dirtypotato.com^2.0

I went over to machine project on Saturday for an electronics class. We ended up building a little synthesizer that was more or less a circuit board with a battery pack that hung from two wires. When I got home I decided to make a little enclosure for my new toy:

The kit we built didn't have an on/off switch. If the battery was plugged in then it was drawing power. So I modified the kit slightly by adding a nice little red power button. You have to hold the power button down while you are using it so I tried to place it in the most ergonomic place possible.

The box itself is made out of birch. I used a combination of my dremel tool and a sanding block to try to achieve round soft corners. The power switch needed a home so I sanded down a piece of scrap wood, and bored a hole through it. I sanded the thing for what felt like hours, but it still wasn't enough. My wood-working can use some help.

There was a little small and flat disc on the board that you could turn to change the pitch. It was hard to grab so I added a little knob to make it easy to turn.

My "noise box" is going to sit on my desk at work where I'm sure I'll get hours of entertainment annoying the hell out of my co-workers.

• Comments ()

Google street view rocks...

...except when a large truck is in the way.

• Comments ()

Clay Shirky is a guy that I used to follow going back about 6 years ago. He introduced me to the idea of the semantic web, and I loved the way he wrote. Then something happened and he seemed to stop writing on his blog or his commentary became uninteresting to me for one reason or another. I haven't heard or seen Clay speak until now.

In his talk last week he mentions a few numbers that startled me. Americans spend 200 billion hours watching TV every year. We spend 100 million hours each week-end watching *just* the advertisements. Talk about lost productivity. Imagine if this time was directed at contributing to the web. As Clay puts it that would be 2000 wikipedia projects a year.

I've had some free time recently, and I've spent the majority of it trying to manage the ideas that have been coming to mind. Some people say that the current web application craze is about to bust. I think it's just starting up. There is room, and there will be users for new web apps in every nook and cranny of society. I would be really interested to see what would happen if we used the 200 billion hours or "2000 wikipedia projects" of time lost a year to focus on new web app development. The results could be pretty amazing.

This guy is web all the way, and I love him for it.

Two of my favorite quotes from the video:

"Desprate Housewives essentially functioned as a type of cognitive heat sink dissipating thinking that otherwise might have built up and caused society to overheat."

"Here's what 4 year olds know: a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for."

• Comments ()

For the past hour or so I have been playing with the Yahoo! Blog Remix application released yesterday, and while the application is in alpha I still have been having a very pleasant experience. It provides a new way of browsing the various music blogs out there in one place, and let's you read the editorial while listening to the track chosen for the post.

It also has some tools that allow you to add tracks that you hear to a playlist which you can publish.

The playlist from my session resides here, and with the magic of the Yahoo! Media Player you can enjoy the music from the comfort of your browser as you read this post.

• Comments ()

I'm having some issues with my videos embedded in my feed. The post previous to this one show's a Yahoo! video How-To in bloglines instead of the video I had embedded, but the correct video displays on my site just fine.

If anyone else out there is using feedburner, and knows how to correctly embed videos let me know.

If you were confused by my last post...you can check out the video that was meant to be embedded in the feed here:

http://dirtypotato.com/2008/01/electro_music_weirdness.html

• Comments ()

Last night I joined a group of folks over at pyramind for a little show n' tell. A demonstration of the new features of MaxMSP took up most of the evening, and a few lightning talks ensued.

One of the talks was from Craig Latta about a smalltalk based livecoding project which resembled early text based adventure games. Craig pulled up a terminal window and began typing commands in natural language that ended up in a simple sequence with a kickdrum, high hat and a note or two.

Ge Wang was up next, and gave a demo of his mobile phone orchestra (video below).

In the initial frame in the video it's Ge Wang in front of the projector with a phone, the two guys in the back both have phones. Later in the video I pan over to another guy to the right, and another to the left making a total of five people in the orchestra. I'm not entirely sure what was going on to make those strange sounds, but I believe that when Ge was signaling a number with his hand everyone in the "orchestra" would hit the appropriate number on their phone which would result in a new tone.

It kind of reminded me of monks...

• Comments ()