The Morse Code Keyboard, my thesis project, and the object of my attention for the past six months is finally complete. This device uses a touch-based slider interface to communicate with a computer as a standard USB keyboard. It works like a regular keyboard, except instead of typing letters you make gestures that get decoded [...]
Umweltforshöw: The 2006 ACE Graduation Show
The ACE second year graduating class (which includes me) is putting on its thesis show next week. If you will be in Southern California next week (or even if you won’t) and enjoy new media art, you should come and see what two years of blood, sweat, and tears can [...]
Saturday, February 25th, 2006
What started out as a diffuse idea, got announced to a room of several hundred people before it was little more than that later that day, and fully implemented that night, has become an interesting resource for those interested in getting their hands dirty with electronics. Opencircuits.com is project that I started with the help [...]
Saturday, February 25th, 2006
Bill Wasik at MOB #2 (June 17, 2003), courtesy satanslaundromat.com
This week’s edition of the excellent NPR program, On the Media, features an interview with the original creator of the Mob Project. The enigmatic creator of the flash mob phenomenon and Harper’s senior editor, Bill “Bill” Wasik, gives a good overview of the flash mob phenomenon [...]
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005
I have an Airport Express that I use, aside from basic network connectivity, for streaming music and printing with my Powerbook. Several months ago I started noticing that all of these things would periodically stop working. The first time it happened I thought the Airport Express had just glitched and needed to be reset. For some reason, this reset normally fixed my problem. But there was that rare occassion when no amount of hardware resets and network voodoo fixed the problem. After a while I realized that it might be a problem with my VPN client. From time to time I need to use a Cisco VPN client to connect to resources made available by my university or my program. After some poking around I found the daemon, killed it, and restored sanity to my network setup.
It turns out that even though the Cisco VPN client requires you to load a horribly designed GUI application while you are connected to the network, it also loads a daemon on startup. (I assume this is for some basic firewall functionality, but I don’t know for sure.) There is also no user interface provided by the client GUI to start or stop this daemon. Which is problamatic, because sometimes the client itself complains that the daemon hasn’t been loaded. Of course, it also doesn’t tell you that definitively. It just complains about “error fffffffffffffch”.
Thursday, September 15th, 2005
I’d like to emphasize one of the recent entries at flashmob.com because it is so pregnant with meaning and happens to echo some of my own frustrations with the state of electronic culture.
As some of you may know, flash mobs are for bourgeois people from MIT only. We want to change this and organize a [...]
Sunday, August 28th, 2005
Those people reading this website that know me, know that I am responsible for flashmob.com. For far too long I let it sit as a hull of a website without serving as anything useful to anyone but spammers (who made good use of the unmoderated forum page).
The problem was not so much that I was [...]
Friday, August 19th, 2005
I’ve been following nanotechnology for a long time and for as long as I can remember, nanotubes have been held as the first great delivery on nanotech’s big promises. But I’ve never been particularly impressed, because everytime I hear about nanotubes I have to remind myself that it will be years before I’ll get to [...]
Friday, August 19th, 2005
So I went on a web search recently to see if there were any websites from hobbyists that had figured out a simple way of implementing an inductive charging system (like the kind you find on electric toothbrushes).
I hoped to find a fastidious account of some lonely guy on a quest to make a portable [...]
Friday, August 19th, 2005
So it took me a while to figure out what the Pixel Factory, designed by Kenichi Okada, actually did. Something about the documentation told me that it had to be an amazing idea, and it is.
It’s basically a 7×7 pixel, completely mechanical, moving image player. It seems to be made out of cardboard, plexi, and [...]