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Flame-The MIDI Talking Synth is freaking awesome - check out the media samples!

The FLAME MIDI TALKING SYNTH is a small-sized MIDI-controlled sound module based on the analogue Speakjet ™ chip, produced by the U.S. company Magnevation LLC. Originally designed for basic artificially generated speech output in American English tongue it was then refined and further developed as an 8-bit sound module with speech-like sounds and synthetic robot voices as well as beeps, alarms, noise and retro-style sci-fi sounds. Due to the structure of the Speakjet ™ (with its complex sound synthesizer, preset sounds and serial interface) it offers an impressive range of possibilities. It contains 72 speech elements (allophones), 43 sound effects, and 12 DTM touch tones. The idea was to create sounds, patterns and sequences in the 8-bit style of the 80s or other retro sounds for making music instead of just simulating speech. Most allophones can be tuned and used tonally. The FLAME MIDI TALKING SYNTH contains two Speakjet ™ chips to produce a richer and more complex tonal variety as well as generating a pseudo stereo effect.

FLAME - MIDI-TALKING-SYNTH - [via] Link.

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Originally from MAKE Magazine on April 20, 2007, 2:00pm

I’ve got to try this -

A desktop printer loaded with a silver salt solution and vitamin C has been used to produce electronic circuits. The UK researchers behind the feat say their experimental device could pave the way for safer and cheaper electronics manufacturing.

Being able to print out electronic components and whole circuit boards could provide an alternative to current manufacturing techniques, which are energy intensive and environmentally unfriendly.

Printing conductive polymer ink (see Goodbye wires and silicon, hello plastic chips), or pastes containing graphite or metal particles are two existing options. But researchers at Leeds University in the UK wanted to avoid the solvents needed for these processes.

printer churns out electronic circuits - tech - 18 April 2007 - New Scientist Tech - [via] Link.

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Originally from MAKE Magazine on April 20, 2007, 11:00am

David Pescovitz:

First used as the earth station for the 1968 moon landing, the Jamesburg Earth Station was shut down in 2002 by owners AT&T and put up for sale. Fortunately, it was bought by a private investor who agreed to allow some Ham radio buffs to restore it. After months of work, the group fired up the 10-story high dish in February and bounced 20 radio signals off the moon. From Aviation Week:

The dish sits on a 160-acre site that’s been subdivided for residential sale, so the restorers feel some urgency in trying to preserve it. Ideally, they’d like to see it returned to service, perhaps to support scientific and deep space missions. But they also think of it as an ideal location for a space camp for star-struck students.

Link to Aviation Week article, Link to Jamesburg Earth Station Home Page, More in the the March 23 issue of the Carmel Pinecone (PDF of part 1, PDF of part 2) (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Originally by David Pescovitz from Boing Boing on April 21, 2007, 11:18pm

Cory Doctorow:

EZT4L1TY sez, “Science in Silico, a new video from Seed Magazine, is about the power of modern scientific supercomputing, showcasing some of the most impressive new simulations and visualizations from around the globe. The coolest part about many of these projects is that they’re giving us information and insights about our world that, as far as we know, would be otherwise unavailable via more ‘traditional’ investigations. These simulations represent a third way of doing science, using the fixed assumptions and prior knowledge so vital to deductive reasoning to generate new information and data that can then be analyzed inductively. Also, the soundtrack has some nice excerpts from the Dub Side of the Moon.”

Link

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on April 20, 2007, 6:53pm

Cory Doctorow:
History Magazine’s old (heh) article on the history of mealtimes is just too fascinating. Before artificial light, the main meal of the day was eaten at lunchtime, with the evening meal being a few leftovers before sundown followed by an early bedtime. Artificial light changed that, prompting aristos to eat a huge meal after dark, party all night, wake up mid-day, and say “good morning” to one another until sunset.

With these late hours for entertainment and parties, and with more artificial lighting, many people in the cities began going to bed later and rising later in the morning. Mealtimes were pushed back as a result. In London, by the 1730s and 40s, the upper class nobles and gentry were dining at three or four in the afternoon, and by 1770 their dinner hour in London was four or five.

In the 1790s the upper class was rising from bed around ten a.m. or noon, and then eating breakfast at an hour when their grandparents had eaten dinner. They then went for “morning walks” in the afternoon and greeted each other with “Good morning” until they ate their dinner at perhaps five or six p.m. Then it was “afternoon” until evening came with supper, sometime between nine p.m. and two a.m.! The rich, famous and fashionable did not go to bed until dawn. With their wealth and social standing, they were able to change the day to suit themselves. The hours they kept differentiated them from the middle and lower classes as surely as did their clothes, servants and mansions.

