a day at the CDC

the CDC has a public space & face. the public space includes a gallery space for a permanent and rotating exhibit. we had to go through an extensive security check that included a x-ray scan and physical search of our vehicle that was worth every bit of the inconvenience. the current visiting exhibit is from the National Holocaust Museum; Deadly Medicine tracks the 20th century Eugenics movement across the world and how it was used during the Nazi years. amazing stuff; i was not aware how large the movement was across the planet.

the permanent exhibit is about the history of the CDC. some of the artifacts include: an iron lung, tools for collecting small pox virus, level 5 'blue suits', and a lounging 6 foot mosquito called Betty. a tour group was getting a chance to put on the hazard suits, I am so jealous. I propose a nList field trip! they do a Disease Camp for High Schoolers, maybe we can talk them into a college-level course.


they have a giftshop (which I am already planning some suggestions for new products), i was able to get some goodies including a plush cold virus for my 7 month old cousin.

crack that (iPhone) case!

cute! my fave 3rd party Mac parts dealer will be cracking open the iPhone tomorrow. they are the smartasses who wear buttons that say "no I won't fix your iPod" (they will teach how to do it yerself).

get live updates of the iPhone surgery photoblog at:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone

>>>>>>>>>>from my email>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
--3-- Live iPhone Disassembly

We will be live blogging the disassembly of an iPhone shortly after
its release at 6:00 EDT on Friday, June 29. The live stream of photos
will use the same AJAX technology that the rest of our site is built
on. Your browser will update with images as soon as we take them,
without the need to refresh the page.

To be notified as soon as we begin disassembly, enter your email
address here:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone

The live disassembly will begin tomorrow afternoon at the above
address. Stay tuned!<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Wayne holds the antenna for the first broadcast of nList TV

the first broadcast

last night John and i met to prototype the TV transmitter. John has some experience at electronics and so he brought a breadboard and drew out the schematics for the transmitter. he then put the components together and we hacked a rca cable for input.

our testing was going poorly until we realized to check our source, sure enough the displays had not auto detected. we immediately saw a transmitted image and spent the next hour tuning the transmitter. an antenna is going to absolutely necessary and we want to prototype an amplifier as soon as I return from my travel.

and as a bonus i was able to make the FM transmitter broadcast through out the room while John was scaring up a cable.

vivoleum!

the future of energy, the history of energy.

just simply amazing, i know they don't need adverts from me, but i want to offer props. and if you don't know this you really should.

http://www.vivoleum.com/event/

ok so i never said i was an early adopter

i was introduced to Quicksilver yesterday in my quest for a one interface tool to mashup my twitter and plazes usage (oh yeah and someone already did twazes, damn scooped again! ;])

ok back to QS, may i please put this down in writing for all of the blogosphere, OMFGods is this coooool! so this little tool has made me rethink interface and get really excited about scripting for the apple OS. The tool is really amazing about providing access to many of your programs through one interface. For the last day i have already been using QS to post tweets and write emails without the hunt and click for separate programs.

you should try it, their tagline about making OS X more amazing is not BS.

twitter + plazes = ??

i have been trying to mash up my main two social network tools twitter and plazes so that it isn't a chore to keep current with both. i found several solutions including a php script that parses the rss feed which i installed on my web server. this solution was exhibiting a bug which i still don't understand so it would post a tweet of 'Error' everytime i ran the script.

i looked for other rss into twitter solutions and came across two from the freakitude blog. the article mentions rss2twitter.com and twitterfeed.com. both services are offered free of charge to the community (yay!!). i had trouble parsing the plazes atom feed through rss2twitter.com but twitterfeed.com's product worked great.

i am going to continue to work on a stand-on-my-own/custom solution because both services only update every thirty minutes and i am not thrilled about the amount of titling that twitterfeed.com is placing in the tweets.

if the plazes api gets released soon i can look for solutions in the other direction twitter into plazes. if i can make this happen, maybe the cutesy web name should be called twazes (wonder what we get when we crossbreed this with flickr? twazkr of course).

a bonus is i was inspired to add the 'what am i up to' feed from both of my services to the side bar for the kN blog.

the silkscreen day

we met about 10:30 and I showed the early birds how to stretch a screen and coat it with the emulsion. next I went over how to prep an image and then we burned the 'rez' design in a screen I had prepared earlier. then we set to printing; by this time lots more folks had shown. many people took turns both assisting me and some actually being brave and pulling their own prints.

