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Simple dynamic site generator with standardised templating tools: certainly looks nice for building those early-stage prototypes before you need a full backend.
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"The history of switching power supplies turns out to be pretty interesting." It really does: long, fascinating post about a history of AC-DC conversion and how new technologies affected it.
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"Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes." As recommended by Matthew Somerville. Looks useful!
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"Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content." Lovely: a camera powered by Mechanical Turk.
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"“coding” is not the only concrete skill required “to work at the crossover of creative and technology”. Especially if you want to make an actual thing that lives outside of a screen." I'll gladly concede Josh's point. This is very much worth reading; if anything, the only reason I focused on code was the original W+K focus on that, likely because that's the technology they're interested in. Good points all, though.
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Fascinating article on the lengths one has to go to to get perfectly accurate hardware emulation. It's not enough to get stuff to run; you have to get it to run right, and in the era this hardware comes from, that means it needs to take into account the weirdness of hardware.
Possible Futures: The BirdsPad
07 June 2011
How long before Rovio enter the hardware market?
I’m serious. This is what Android was surely designed for: cheap, off-the-shelf, no-brand tablets, spruced up with a canny rebrand.
And what could be better than the inevitable $100-200 tablet, running Android 3.0 out of the box, and – even more crucially for the target audience – pre-installed with Angry Birds. One step further, maybe: Angry Birds Universe, the eternally updating, subscription-driven, physics-based puzzler.
The cherry on the top: by default, the device just boots into Angry Birds. What else were you going to use your tablet for? The whole Android universe is there, of course – it’s the extra-added-value – but it’s really just a footnote on throwing birds at pigs.
I’m not even sure that it wouldn’t fly off the shelves.
Take a deep breath; it might not happen. But given everywhere else Rovio are, it doesn’t feel like an extravagant extrapolation to move them into consumer electronics.
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Matt Brown and Mark Slater, writing about music and things. Looks set to be like a cracking little blog.
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Reviews of Phill Niblock's "Touch Three": drones created by stripping out attack/release/breath sounds from acoustic performers, and then gluing them together. What we're listening to right now, too. (It is better than that description makes it sound).
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This is, in fact, the most successful rotary encoder code I've found to date.
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Excellent summary of what happened on the Yaroze – and a quest to track down all the released Yaroze titles.
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Jason Rohrer's recursive shooter, which I must pick up at some point.
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"This is what the next generation of the mega-selling phone will look like. They'll be rough facsimiles of the high-end smartphones forged for well-heeled buyers, stripped of fat and excess—an embodiment of compromise. They'll be 90% of the phone for 20% of the price, with FM radios instead of digital music stores, and flashlights instead of LED flashes. This is how the other half will smartphone, if you want to be so generous as to call the developing world's users a half. We're not even close." Yes.
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"Sahel Sounds rounded up music salvaged from the discarded mobile phone memory chips in West Africa." Wow; the after-life of dead electronic media made real.
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"Board games are different. Sure, while you might love a board game for the sense of immersion it provides, or the way the game lifts off the table and fills the room, you also might love it for how beautiful the mechanics are. It’s like looking inside a clockwork watch. That fascination, as you see how all the pieces fit together, how everything is timed to perfection, how balanced it all is. With a beautiful board game design, you can love it for that craftsmanship you can feel with every turn." Yup. But, of course: this is, increasingly, why I like any game. It's just much more visible in boardgames – where you have to wrangle the rules yourself. And everything else – the immersion, the involvement – will come too; it just comes from that clockwork heart.
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Microcontrolled Lego printer, running off some kind of postscript driver, I guess. Properly awesome – and, of course, the most important thing is all the little chaps that keep it working.
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Nikon IR intervalometer, hooked up to an Arduino, without even needing another remote. Definitely interested in building one of these.
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"I missed the selection, the album art, and the dusty trays and hand-written CD-Rs. The absence of the compact disk reminded of another format that had recently gone away: the 3.5" floppy diskette. The Floppy Stereo attempts to recreate that ceremony within a single device. An album's playlist file is stored on a floppy disk, complete with the album art. When it is loaded, the playlist is read and retrieves the songs from my MP3 collection." There's a similar tactility in the 3.5" disk to, say, an eight-track cart. I like that.
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"The history of roads is the history of ourselves: our desire for community and our fears about its fragility; our natural instinct to expand the possibilities of life set against our premonitions of death, destruction and loss; and our fierce arguments about what is valuable and beautiful about the world. But this history, like the road itself, is full of loose ends and detours, unfinished stories and stalled narratives."
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Just beautiful: an implementation of a Turing Machine, as described by Turing; not only is it ingenious – reading characters written on tape with pen via OCR – but it's also a beautiful piece of hardware; it feels as elegant as the point it is illustrating.
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"The Lego Step-sequencer is 3 channels 8 steps sequencer. The different coloured Lego pieces each have their own sound. Connecting the Lego three-dimensional makes complex sound. This is building sound more than playing sound."