Hcross Blog

080818_0021.31 - after I read my feeds today ; must sleep now.

2008-08-17T21:24:00.001-07:00

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/25/view/3646/nike-burguer-air-max-90-by-olle-hemmendorff.html

Trey Ratcliff | Design You Trust™. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration. - the cathedral is a very cool pic, but there are more to view at this link

Will Horizontal Layouts Return? | Events | Smashing Magazine - is it a question worth asking or are we just kinda bored?

Apple Now Worth More Than Google - Mac Rumors - I love seeing these corporate worths stats; also like the "who owns what" lists

10 Awesome, Contemporary Character Designs | Events | Smashing Magazine - cool pics here. modern-ish

nike (burguer) air max 90 by olle hemmendorff - wow, it looks so weird.

Green Concept Cars by The Royal College Of Arts - slick. reminds me of that one ride at Epcot. Do they still have it? The car history ride.

Learn Illustrator CS3 in 30 Days - sounds like a nice goal

Top 10 Usability Highs Of Mac OS | Events | Smashing Magazine - have to admit they do UI right for the most part

Top 5 Most Inspirational Videos on YouTube | Zen Habits - need inspiration? I haven't watched these, but I should.

36 Font Resources You Should Have in Your Bookmarks - fonts.

5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers and Developers | CSS | Smashing Magazine - not sure how REALLY useful these things are, but what do I know?

Is Facebook the Most Popular Social Bookmarking Service on the Web? - ReadWriteWeb - I enjoy seeing email as the #1.

Top 5 Graphic Design Forums | You the Designer - more useful things?

richard rogers retrospective exhibition and graphic design - interesting graphics?

livingstones by stéphanie marin - saw these at Kanye Wests blog a while back.
Tulipan Condoms Print Ad | Design You Trust™. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration. - cool ad
Yay Hooray | Best use of Live Journal (Official) - many crazy pics here, some NSFW

080817_2254.06 - things on my mind

2008-08-17T20:07:00.001-07:00



Hacking Techniques in Wireless Networks - for education purposes, of course
USAA / Pain at the Pump: A Reality Check - straight talk about gas prices LONG after the recent phenomena became a news story; I'd love to work out some sort of formula/axim for the dissemination of truth
Wardriving Software Downloads - WardrivingOnline.com - more education; I'm trying to get my WRT to do all the work for me

traffic - today, as I was driving, I thought about modeling traffic as a phenomena based on simple rules/behavior followed/exhibited by a group of individuals.

"something else" - there was something else I felt like modeling, also. I can't recall what it was - I probably will recall when I lay my head to sleep (soon). Suffice to say that it was something I'd like to model or consider that was similar to traffic... hmmm.

hacking, wireless, gas prices, economy, economics, modeling

I love TOMATO!!!

2008-08-14T21:45:00.001-07:00

if you have one of the supported routers (ie. the linksys wireless that EVERYONE has) and you don't have tomato installed then you are missing out!

I went from a modded DD-WRT v4d to Tomato and I won't look back... so much faster.. so much nicer - graphs and stuff... WOW!!!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wrt54g tomato

Coign of Vantage

2008-08-14T20:36:00.001-07:00

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Coign of Vantage

via Waxy.org Links on 8/14/08

rotate playing field with your mouse to assemble icons [via]

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080814_1213

2008-08-14T09:18:00.001-07:00

Shapeways | Home - cool 3d printing - seems to have a business model like threadless or cafepress(?)
'optimus tactus' by art lebedev studio - another cool keyboard from these people; when do I get to see one?
kanYe West : Blog - cool lights from blown glass; Kanye has cool taste, but he's so not bookmarkable, ie. "kanYe West : Blog" says NOTHING about the content
Unwrap.. - Chad Essley's Tablet Pc Sketchblog! | - looks like a face all unwrapped; weird!
Create Digital Music » Nodal: Generative Music Software for Mac (Free for Non-Commercial Use) - wish I had a Mac or that this was on PC, I love modular gui's in program controls

EyeDefender Helps You Avoid Computer Use Injuries

2008-08-14T08:56:00.001-07:00

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EyeDefender Helps You Avoid Computer Use Injuries

via Download Squad - AideRSS (Best) on 8/11/08

Filed under: Windows, Office, Productivity, Freeware

While computer work tends to not be physically risky, that doesn't mean you should assume it's not impacting your health. Carpal tunnel and Computer Vision Syndrome are no laughing matter, and it's important to take steps to avoid them.

EyeDefender helps by starting breaks at intervals of your choosing (you choose the length of the break as well). To rest your eyes you can choose either your default screensaver, an image, or the visual training mode. The training mode is a bit reminiscent of the relaxation portion of Flash Focus for the Nintendo DS.