Wayne mixed a beautiful grey that proved super popular. Xiaoqing's art looked awesome and many people put it on their shirt. lastly, we pulled some prints of XJ's design on RIves BFK (we are thinking about selling them at the street fair that Anno D will be doing later this summer). think about designs we could hawk at the fair! we can work on full color designs.

heres some sweet shots from the day http://www.flickr.com/groups/nbsp/

sweet &nbsp; photo

the silkscreen was curing and caught this really interesting light

tshirt poll

Vote for your favorite 'rezzing' design. click any image for a detailed look-see.

Which 'rez' tshirt should we print?
	rezzing01
	rezzing02
	rezzing03
	rezzing04
	rezzing05
	rezzing06
pollcode.com free polls

-->

the poll has closed the results are: rezzing01 wins with 32% of the vote

follow up on bot

the quickly bot works very well in the bright light of daytime. i used a yard stick and my hand to shade the photo-diodes and the bot responded very well. obviously the photosensitive diodes i bought take quite a bright light to trigger the IC. i plan on looking for more sensitive hardware to improve the performance.

i took some video of the behavior but accidentally erased them in moving files around today. as soon as possible i will retake the videos and post them.

here are some stills until i reshoot the vid

bot building

i have been struggling with the schematics and building a bot design called the Quickly by Math Vos. the name Quickly refers to the small number of components and short amount of time that it takes to build it. i was not so quick in building it because i am so new to circuitry. Steve Durie consulted with me today and taught me a little about how to look at the circuit diagram. He encouraged me to look up the specs of the LM386 IC. we were able to make to informed guesses about the IC function. i then coupled this information with the schematic and the circuit board drawing.

this is a reversal of the drawing i made to could conceptualize the circuit more easily:

the bot was exhibiting behavior tonight consistent with the function. the bot is having trouble grabbing a good footing so i experimented with a few different materiaals added to the motor shaft. so far none of them are great. the bot was responding very well to the bright sunshine reflected into the room. i will need to find or construct a super bright light source to keep tuning the bot.

the first of many temporary autonomous zones

maybe the it is the ugliest homebrew circuit of all time but i successfully broadcast a mighty 1/2 watt of the local Chinese language AM radio to 97.10 FM. John Bruneau asked if I would be able to help him build a FM transmitter to broadcast TV signal this summer. The only bummer is that the kit from Free Radio Berkeley (FRB) is about 150 bucks.
I did some digging around after I remembered talking to the mavens of SF micro-radio Neighborhood Public Radio; they had told me about Tetsuo Kogawa. Kogawa pioneered micro-radio and micro-TV work in Japan. And he has published his notes, manifestos (temporary autonomous zones and polymorphous space), and plans on the interweb. The plans allowed me to whip up this transmitter for less than $15

next step to find the right trimpot to tune the sucker to any channel



CADRE TV!

sculpting update

a little set back in that the C patterns are too big. Sarah is taking them all in. bless her! it is beginning to take shape though! yay verily! click the photo to go to my flickr set.

steampunk magazine

http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/index.html


check out the electrolytic etching in issue 1. i have been reading about this for a month now and i am going to suggest this to the nlisters for an afternoon activity, etching party!

an email from Sarah

To: Thomas Asmuth
Message-Id: <3afaede1-185f-4e17-9c98-6638401230dd@alumni.carnegiemellon.edu>
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=Apple-Mail-13-582469554
From: Sarah Lowe
Subject: interface
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2007 19:58:52 -0700
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3)

--Apple-Mail-13-582469554
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
delsp=yes;

A monumental sculpture by modernist master Thomas Asmuth, as seen installed at Storm King.

another day of interface and threads

yeah interface right? you know digital media, interface. threads. no...
it is the f&*%ing third day of the cutting wheel and the iron. Yeah ironing.

As you might know I am preparing a sculpture for a show later this fall. Imagine a giant stuffed animal. More on that later.

I am preparing fabric (interfacing) for the sew-master Sarah Lowe. Sarah by the way is the coolest and a genius. She is currently constructing a chandelier made from mortality data from the 1665 plagues in London.

the armature Sarah fabricated (yeah I know, she is unbelievably talented):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/slowe/514123674/

my interface for (making) the sculpture: