The wolf's behavior is putting the other wolves off.
Before visiting a new neighbourhood, intrepid Londoners would use these as guides. Each booklet street facades, a mini-map of the area and a realistic illustration of a landmark (all drawn by Charles Bigot).
The booklets were very cheap because Tallis stuffed them with advertisements.
Each one contained about 5 pages of business ads. It’s likely that Tallis also charged merchants to have their business’ name engraved above their store on the street level.
Ads from booklet No. 45
Tallis’ booklets were like an early “Google StreetViews” and I posted a link to a scan of all 88 to a website for curious technologists. What happened next made me go down a rabbit hole 🐰🕳️
There was a lively discussion and user fritzo said the following:
Feature request, can someone integrate this into the DOOM engine so one can navigate 19th century london?
Yeah, I wasn’t going to do that.
I’ve never made a 3D environment.
Never even made a DOOM map when that game was popular (hi, it’s me, your grandpa).
But the idea stuck in my head.
And stayed.
And stayed.
And, I thought: “how hard could it be to make rectangular slabs and skin them with the images from the maps and put them in an online 3D engine and maybe pop a catsmeat man in the scene?”….
Well, Dear Reader, here is your chance to enter a proof-of-concept 3D version of Tallis’ Street Views:
Delightful on desktop. Monstrous on mobile.
Making the 3D streetview
My idea was to texture-map Tallis’ images over simple rectangles to create a “street”. I started looking for a 3D engine that was free, could run in the browser and would have a simple First Person mode to permit walking around.
I settled on the the CopperCube 3D engine. A simple and easy to learn game engine that could publish to the Web.
Screenshot of the 3D world in the CopperCube editor
Next, I had to find the highest quality scan of one of Tallis’ views. Then cut it up into rectangular sections for each side of the street.
The best image scan was booklet No. 45 from a sale listing at Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. The image is set up as an OpenSeaDragon zoomable image and comes in at a huge 53 MB.
One hitch with zoomable images is that you can’t simply “save as” to your computer. That’s because they’re made up of hundreds of separate images that your computer stitches together on the fly.
Thankfully, a tool called Dezoomify let me combine the zoomable tiles and download them as a single PNG file.
After editing and cropping the streetview, I went ahead and created a proof-of-concept scene in CopperCube. It’s imperfect – like “the walls don’t align” imperfect – but it was fun to make. In addition to the street facades you’ll see the map of the area, a detailed illustration of a particular business, and several orbs that open webpages with information about those specific locations (make sure to “allow popups” when they come up). If you haven’t checked out the 3D experience yet, go ahead and click below:
If you were to expand this kind of 3D environment, you could add historical characters and their stories to the scene. You could also lay out streets according to their actual geometry on a map, using the real width of the pavement and real height of buildings.
Personal observations
Actual London, in 1870
Working on this project, one of my takeaways is just how sterile Tallis’ street illustrations look. They’re very focused on the commercial life of the buildings. I get it – these booklets were financed by advertisers, and they wanted to present a clean view of life. The real life on the streets of London would’ve been brutal, smelly and dirty. We’re talking the people wearing every single garment they own at once kind of dirty.
This is an interesting use of AI and really livens up the landscapes. However, if you wanted to make an accurate representation of London buildings, you’d have to show the colours of the actual material/cladding. Note how, some of the other colorized images in the album show excessive numbers of trees on the street and others show the kind of stucco-clad buildings that are typical of Florence, not London.
In my experience, off-the-shelf AI colourizers mangle the Tallis etchings and alter the image so it only loosely resembled the original. Here’s a before-and-after example of this heavy alteration:
I heard a lot about AI tools that take 2D images and turn them into 3D models. I tested out several of them.
A reliable and simple tool for turning 2D pictures into 3D is the “ZoeDepth” algorithm that you can try on Hugggingface: https://huggingface.co/spaces/shariqfarooq/ZoeDepth . It works best on pictures and photorealistic etches. It did not do well on the Street Views engravings.