Some upper-class individuals did get up earlier, children for instance and sometimes their mothers. By 1800 the dinner hour had been moved to six or seven. For early risers this meant a very long wait until dinner. Even those who arose at ten a.m. or noon had a wait of anywhere from six to nine hours. Ladies, tired of the wait, had established luncheon as a regular meal, not an occasional one, by about 1810. It was a light meal, of dainty sandwiches and cakes, held at noon or one or even later, but always between breakfast and dinner. And it was definitely a ladies’ meal; when the Prince of Wales established a habit of lunching with ladies, he was ridiculed for his effeminate ways, as well as his large appetite. Real men didn’t do lunch, at least not until the Victorian era.

href=”http://megnut.com/”>Megnut)

Update:
Dallas sez, “My mother grew up on a farm that followed the traditional meal times: Breakfast after chores, Dinner at noon, Supper in the evening. Lunch was a snack taken out to the men working in the fields in between both Breakfast/Dinner and Dinner/Supper. As a child, I was always puzzled by having Dinner at noon and cold cuts and leftovers at night. This is still the general pattern that my grandmother (92yrs old) follows, still calling the meals by their traditional names as well. When we go to visit, we just adapt and I find myself eating a small snack before bed - cold-cuts having not been enough for a body that is used to a big meal.”

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on April 21, 2007, 8:28am

Mark Frauenfelder:

I recently spoke to Joey Anuff and Will Kreth about their cool new music-related venture, Critical Metrics. (Joey is the co-founder of Suck and Will is the co-founder of Wired.) In short, Critical Metrics is a powerful song discovery system that lets you build playlists and listen to them in a pop-up player. (Try their “100 songs we love” in the upper left hand corner.)

As Joey points out in the following Q&A, Critical Metrics — in it’s current state of development — is geared towards music geeks, but future iterations will make the service more accessible to casual music lovers.

Q: What does Critical Metrics do?

A: Basically, CM takes advantage of recommendations across ALL
media to quickly find and source, with some credible accuracy, your
real, e.coli-free, “new favorite song.” Pretty much at whatever rate
you want to consume new favorite songs.

Q: Who will use it?

A: At this moment, I think Critical Metrics will most impress BB’s music
nerds and/or
Rails hacker-types. The music nerds, because they’ve been
waiting for/fearing a digital indexing of the music press for years
already. The hackers more to laff at our sheer Ruby-on-crack
audacity.

Honestly, we’re a few passes short of being nice enough for the
average music consumer, but our soonish goal is for anyone who enjoys music
to understand CM as a legit alternative to relying upon
iTunes ads, Grey’s Anatomy, college radio, a 2.0 blackbox, or their
cool friends to find fresh tunes. (Much as we love all those things,
ofc. They’re all in the next rev.)

Q: How does it work?

A: Stat-wise, here’s how CM breaks down: we’re currently indexing ~22K
reviews written by
~1200 reviewers, who over the last 18 months have collectively
recommended 15K+ songs via 300+ review/recs sections of around 80
publications and misc media outlets. Out of these 15K songs, we’ve sourced
23K merchant links amongst iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, and various other
merchants. Of course, these numbers all grow daily, but it’s already a nice
library.

Q: You mentioned that Critical Metrics is especially suited for
integrating Rhapsody accounts into playlists. Can you explain?

A: I think Rhapsody is proving itself to be super-suited for 3rd party
integration in general. Yottamusic is a perfect example–an incredibly fast
and useful Rhapsody skin that lets you build a massive CD collection in an
afternoon. Critical Metrics is another example, although our focus is more
on playlisting singles and individual tracks.

I think it’s altogether fair to encourage everybody, iPod supremacists
included, to
pony up for the doggone Rhapsody subscription already. Great sound,
great selection, super portable, and ridiculously cheap compared to
ANY other entertainment service out there: Netflix, iTunes, and your
local cable provider included. These days, Rhapsody’s pretty much my
favorite net institution.

Link

Originally by Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing on April 20, 2007, 2:34pm

Xeni Jardin:
Tens of thousands of social security numbers belonging to Americans who received loans or financial assistance from the government were exposed for years in a publicly accessible database. Snip from New York Times article:

Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet.

“I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there,” said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill.

The first link that appeared in the search results was for her farm’s Web site. The second was for a site that she had never heard of, FedSpending.org, which provides a searchable database of federal government expenditures. The site uses information from the Census database.

