See the thread here.

Earlier this week, Anne Hong, Andrew Schneider, Nick Sears and I set up the Interactive Youth exhibit at the Material Connexion. The Material Connexion is an amazing resource for anyone doing anything that has a physical presence. The show looks amazin…

A little reality check amidst the hype though I must admit I do yearn for an iPhone. My rational brain tells me it’s a buggy, locked down, early version of the device yet I feel the multi-touch calling me. See more videos here.

It’s for wearing! …Er… or wait, is it for hugging? What is an Unglefor?

Unglefors are the final project by one Kim for her Manchester Metropolitan University degree in Interactive Art. They start out as t-shirts that have instructions on how to cut them up and sew them into these adorable creatures.

Here’s a photo [...]

And this time on to L.A. for a little relaxation. Also big plans of slipping off to Vegas for a little dabble at the poker table. Better reload, Doyle, I’m on my way…

Holy sweet Jesus! The first teendrama entry in, what, two months!? Friends, in just a few short hours I will be in my busted ass truck driving back to Boston Cape Cod for Mike.D + Jos’ wedding. And on this…

link

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I’ve been revisiting Voronoi Diagrams after seeing flight 404’s post and continuing amazing work. Started out by duplicating Golan Levin’s portraits (see image below) with the idea of developing some sort of voronoi-esque video filter (see sample above). I’m planning on trying a few things to make the Voronoi cells [...]

We played with mypet in the samsung anycall cellphone Jenny brought from Korea.
She can even text friends in Korea.

- I can’t sleep. Do you have a dog in ur phone?
: I used to have one but it was so stressful so i chose not to have a dog in my phone anymore.
- Why do you get stressed?
: you will see. Do you want to have one for yourself?
- yeah.
: alright, what color, what name do you want?
- beige with long ears.
….
: look, It ’s coming.

It was literally coming from the left corner of a screen.

I pushed some buttons to see what happens.
It is getting stressed since i fed it when it’s not hungry, I brought it to hospital when it’s not sick, i brought it to bed when it’s not sleepy.
I couldn’t handle it
I understood what Jenny meant by have-nothing is better.

(image courtesy of O’reilly Radar)
Yet another pleasant surprise from Google. What I really appreciate is these subtle changes to their core products, changes that show that they are paying attention to their users. The other day I clicked on ‘link to this page’ in Google Maps and instead of having to cut and [...]

For those who haven’t been obsessively shopping at Whole Foods and other natural food stores since their impressionable teens, allow me to introduce you to Veggie Booty. It’s puffed rice and corn with a fine, green, powdery coating of dehydrated kale, spinach, and other veggies. The texture is a bit like how I imagine styrofoam [...]

I had to laugh a bit when I read this post on Rev2.org about ‘angry facbookers’ and the author’s particular disdain with Facebook’s choice to enroll every user in the new platform. It is amazing to me that people will…

Just noticed that Picasa Web Albums added a new feature where you can link your photos directly on to Google Maps… the idea is not new but again, the simplicity of their interface wins me over every time.Click HERE to see an example.

Elizabeth Royte’s book, Garbge Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash , is probably unlike other Sustainability books, in fact I would not categorize it as such. Instead, Royte offers the reader a …

Trying to catch up on my posts here…After touring the bay in Hong Kong as I mentioned, I took a random ferry and ended up in Lama Island. Basically a fishing community + a power plant and a single wind powered generator. Walked around and shot this l…

Bizar to see all the signs in Portuguese and in Chinese. Like Hong Kong, Macau was handed over back to China about 10 years ago but it is still under Portuguese law (hence a huge number of lawyers in the area) and will have a formal border for the next…

Toshio Iwai is showing another of his incredible Morphovision installations, this time at the newly inaugurated 21/21 Design Sight art space at Tokyo Midtown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX3i0fNKjg8

A rapidly spinning sculpture is illuminated by scanning lines from a video projector, changing the timing and duration of the lighting pulses appears to warp the object.