Example of ZoeDepth turning a 2D image into a 3D model
There’s an cool related animation you can generate with Immersity AI, but it doesn’t let you export a useable 3D model:
Most of the AI tools were flops – there is a lot of misinformation about AI’s capabilities.
The most capable tool of the bunch was Meshy.ai (refer-a-friend link!). The tool is optimized for generating characters and objects, rather than “environments” – so it failed when I fed it a whole street facade with dozens of buildings:
Would you open a business on these premises, Meshy? I didn’t think so!
When I fed it an image of a standalone building, it did much better:
Input image1 out of 4 options for 3D modelSkinned – notice the discolorationAdvanced skinning – much better texture
Note how the AI added in an extra set of windows and columns on both sides of the entrance (3 in each row, rather than 2). This model is not quite true to the original.
I tried its neat “generate a texture from text prompt” feature. The result was underwhelming. Here is my prompt:
The walls of the bottom floor are made of limestone blocks. the walls of the floors above are finished in stuccco, while the columns are made of light marble. This building is from London in 1840. Photorealistic style, high quality.
And here is the output:
You can see that the model latched onto “blocks of limestone” and clad the whole building in them. Meshy ignored directions to add stucco & marble on the upper floors.
I decided to keep the facades as flat images in the 3D world, and o add the above “Town Hall” model as a toy object in the virtual environment. Unfortunately, it had an extreme level of detail (265,000 mesh faces) and came in at 27MB. Meshy’s paid tier lets you adjust the complexity of the model, and there are also standalone tools that let you simplify a 3D mesh. But I’ll leave that as an exercise to others. I just opted to embed an “orb” link to the finished model on Meshy’s site.
[Edit: I also used Poly.cam to generate a 3D model of the same facade – it generated an accurate model with no hallucinations]
[Edit from June 14, 2025] I tried generating a 3D object from the same facade with AdamCAD. Both the “Max Quality” and “Speed Demon” modes missed certain elements. I actually found the lower-quality model more accurate, and it looked like it had fewer vertices/embellishments (ex. it kept the back of the building as a plain wall) – which was better for my purposes. The .OBJ exports seemed to have something wrong with them – the simpler model was an 86MB file, while the more complex one was 4MB. However, the 4MB file looked very low-resolution in Copperlight.
“Max Quality” mode – slow, very detailed, with a texture.“Speed Demon” mode – fast, with no textureThe OBJ export of the “Max Quality” model looked very low-poly
Finally, attempted to create “street characters” with Meshy to place into the 3D environment but they weren’t quite right. Finessing the models would take skill and time that I don’t have. Here are some of the funniest/worst options from that attempt:
A mud-lark6 fingered, 3 legged mud-larks2 wheeled hansom cabbackwards hansom cab from hell
If you want to see how a particular part of London looked in the past, Matthew Sangster created a map that shows where each of Tallis’ booklets is located. Once you find the number of the booklet, you cna find it on the David Rumsey site or on the Internet Archive.
If you’re still reading, then you’re a prime candidate for the hard stuff – London Labour and the London Poor. Here is Volume 1 of 4 that you can get online for free (or, if you’re like me, just buy the whole series; abandon it unread; then give it away to a friend).
The tour was right there, but I couldn’t view it! The Victorian Room and all the other related tours, were created in 2014 in a format that’s been abandoned by browsers – the QTVR format.
The “QuickTime Virtual Reality” (QTVR) format was developed by Apple to let you view an immersive panorama picture. You could click on “hot spots” to advance between scenes. Like an ancient Google Streetview from 2005. It was used on the web and in CD-ROM experiences like On Board the USS Enterprise.
Often, you can get the file by right clicking on the page, and selecting “View Source”. Search for the text .mov – that’s the file extension of these QTVRs.
“gotcha!”
Copy and paste that path into the URL bar and “save as” to your computer.
If your virtual tour file contains “hot spots” that let you advance between scenes, then you’ll have to dive into the file that you downloaded in order to find the “next URL” it links to.
