"Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it." See the video (Quicktime).
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"Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it." See the video (Quicktime).
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Beth and I just got back from vacation in San Francisco on Sunday. See the photo set on Flickr.]]>
Paul Bourke's site has a large gallery of surfaces and details on the equations that describe them.
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My friend Colin recently introduced me to the Prelinger Archives, a collection of educational and special interest films produced between 1927 to 1987. The "Most Downloaded Items" box on the right is a good place to start. Sure enough, Duck and Cover is by far the most viewed item.]]>
A lamppost covered in about 150 CD packaging stickers, outside the Best Buy location in Fairview Heights, Illinois. A wide variety of musical genres and time periods were present, and no other post in the lot had a CD sticker.
"Stigmergy is a method of communication in emergent systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. [...] 'Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved.'"I remember a ride at Six Flags when I was a kid that started with a boat going into a cave. Where the ceiling dropped into reach, there was a huge neon splotch where countless bits of chewing gum had been stuck together. One solid plate of gum, beginning with a single piece and accelerating outward.]]>
Some favorites:
(via Generator.x)
]]>I called the effort Brain Fusion, then Kodama, then Kid Icarus (whoops, already taken), then Kodama again. As I remember it, more kids were messing with cracked copies of ReBirth in high school than were trying to play guitar.
(via RepeatWhileTrue)
]]>In July, I began a new job developing software for the government. My coworkers are great, and I'm learning a lot of new technologies and design practices. The future looks promising.
Otherwise, I've been juicing the last weeks of summer with as bohemian a life as I can. I'm biking almost every day, logging about twelve miles a trip. Reading is fun again too; I strongly suggest Monkey King: Journey to the West.
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Context Free is program for generating recursive structures, based on Chris Coyne's CFDF grammer. It's easy to use, open source, and outputs very clear images. Within minutes, I was able to produce the image on the right.
Recursion is handled particularly well. The image is rendered iteratively, allowing it to grow without slowing the computer down. Rendering continues until it gets down to features that would be too small to see. Very nice!
It's probably time to a new generation of software toys for playing with chaos and generative graphics; the classic applications are all from the nineties. With an emphasis on usability, and integration with the web, these toys could be accessible to everyone.
]]>To create a program in Pd, you connect little boxes to one another with the mouse using graphic "patch cords." [...] Once you've created or loaded a patch, you can interact with it by sending MIDI messages to your computer from a hardware controller and by using onscreen sliders and buttons.If you've ever seen or used Cycling '74's Max, Pd will look eerily familiar. To a considerable extent, Pd is Max. Puckette created Max at IRCAM, the French research facility, in the mid-1980s.
I tried using Pure Data years ago and just couldn't get it. Now with more documentation and a larger community, I'm definitely going to try again.
]]>Hopefully I'll finish configuring a Processing-only feed soon, so that you don't have to wade through my personal notes.
]]>Disclosure: I'm on the PC side, and generally skeptical of the hype surrounding Apple products. Discrediting myself further, I have never owned a USB drive or MP3 player.
Does having to shuffle suck?
Sometimes. Finding a specific track is nearly impossible, of course.
After a few loading sprees, I found a workable strategy: order the tracks on the Shuffle by genre. All of the radio plays on mine are grouped together; I switch tracks in shuffle mode until I hit any radio play, and then switch to order mode to navigate to the track I want.
I can imagine a number of ways to make finding particular tracks easier (track bookmarking?), but they would all require complicating the Shuffle's interface. A single button to jump to the first track would have been a nice compromise.
Will I actually use it?
I have a bin full of expensive gadgets that I've used for only a month: a MiniDisc player and recorder, battery chargers, a Zip drive, and so on. I bought these things thinking that I'd use them every day, but soon lost interest for whatever reason. I'm picky that way; if it's not perfect, it eventually goes into the bin.
The Shuffle has literally been within 10' of my person for the last five days. When I'm using a computer at work or home, it's plugged in as a flash drive for my project files. While doing mindless paperwork, I listen to old radio plays. On the commute, it's plugged in to a cassette adapter for music. The Shuffle has fit into my daily life seamlessly.
Gripes
Having to use iTunes. I had to install this ugly, pushy salesman on my computer. During installation, iTunes did its best to make itself the default organizer and player for desktop media. No thanks.
Following installation, iTunes' default action is to load the iTunes Store. If a customer is installing a copy of iTunes that came with a new iPod, doesn't it make sense that the customer is more interested in loading the iPod than buying new music?
]]>Massive celestial bodies bend the light passing around them. If the bodies are arranged just right, they act like a lense though which we can observe extremely distant galaxies.
Background, diagrams, photos of Einstein Rings
(via Kottke)
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