I finally got a chance to read Danah Boyd’s very interesting essay called “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” the other day and have been thinking for a while about some of the points she raised. I have…

Santa Clara County Bikeways Map
list of bike friendly routes
(tags: biking)

Vitamin Features » Web app without makeup: iterations of TeamSnap
(tags: design)

Shifd.com - Hack Day London 2007 Winner
Shifd between your computer and MOBILE seamlessly
(and back again)
(tags: mobile hackday)

TERMINAL ZERO ONE
Digital Art Exhibition at Toronto Pearson International Airport
Terminal 1 – Level 3 Terrace, Departures Level
July 1, 2007 – January 13, 2008
Terminal Zero One (T01) is a site-specific digital art exhibition of five projects exploring themes of contemporary air travel and the architecture of airports. Airports are networks, information is increasingly networked, the T01 [...]

Read this in the press: Posh buys a $500,000 closet that scans what she’s wearing so she can see a 360degree view of herself before she goes out….
Firstly, I think the technology is shoddy, I mean, isn’t that what a 3-mirror thing is for? Wouldn’t it be cooler if she had all her clothes [...]

Just got home (3am) after an early start - went to Macau and met with Diana and Miguel, a Portuguese couple (interior designer and architect) friends of Andrea’s. They took me all around Macau, had a great traditional Chinese lunch, saw the other islan…

I’m still sifting through piles of data to prove my innocence to these asses. I was on the phone for 2 hours today.  Thanks god I finally got a patient intelligent person.
I currently use 2 verizon services, both of which I am going to cancel shortly.  Verizon wireless and verizon business.  I pay these people [...]

Here are a few links:
COME OUT AND PLAY
http://www.comeoutandplay.org/blog/
MIT LAB
http://www.projectnml.org/exemplars/07biggames/#
Jane McGonigal
http://www.avantgame.com/
Frank Lantz
http://gothamist.com/2004/05/04/frank_lantz_game_designerteacher.php
Area Code
http://www.playareacode.com/
Conflux
http://confluxfestival.org/conflux2007/
Eric Paulos
http://www.paulos.net/
Julian Bleecker
http://www.techkwondo.com/
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Started out as a very lazy day in bed sadly watching the rain pour out of the sky wondering what the heck I was going to do if the rain did not stop. Went down for breakfast, came back up, watched some more TV… at around 11 the color outside changed….

Stepping in to take Yahoo reins / Co-founder Yang will lead the company as it tries to find its way back to the top
(tags: yahoo)

Arrived in Tokyo two days ago.
I was happy to see how quickly I fit right back in - my phone rang already while I was standing in the immigration line! Patterns of interpersonal interaction, vocabulary, signs, the ways of navigating the city are all different from New York, and came back to me quickly.
First impressions, [...]

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Despite having plenty of more productive things to do with my time, I’ve been hooked on this game Desktop Tower Defense for almost two months, now. And while I don’t consider myself to be in the upper-echelon of players — I’m not ready to go Pro — I have become quite good. Maybe 95th+ percentile. Good enough to teach. So here’s some teaching, a few Desktop Tower Defense pointers that might help you — lowly DTD-plebe that you are — improve your game a bit.

1. Get your creeps on the same path ASAP, but make sure the distances they must travel to get onto that shared path are different enough in length so that the creeps are spread out as they run past your towers. When they get all clumped up together, your towers will have less of a chance to hit them.

2. Define the paths the creeps will take with cheap Pellet Towers. But place Squirt Towers where they have access to the longest lengths of path and can shoot at the flying creeps. And then get those Squirt Towers up to level 5 as quickly as possible. Level 5 Squirt Towers are crazy powerful. Get a couple of them going early in the game and you’re on easy street. But remember, a smaller number of more powerful Squirt Towers is preferable to a large number of weak ones.

3. Don’t worry about the absolute length of the path the creeps will take. Don’t fill up the screen. Make your goal getting as many level 5 Squirt Towers as possible.

4. Once you’ve got a stable base of Squirt Towers, put a couple freeze towers where they can hit creeps and flying creeps. And level them up a couple rounds. These will help, especially against the flying boss creeps.

5. The Swarm Towers are great for killing flying creeps, but don’t level them up too high too early. You’ll just take points away from leveling up your Squirt Towers. Squirts will kill flying creeps fast, too, so get those going at the beginning. Only concentrate on getting level 5 Swarm Towers when the flying boss creeps approach — but don’t ruin your game trying to kill those guys. They can be tough to kill, especially in Challenge Mode, but you’ll only loose two lives if you miss ‘em.