To do that, open the .mov file in a text editor (like Notepad++ or Windows Notepad). And search for .mov again. You’ll see something like the following:
In the above screenshot “1Floor-7.mov” is the linked .mov file that you should download next. In our example, if the original file I downloaded lived on http://website.com/tours/tour1.mov then this next file from the screenshot would be hosted at http://website.com/tours/1Floor-7.mov
Viewing the QTVR Contents
If all you want to do is view the panorama/tour, then the best tool is QuickTime Viewer. This software was Discontinued in 2016 but is still available here: Quick Time 7.7.9 for windows (mirror of the file).
Viewing the panorama with Quicktime 7> Panorama viewing tips from the QuickTime 7 User Guide <
Viewing QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) Movies QTVR movies display three-dimensional places (panoramas) and objects with which the user can interact. With a QTVR panorama, it’s as if you’re standing in the scene and you can look around you up to 360 degrees in any direction. In a QTVR movie of an object, you can rotate the object in any direction. To pan through a QTVR movie, drag the cursor through the scene. To zoom in or out, click the + or – button. (If the buttons are not showing, zoom in by pressing Shift; zoom out by pressing Control.) 16 Chapter 1 Using QuickTime Player Some QTVR movies have hot spots that take you from one scene (or node) to another. As you move the mouse over a hot spot, the cursor changes to an arrow. To see all the places where you can jump from one node in a scene to another, click the Show Hot Spot button (an arrow with a question mark in it). A translucent blue outline of any hot spots within the currently visible VR scene appears. (If there are no hot spots, clicking this button has no effect.) Click a hot spot to jump to a new scene. To step backward scene by scene, click the Back button. (The Back button appears only on QTVR movie windows, not in all QuickTime movie windows.)
Exporting standalone images
The simplest way to export individual images from QTVR files is to take a screenshot of your QuickTime 7 window with the file open. I’m serious.
For more modern versions of QTVR, you can export an entire scene using the FFmpeg video conversion tool. Download it from ffmpeg.org and add it to your computer’s PATH environment variable.
Open the Command Prompt and navigate to the folder with your .mov file. Then run the following command:
ffmpeg -i yourfile.mov %02d.jpg
This should create 6 .jpeg files with names like “01.jpg”, “02.jpg” and so on – representing the entire scene:
You may get a few dozen files in a horizontal/vertical strip that represents your photosphere. I recommend going to this online JPEG merging tool to combine them all into 1 whole – it’s more straightforward than other options I explored.
The BBC’s virtual tour was created with an old encoding: Cinepak. So FFmpeg could not extract the images. I had to use an alternative:
Creating a video from a VR sphere
You can convert a QTVR file into a regular Quicktime video using the Pano2Movie application. The output video will show the viewport moving according to your recorded movements. That file should be simpler to convert to a modern format than the original QTVR file.
Pano2Movie can also export your movements as a series of static images.
Pano2Movie is hugely temperamental. It’s slow and takes tweaking. Some tips for generating a series of images:
First, you need to record a “path” through the panorama
Set the Frames Per Second. Below I have it set to 15 – so there will be 15 JPEGs exported for every second of movement
To reduce the number of images you generate, lower the “Duration” figure for the keyframes at the bottom of the screen.
You can combine screenshots / static pictures from Pano2Movie into one big image that you can view and use for interactive HTML5 photospheres. For that, you’ll need Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). ICE automatically detects overlapping regions in your image and stitches them together.
For the BBC Victorian Room, here are the Pano2Movie images I fed into ICE:
And here is the output:
Creating an interactive web panorama
I’m going to recommend Pano2VR as a tool for converting old QTVR files to working interactive experiences. This tool looks especially friendly for creating multi-node journeys. It costs 450 Euros.
Pano2VR could not handle the older Cinepak BBC file, but it could handle a newer panorama of the Words And Pictures Museum that I got from the Altered Earth website.