If you stick to the schedule you set up, EyeDefender breaks will also help prevent repetetive strain injuries. Like anything designed to help your quest for improved health, you've got to stick with it to see benefits.

For web workers that have a hard time tearing themselves away from their screen, EyeDefender is a handy application with tremendous potential benefits. It's free for non-commercial private use and runs on Windows only.

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Interact with Websites via Easy to Remember Email Addresses

2008-08-14T08:47:00.001-07:00

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Interact with Websites via Easy to Remember Email Addresses

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 8/13/08

You know how easy it is to interact with websites through email. For instance, you can upload photos to Flickr, publish blogs on Tumblr, add tasks to your To Do list in Remember The Milk, upload files to Google Docs, save notes in Evernote, send videos to YouTube, convert documents .. and so much more with a simple email message.

Each of these services provide you with a secret (and often impossible to remember) email address that you are not supposed to share because anything sent to that address will instantly get published / uploaded on to your account.

Since it is fairly hard for anyone to remember these addresses, the alias feature of Gmail can come quite handy here. Lets see how using Flickr as an example.

Setup a Gmail account (say labnol@gmail.com) and create a new filter. In the To: field, type labnol+flickr@gmail.com and then put your secret Flickr email address in the "Forward it to:" field. Save.

Now any picture attachment that is addressed to labnol+flickr@gmail.com will get published on Flickr. You can create similar aliases for other services like labnol+youtube@gmail.com for YouTube, labnol+gdocs@gmail.com for Google Docs, and so on.

So your single Gmail account acts as a central hub and redirects messages to the relevant service based on the alias used in the address. And since these email aliases are so logical, you will probably have no trouble remembering them even if your email address book isn't around.

Also see: Create Email Polls using Gmail

Interact with Websites via Easy to Remember Email Addresses - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

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Edison Helps You Green Your PC

2008-08-14T08:45:00.001-07:00

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Edison Helps You Green Your PC

via Download Squad - AideRSS (Best) on 8/13/08

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Rising energy costs and environmental concerns have caused just about all of use to take a good hard look at our usage habits. Verdiem's Edison helps your conservation efforts by picking up where your Windows power saving features leave off.

You may already be familiar with Local Cooling, another similar application. Edison won't hibernate or shut your PC off like Local Cooling will, but it will turn off your screen and hard drive, and suspend your PC to achieve savings.

Set up your work schedule and choose your power savings plan. Edison lets you create different plans for work and non-work times, and you can either use one of nine preset savings plans or customize your own.

While scheduling is a great feature, I'm not convinced it makes Edison a better option than Local Cooling. Edison is a much bigger download, consumes almost four times as much memory, and requires activation.

Either way, grab one of these apps and make your PC a little more environmentally friendly. Every little bit helps!

[via GreenBlog ]

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Send an Anonymous Email Message With Note2Email

2008-08-14T08:40:00.001-07:00

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Send an Anonymous Email Message With Note2Email

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 8/14/08

Note2Email is a simple web form that you may use for sending email messages anonymously to just about anyone - no need to create any account.

Your IP address is not passed in the message header so your identity remain hidden and the email recipient will never know who exactly sent that message and from where.

Other than sending anonymous emails, this service will also come handy if you are sitting on a public terminal and want to quickly send yourself an email without logging into your own web account for security reasons.

You may send unlimited number of emails with Note2Email but one at a time. Obviously there's potential for misuse so you can ask them to blacklist your email address so that people can't send you messages anonymously.

Send an Anonymous Email Message With Note2Email - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

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The Joy of Interlacing: Video Answers Everything You Were Afraid to Ask Abou...

2008-08-12T22:15:00.001-07:00

the CS Lewis quote at the end could be seen as ironic given the last few years in world history. I hate interlacing; I wish it would go away. It's just a stupid trick.

Sent to you by Jay via Google Reader:

The Joy of Interlacing: Video Answers Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About Interlacing

via Create Digital Motion by Peter Kirn on 8/12/08

The Joy of Interlacing from Videopia on Vimeo.

As it happens, interlacing is not a diabolical technology invented just to make your life miserable by creating those annoying Venetian Blind patterns on digital videos. (Who knew?)

The wonderful people of Videopia don't just explain interlacing – they defend it, starting with its early history. Then they explain how to deal with removing interlacing in the progressive-scan world of Internet distribution. And if you're still not clear on when that horizontal pattern of lines on your video is a good thing and when it's a bad thing, this will make it clear.

It's by far the single best explanation I've seen, and they've done it all with fantastic production values.

Now if people will just watch the darned thing, maybe we won't see all this poor deinterlacing in online videos on YouTube. (Stats were surprisingly low when this came online, so have at it, Visualist Nation, and spread the love around!)

