As evidenced by a growing collection of projects, the MAKE Controller has great potential as a hardware platform enabling computers to really do things.
We won a MAKE Controller for our set of Halloween projects this year, and we’re just starting to play around with it. Having spent some pondering how best to communicate with the board, it’s clear that one of the barriers to more widespread use of this and other embedded systems is the lack, or perceived lack at least, of user-friendly software for programming and communication.
A number of open-source software packages, such as processing and Ruby, can communicate with the MAKE Controller using its OSC interface. However, there has been a noticeable absence of a suitable interface to LabVIEW, a program that is commonly used for interfacing to other similar types of hardware.
So, we wrote one. It’s a simple LabVIEW “vi” routine for issuing (most) simple commands and queries to the MAKE controller. We’ve also included some example routines to help you get your blinky lights going a few minutes sooner.
st Laboratories - LabVIEW routines for the MAKE Controller - [via] Link.
Ian Grant, Lecturer in Digital Art at Thames Valley University, has posted a couple of very innovative and interesting Quartz Composer related projects on his website:
“>Digital Puppetry Project Using Quartz Composer - involves chroma keying and other elaborate techniques.
Quartz Composer is doing a lot of cool things, but, curiously, it can’t draw a simple line. Because we needed it for a project, we created a patch to draw a line. So, with great pleasure, we present you with Boinx Line Patch 1.0.
The Archive includes installation instructions and more info in the Read Me file and a couple of sample Quartz Compositions. You can see demo movies of these here:
Set Structure Member is a Quartz Composer modifier patch and can be used to do two things:
Create a structure from scratch or
Modify an existing structure.
Quite a few built-in patches in Quartz Composer work on structures or deliver structures as output. There are also patches to get data out of structures, e.g., Structure Key Member. However, we felt it a limitation that there is no way to create or (programmatically) modify a structure inside Quartz Composer compositions. This is why we created a custom patch for doing exactly that. Look at the bundled demo composition for a simple example.
Highly liquid points to this awesome MIDI-controlled circuit bent telephone modem - what a great use for an old modem, there are millions of them just getting tossed…
a wearable ambient display using flexible, non-emissive color-changing textile modules for new expressions of visual imaginary appications. the Fabcell system consists of a mosaic of Fabcell modules, a black piece of cloth, & a controller for changing the color of the modules. potential applications include color-changing suits that change from gray during daytime to red to go out for a dance, or body temperature sensitive clothing that visualizes the emotion of the wearer.
Cory Doctorow:
The $750,000 Reversible Destiny Lofts in Tokyo resemble a psychedelic jumble of kids’ blocks. These “challenging” condos are intended to delay senescence in their elderly residents by forcing them to stay alert and defend themselves from architectural peccadillos.
Most people, in choosing a new home, look for comfort: a serene atmosphere, smooth walls and floors, a logical layout. Nonsense, says Shusaku Arakawa, a Japanese artist based in New York. He and his creative partner, poet Madeline Gins, recently unveiled a small apartment complex in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka that is anything but comfortable and calming. “People, particularly old people, shouldn’t relax and sit back to help them decline,” he insists. “They should be in an environment that stimulates their senses and invigorates their lives.”
With that in mind, Arakawa and Gins designed a building of nine apartments known as Reversible Destiny Lofts. Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall.
David Pescovitz:
Researchers at the University of Geneva are developing a system to give “virtual fabric” the same feel as the real thing. First, professor Nadia Magenat-Thalmann and her colleagues are modeling certain fabrics’ physical attributes such as their stress, strain, and deformation properties to create a digital model of the material. Then, in order to feel those simulated properties, the user dons a “haptic” glove outfitted with a mechanically-controlled array of tiny pins under each finger. The force of the pins and the glove provide the wearer with the sensation that he or she is actually touching something real. From New Scientist:
The virtual model of each textile works on two levels – a “global” model of its properties, and a more detailed model of the area being touched. Together these drive the haptic and touching devices.
The second level is more difficult to simulate, says Magnenat-Thalmann. The human visual system will be fooled by images that change 20 times per second, but a realistic touch interface must ideally be able to change 500 times per second or more.
In 1977, Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto made this beautiful and often very funny (although the Sibelius’ Valse Triste cartoon is quite poignant) parody of Disney’s Fantasia which someone has uploaded to Google Video. Unfortunately, there are no subtitles for the live action parts which are in Italian, but the real gems are the non-verbal cartoons, especially the Ravel’s Bolero bit which is a terrific parody of the evolution part of Fantasia using the Rite of Spring (the part with the dinosaurs). A warning for those viewing at work- cartoon nudity abounds, some of it full-frontal.
I have an ancient english-dubbed version on VHS. The black and white live-action parts that you are missing by not knowing Italian aren’t very good, mostly a weak Fellini parody with a lot of slapstick, but the color animation is terrific. The first cartoon starts around 9 minutes in and there are short live action breaks in between each subsequent cartoon.
The style is refreshingly different from most other animated films I’ve seen, in some ways reminiscent of the New Yorker cartoonist Gahan Wilson.