The free version of the software adds a watermark, that you can see below. Click on the image to get the interactive experience:
If you want to create a web-based panorama experience for free, then you’ll need to use a Javascript library – like the fantastic Photo Sphere Viewer.
If the images you extracted fit together into 1 long horizontal strip (made with the ICE tool or through the online JPEG merger) then you just need to provide your image as an input to the default Javascript code. If your .QTVR file gave out 6 square images, with two of them representing the ceiling & floor, then you’ll need to set up the Cubemap adapter with the 6 images that you got out of FFmpeg.
Panorama of the Words And Pictures Museum
During my QTVR research, I discovered an online tour of the Words And Pictures Museum from 1998. The museum was located in Northampton, Massachusetts and it shut down in 1999.
Dear reader, now it is your turn to find more QTVR files and rehost them. If you found the information in this post useful, or you’ve written about your own QTVR adventures, then email me at “jacob” at this site.
“Ford hundred and seventy ford years. That’s how long I’ve ruled Ontario”
Steph stood by your side, her legs trembling. But you felt an odd calm.
“We are here to end your reign!” you yelled.
Ford’s guards missed the hidden blade in your sweater when they let you deliver his morning coffee.
Ford laughed. A deep rumbling sound. “Do it if you must, but another man like I will take my place
“We are a province of accountants, landlords, insurance adjusters, insurance underwriters and insurance salesmen. Ontarians don’t like change. Or innovation. We insure it never happens.
“Before me, the province was handed back and forth between groups of grifters. There were some real legends. Like Sir Mike of Harris, a Technomancer who ‘downloaded’ provincial responsibilities onto cities. Or Dalton of McGuinty, who rewarded his friends with a $1.3 billion cancellation fee for a certain-to-be-cancelled powerplant project in the richest city.
“One leader was different, Robert of Rae. But he promised to reduce profits for Car Insurers – and you do not mess with Insurance in Ontario.
“I made them a deal: from now on you can have less change. Just vote consistently for one leader.”
“But you did a terrible job!”, Steph interjected.
You met Steph at the cafe where you both worked – Barista and Uber Driver being the only jobs open to people under 65. After that, a career in Insurance beckoned.
“I knew I was in over my head!” Ford shouted. “Ontario had huge debts. And all I knew is running a province like running a family budget: keep chugging buck-a-beers and ignore the bills that pile up at the door.
“I tried to save money on schools by making every teacher double as a janitor. When I rewrote the curriculum to replace the number four with ‘ford’, I was sure there would be a backlash. But Ontarians just kept taking it and asking for more.”
“What’s a number ‘four’?” Steph asked
“Exactly”
“I thought I could save cash – and enrich my friends – by privatizing healthcare. My buddies were supposed to scoop up the freshly open concessions. Just like we did with the Green Belt. But the Americans muscled us out. We should’ve known those business wolves would eat Ontario’s soft business sheep.”
“All I gained was this incredible life-extension procedure. But I’m on the hook for payments that last for a thousand years!” He shifted, leaning closer to you. “So end it if you must. Do it! This crown sits heavy on my head.”
You thumb the edge of your sweater. Inside, a long obsidian blade. One of many shards strewn about since the time when Ford, in a desperate bid to boost productivity, had everyone try to smelt steel in their backyard. All that came out was slag and black glass.
Steph begins to frown. Her body turns slightly. Your own mouth turns down in disgust…
And in that moment both of you start walking away
“No.
You can stay king of Ontario forever.
I can’t think of a worse fate for anyone.”
As Premier of Ontario, I promise that I would:
Introduce anti-corruption measures with real teeth. Because no politician is above temptation.
Abolish the first-past-the-post electoral system. Replace it with a modern proportional representation system, to end “strategic voting”.
Encourage Ontarians to reach for excellence and expect more. We fully failed to capitalize on the high-tech revolution (name an internationally known Ontario startup that’s not Shopify). We captured no gains from the AI breakthroughs we spearheaded. We can do better.