Ms. Bergmeier said she was able to identify almost 30,000 records in the database that contained Social Security numbers. “I was stunned,” she said. “The numbers were right there in plain view in this database that anyone can access.”

“red”>Reader comment: Gabriela says,

I saw your post on BoingBoing about the USDA privacy breach that The New York Times reported and wanted to let you know The Sunlight Foundation just unveiled a new project — Real Time Investigations – that also had exclusive coverage of this story and blogged about it moments before the Times piece ran.

Real Time Investigations is an open source journalism effort that reveals the behind-the-scenes research involved in petitioning the federal government to make its information more accessible to citizens, constituents and journalists. We first learned of the extraordinary privacy breach by the USDA when a user of FedSpending.org, an online database of government spending created by OMB Watch and funded by us last year, reported it to OMB Watch late last week.

eeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?a=UAoXrb”>

Originally by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing on April 20, 2007, 2:24pm

Originally from BLDGBLOG on April 22, 2007, 9:40am

Mark Frauenfelder:
Joey Manley says:

Webcomic artist Neal von Flue has scanned a page from an old encyclopedia which basically says that comic books are the root of all evil. He found it while helping his daughter do a school paper on “comets,” and just, you know, skipped over a couple of pages.

Best bit: “There is nothing real about the stories in such comic books, and for that reason, grownups are often against them and children love them.”

Link

Originally by Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing on April 20, 2007, 2:44pm

An iconic Banksy Pulp Fiction mural has been painted over as London Transport draws the line … BBC

There are so many things that are ridiculous about this - that the “iconic mural by ‘guerrilla artist’ Banksy [is] estimated to be worth more than £300,000″, and that transport officials have deemed that the mural had to be taken down “because it created an atmosphere of social decay”. Maybe we should just stop talking about graffiti for a while, since no one seems to know how to think about it. –DB

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, ReBlogged by DB on Apr 20, 2007 at 03:07 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on April 20, 2007, 3:07pm

I do lurve me some Firefox (tabbed browsing….mmmmm), but it can be the biggest memory hog. Technology site Zolved.com has a few suggestions on how to curb this problem, including:

• Check your extensions and themes.
• Clear your download history.
• Restart Firefox periodically.

Firefox memory issues are a bit of a recurring theme here at the Lifehacker mansion, and with good reason: it seems to be a recurring (and annoying as hell) problem. What have you done to stop Firefox from slowing down your machine? Thoughts in the comments. — Wendy Boswell

Originally from Lifehacker on April 21, 2007, 1:00pm

Easily search across a variety of social networking sites - MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, Digg, etc. - with yoName, a search service that quickly and easily searches by email addy, username, or first and last name.

For example, if you’ve ever wanted to more easily track down your work colleague’s embarrassing Sanjaya tribute on MySpace, but wanted to avoid the seizure-inducing graphics for as long as humanly possible, this might be a good place to do it. Each search result has a handy drop down arrow so you can if the person you’re looking for has been found accurately; a nice touch so you don’t have to click unnecessarily. — Wendy Boswell

Originally from Lifehacker on April 21, 2007, 11:00am

The Floating Clinic-GOOD Magazine.

Originally by jo from networked_performance at April 20, 2007, 11:12, published by mark cooley

Originally from Rhizome.org on April 21, 2007, 2:27pm

no disc, rafael rozendaal

Originally by cabbie from supercentral at April 22, 2007, 01:13, published by John Michael Boling

Originally from Rhizome.org on April 22, 2007, 12:54am

The most exciting exhibitions at the Salone del Mobile are usually the ones set up by the design schools. Design Academy Eindhoven being a big favourite, not just because of the works displayed but because the Academy PR people just make my life so much easier. They provide the press with pictures and a clear text presentation of each piece in italian, english and dutch. Immediately. No “write your name on this bit of paper and we’ll send you some images next term.” Actually i’d rather write about another school’s show but there was no press material available. So i’ll have to wait before blogging it. And i bet that when i get the press kit, i won’t be in the mood for it anymore.

To celebrate its 60th anniversary this year, the DAE exhibition, called The Family of Form, presents the work of 3 generations of graduates who have investigated the identity of design.

The title refers to Edward Steichen’s photo book The Family of Man. Published in the ’50s, the book was the first to give an overall image of the peoples of the world, the uniqueness of their characteristics and the universality of their experience.

There are dozens of works in the exhibition. Just a selection:

Nacho Carbonell Ivars’s Pump It Up is an air-filled chair that connects with a family of parasites, two dogs and two cats that gently inflates when you sit down on the chair (images.)

In A Hunt for High Tech, Bart Hess seeks to harness both nature and technology and create armoured skin and fur for a new human archetype incorporating animalistic and fetichistic instincts (images from Bright.)

Inspired by Darwinism and the theory of Human Evolution (all creations are named after a human ancestor), Yoad David Luxembourg’s The Volution is a critique about fashion’s serial tendencies through a family of garments derived from archaic postures and simplified silhouettes.

Simone van den Boom’s project Kitchen Help Becomes Body Healer are glass containers shaped to resemble the organs benefiting from their contents of medicinal plants; the packaging indicates thus the healing powers of the herbs they contain.

Sander Lucas’s Distilling Machine for distilling your own liquor. The instrument was created by shopping for spare parts in the building market.

Willem Derks‘ My Archetypes reduces household electronics to very simple and utterly alluring archetypal forms.

Image on the top is from Christoph Brach’s project A Second Nature that depicts our inner anatomy with balloons.

Most of the images on the post comes from the press kit (name of the photographers was missing). All the images. More projects from DAE: Dutch ideas, Follow the Flocks, Post Mortem, Vehicle of the day.

Originally from we make money not art on April 21, 2007, 3:22am

Videos with Bibi has dug up Ed Wood’s 1953 movie Glen or Glenda: Confessions of Ed Wood, The Transvestite, Glen or Glenda? or He or She.

The movie is a docudrama about transvestism and transsexuality, and is semi-autobiographical in nature. Wood himself was a transvestite, and the movie is a plea for tolerance. However, it has become a cult film due to its low-budget production values and idiosyncratic style.

The sex reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen, born George William Jorgensen, Jr., made the headlines in the US in 1952, and prompted George Weiss, producer of low-budget films, to commission a movie to exploit it. Wood took the job, but instead made a movie about transvestism. The movie was deemed too short and too divergent from what was requested, so Wood tacked on a few extra scenes about sexual reassignment and Weiss spliced in two unrelated soft-core sequences, cutting in reaction shots of Wood and Lugosi.

Also: Trailer of the film.

Originally from we make money not art on April 21, 2007, 1:52am

Custom USB Keyboard for Controlling Ableton Live

I just finished reworking an old USB QWERTY keyboard to serve as a custom keyboard for controlling Ableton Live, and thought you might like a look. The whole thing is well-documented with photos and comments at my Flickr site:

flickr set: Custom keyboard for Ableton Live

The basic idea: instead of buying an expensive controller to expand my tactile control of Ableton Live (or building something custom with MIDI controllers), I decided to use an old USB QWERTY keyboard and custom-paint it to enhance its use as a live performance device.

The big idea behind the keyboard is that the humble QWERTY keyboard offers a ton of control possibilities, thanks to the flexible keymapping capabilities of Ableton Live. I’ve been using the built-in keyboard on my Powerbook for a while now to trigger clips in performance, but it’s tough for a couple reasons. First, it looks like you’re writing e-mail during a show, and that’s kinda boring. Second, all the keys look the same (minus the markings, of course) - there’s not much that lets you navigate easily in low-light conditions and in the heat of the moment on stage.

You can see a full write-up here:

custom USB QWERTY keyboard for Ableton Live [Ableton forum]

Simple and yet effective!!

(Via createdigitalmusic.com.)

Originally by SteamSHIFT from SteamSHIFT on January 2, 2007, 7:26am

I recently wanted to create an application to allow uploads to a website, in the simplest possible way; so I made a little BASH script which used cURL to post the files to the server. Then with a little Platypus (mixed up with CocoaDialog) magic, I ended up with a droplet style application. If you’re a scripter, and want some application magic then do check it out.

SteamSHIFT out.

ati Tags:
mac, osx, developing

=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Steamshift?a=wiR1LQcN”>

Originally by SteamSHIFT from SteamSHIFT on March 14, 2007, 10:50am

Originally from 3quarksdaily on April 21, 2007, 7:12am

Cheap acoustic sensors make surfaces interactive

New Scientist has an article on turning any surface into a touch screen using small piezoelectric sensors to sense surface vibrations -

“A series of acoustic sensors that turn any surface into a touch-sensitive computer interface have been developed by European researchers.

re sensors are attached around the edges of the surface. These pinpoint the position of a finger, or another touching object, by tracking minute vibrations. This allows them to create a virtual touchpad, or keyboard, on any table or wall.” [via] - Link.

(Via MAKE Magazine.)

Originally by SteamSHIFT from SteamSHIFT on January 2, 2007, 7:16am