So, there you go.

Novel Concepts, the blog by the guy responsible for Desktop Tower Defense (and another guy), is an interesting read, as well. Their Flash piracy post is an interesting perspective on the “meme piracy” which is rampant online. (Any popular meme image or video — anything small and probably created by someone indie enough not be able to control it with lawyers — will eventually wind up on meme-dump sites like ebaumsworld — which I won’t link to because, frankly, I think many sites like this are essentially scummy and spammy and shitty. (Something Awful agrees.) Ebaumsworld is a particularly egregious case. But these sites appear to be actually quite difficult to get rid of because, of course, few people have the resources to go after them over some image or video or small Flash game that goes viral and gets popular.

But there’s another interesting point in all of this. Desktop Tower Defense is great — horribly, horribly addictive. But it is definitely not horribly, horribly original. It builds upon the fine tradition of tower defense games that started with a Warcraft III mod (I’m told — I’ve never played WCIII). It’s almost indefinable why this version so compelling. I’ve played a few others and felt just “blah” and not interested. Partly, I think, it’s the fact that it is a phenomenon — I can talk about this game with people is a way I could never really talk about some little Flash game I’d come upon in the past. (I mean, talking about it kind of feels like comparing masturbation tips, but still — at least we’re all masturbating.) Even console games rarely have this appeal because it’s rare for me to play a game at the same time as someone else — when I talk about the new Wii Zelda, I’m either talking to people who’ve finished it or who haven’t started.

Kongregate, the new social gaming site that now has their ads all over Desktop Tower Defense (which I’m actually okay with) appears to want to capitalize on the above feelings — community around small, quickie games. Will it work? They have almost 1,000 games available right now, including Desktop Tower Defense. I’d ballpark about one out of every 1000 Flash games are compelling enough to play more than once. Game design can be hard, let’s be honest, and small Flash games necessarily follow that difficult-to-predict “pop song” model — so many bands are capable of tossing together a quick, catchy, fun track that the market gets glutted and the winners, the band that gets the hit, can be difficult to anticipate (unless there’s a giant marketing push of some sort). (I also don’t buy the “revenue sharing” business model, but that’s another post.) So Kongregate will have to get much larger soon to become viable as a business, I think — or else learn to capitalize extremely well on hits like Desktop Tower Defense. I’ve never seen a Flash game go viral quite as hard as Desktop Tower Defense has, though, so… We’ll see what happens.

Natalie Jeremijenko and I released two dozen butterflies in the OOZ garden. We helped them feed from some watermelon in the Strange Attractor artificial flowers then observed their behaviour. The Monarchs stayed at Strange Attractor longer and were more likely to leave, fly around the garden a bit and return to the [...]

Admittedly, she’s quite a looker. Kevin Eubanks  won the title in the men’s division of this hotly contested event. Perhaps the two should mate and pioneer a new species of non-meat eating humans that we can use as slave labor. Cheaper to feed.
story 

From The Onion:
“Sometimes I Feel Like I’m The Only One Trying To Gentrify This Neighborhood”
There’s a  political undercurrent in there too. Not the one you’d expect from an article written in/about Bushwick, either.

Flavored Cocaine comes to California! 

Here’s a short PHP script that gathers info about the browser and the IP address of the client and returns it via email. I used it to gather data on cell phone browsers, and got the results seen at the bottom over the course of a day. Thanks to all those folks who hit it.

I finished my synthesizer project! The last touch was to to connect the four switches, which choose the phase of the modulation signal. This means that when two oscillators are modulated at the same rate, you can choose whether they sound at once, or alternately.

I’ve put a couple of MP3s recorded from it online here and here.

I found (you may disagree…) that it allows for a striking degree of control and expression, just by turning 4 knobs for pitch, 4 knobs for modulation, 4 switches for phase and one last knob for overall tempo.

Next steps with this project:

* add an amp within the case, so speakers can be powered directly
* add speakers - maybe on stalks, coming out of the currently empty front of the case
* add some kind of controllable distortion circuit
* etch the circuit board

Part of what i am doing this summer