Cory Doctorow:
Democracy Player, the killer free Internet TV app, is edging closer to 1.0. The new version fixes a ton of little bugs and cleans up the UI even more. Democracy is like iTunes for Internet TV, without the DRM. Just tell it what channels you like (or pick from a huge menu, or your favorite YouTube or Google Video keywords) and it will download a steady stream of programming with BitTorrent. Democracy uses VLC to play back video, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to view a QuickTime, WMV, or plain MPEG (or DivX, or FLV, or whatever…) — it just works. And because Democracy has BitTorrent built it, it’s cheap and easy to publish your own Democracy channel — the more popular your channel gets, the cheaper it is to serve and the faster your fans get your video.
Democracy runs with equal ease on Linux, MacOS and Windows. I use Democracy as my preferred video player on Ubuntu Linux, and as my preferred torrent-catcher. It’s solid, easy to use, and free. (Democracy also has a new Ubuntu repository for fetching binaries of the latest versions)
Refined interface. simpler, smoother, easier to use.
Share menu. New ’share’ menu on each item lets you email a video or post to Video Bomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit…
Pause / Resume downloads. Long awaited! You can now pause and resume any download or all downloads.
Better BitTorrent support. BitTorrent performance is significantly improved.
Mark Frauenfelder:
In 2001, Mitch Kapor, the designer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started the Open Source Applications Foundation, or OSAF for short.
Kapor hired some of the most talented programmers and software designers around and went to work to create a new kind of personal information manager, code named Chandler.
In 2003, Scott Rosenberg, the cofounder of Salon, asked Kapor if he could embed himself in OSAF for the purposes of writing a book about the development of the application. For three years, Rosenberg sat in on company meetings, met with programmers and designers, and observed the progress, or more accurately, lack of progress, of Chandler. Rosenberg’s book Dreaming in Code: Two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software, examines why making good software is so hard.
Dreaming in Code is addictively good reading. Rosenberg tells the story of the smart people at OSAF and why they can’t seem to gain traction with Chandler, even though they were veterans of other successful projects at places like Mozilla and Apple. Rosenberg also examines the larger picture of software development, recounting episodes in the history of computer science that add insight and context to the main story.
I interviewed Rosenberg about his book on February 13.
Marque sent in this electric motorcycle conversion using (mostly) scrap materials -
We started with a Honda Rebel junker and a dream - to make a practical, zero emissions vehicle for commuting in San Francisco. After consulting with some plans available online which required chopping the frame significantly, Gxaoui suggested we figure it out for ourselves. Armed with a basic metal shop, we methodically convert the Honda rebel 250 into a clean quiet bike in about a week.
Marque Cornblatt - DIY Electric Motorcycle Conversion - Link.
Mac only: Display MP3 metadata - like artist and album right inside Finder with the MP3-Info CMM add-on.
With the Contextual Menu Module (CMM) installed, choose Get Info from an MP3’s Ctrl-click menu in Finder to view its metadata. The MP3-Info CMM module is a free download, Mac 10.2 and greater only. — Gina Trapani
a few infographical inspirations for your Valentine’s day (or any other day, of course).
- convince your partner of your good intentions at graphs for flirting.
- analyze your present with the what are you getting for valentine’s day doodle.
- explore expressions of love & hate in blog posts with lovelines & we feel fine.
- track, predict & explain mood levels in thousands of blogs at moodviews (’loved’ is peaking!).
- analyze the reasons of romantic break-ups at the dumpster.
- see how love conquers hate at google trends.
- communicate your love ambiently through the lover’s cups.
- spread your love messages online via the ecotonoha tree.
- overcome your fear of touching wearing a hug shirt.
- track your daily emotions with mood stats.
- reflect your emotions in paintings by empathic stylization.
Tritt mir in die Eier (i guess it translates by “Kick me in the eggs!) is an interactive video installation and i’m sure you don’t need me to explain how it works.
Graham Pullin asked his 3rd year students in Interactive Media Design in Dundee to engage with a history of interaction design that is much longer than that of digital electronics, and reflect on the social as well as technological changes that have taken place. They had to research Lost and Dead Media (cf. miss.gunst’s post on the Found Tapes Exhibition and Zoe Irvine’s Magnetic Migrating Music project) and build working models (using found objects and MaxMSP on iMacs) of fictitious historical products that might have been lost precursors to modern products and media. To underpin their authenticity, they filmed documentaries with archive film footage, and uncovered contemporary photography and packaging.
Examples (each of the projects deserves a post but i had to choose two of them. Some readers complain that i blog too much):
The Case Communicator, developed in 1936, was a laptop/PDA in a briefcase. This portable electronic workstation allowed male executives to get a 24/7 link to their secretary. Through the connection stream, the businessman is connected to the developers’ switchboard where his personal 24 hour secretary is ready to fill his “every need” (news headlines, favourite music and schedule.) A project by Alison Thomson and Shaun McWhinnie.
Conceived at the beginning of the 70s, Pester (the Portable Enhanced System for Telecommunication Entertainment and Recreation) is the first smart phone. It contains a cassette player, camera and games as well as a phone.
Pester relied on a wired network using Connection Points positioned at convenient locations (parks, shopping centres and restaurants as well as regular sites along streets.) These Connection Points allowed callers to access an operator who could let them communicate with landline users, fellow Pester owners and also record and send vocal messages.
Pester contains a player for cassettes that held as much music as an LP! With video games in their infancy, the designers of Pester incorporated a set of playing cards into the back compartment for their recreation. A camera was integrated into the handset as well.
With the development of cellular networks by the 80s, Pester soon lost its appeal. A project by John Drummond and Euan McGhee.
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