Any further tips (or questions) to add to their interlacing advice, ye tech-savvy visualists? Let us know in comments.

Lots more smart advice at Videopia. Via Jamie Wilkinson's FriendFeed

Updated: Richard Lainhart writes with a still-better technique. I agree, absolutely - got so distracted by the elegant explanation of interlacing itself and its history that I neglected to pay as much attention to what they were actually suggesting! Of course, this won't work in all cases, meaning you're back to the video technique. But since a lot of you have cameras capable of shooting as Richard describes, this could be helpful.

The deinterlacing techniques mentioned in the video all will introduce artifacts of some sort in the image. If you use leave the fields in, you'll still see interlace combing on the edges of objects in motion, even if the frame isn't paused. Interpolated interlacing can be better, but you'll still often see blockiness, sawtooth effects, or other such artifacting on straight lines and hard-edged objects, as no interpolation method is perfect.

If you can, you'll get better results with this method - shoot everything in full 1080i HDV, and reduce the frame to one-half resolution in After Effects. When you bring the HDV footage into AE, convert it to square pixels but tell AE to not deinterlace it (in the Interpret Footage dialog.) Then scale that image to half-size in a 960×540 comp. This has the effect of throwing out every other field and reducing the frame to widescreen SD format, and you'll get perfect, clear progressive full frames. From there, crop to 4:3 for standard SD, or scale up to 1280×720 for 720P HD - scaling the image up in AE will introduce some softness, but it will still look better than 720i footage when viewed on a computer screen.

All the footage on my YouTube site was processed this way, and none of it has any visible field artifacting.

http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart

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080811_2241.22

2008-08-11T19:41:00.001-07:00

- soon I will give up for the night, but what I'd like to do is describe my challenge

I want to check what local computers are on via the browser or a program interface and have the option to turn them off

I'd also like to ensure the internet is accessable and, if not avaialable, turn it on by reset or other means (prompt user what to do)

I think the best way to do this is to ping each local computer and set a status vairable dependning on if/how fast they respond

I don't want this to be an app that waits forever to locate a computer...

I'm not really sure where to go from there

in pseudo code:
<code>

For ComputersInList
{
NetStatus[i] = getStatus(computerIP, timeout)
Next ComputerInList
If ComputerInList=0 break
i++
}

while i < NumberOfComputersInList
{
if NetStatus[i] = up
    {
    writeStatusToHTML(ip,status="good")
    }
else
    {
    writeStatusToHTML(ip,status="bad")
}
i++
}

RefreshStatusDisplay

</code>

java samba - Google Search
AutoHotkey and Thinking Rock - The flow from thought to action. - What's the next action
Listing of directory: /stevesfreeware/
ServerCheck via Alive ping test

Ableton Live Rack Tutorials: Slicing and Drum Racks, Vocal Slicing with Simp...

2008-08-11T12:52:00.001-07:00

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Ableton Live Rack Tutorials: Slicing and Drum Racks, Vocal Slicing with Simpler Racks

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 8/11/08

The last few days have brought still more Live tutorials to help hone your Live ninja skills. This time, both focus on racks.

Vocal manipulation with Ableton Simplers. from wiretotheear on Vimeo.

Oliver Chesler of the currently on-fire wire to the ear shares this tutorial using Live's Device Groups and built-in Simpler. Basically, the idea is to rack Simplers together so you have easy access to different slices. Because these racks can easily map MIDI to different rack slots, there's quite a lot you could do with this technique.

Oliver ultimately works his magic by manipulating the patterns in Arrange View. You have a couple of options here if you want to work live. You could simply bounce some of those manipulations that would be hard to play back into a slot in Session View. Or, if you want to stay in Session View (the one with the clips), you could try doing more extensive MIDI mappings with the Rack, and use patterns in clips in place of Arrange View.

Need to brush up on the basics of slicing and drum racks first? The good folks of Infrasonik are back with another 101 tutorial:

Ableton Live - The Definitive Guide: Intro to Slicing and Drum Racks from Infrasonik.com on Vimeo.

Previously:

Ableton Live Shortcuts in Infrasonik Video, Live Tutorial Player

And yes, I'll be working on assembling all these videos into one, central location. Stay tuned.

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Audiovisual Inspiration: Suryummy Imagines Interstellar Cooking Show

2008-08-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

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Audiovisual Inspiration: Suryummy Imagines Interstellar Cooking Show

via Create Digital Motion by Peter Kirn on 8/11/08

Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

Friend of CDMo Suryummy shares this audiovisual motion sequence, imagining what the world would be like if you cooked … in … outer space.

Good stuff. And no, The Frugal Gourmet hasn't been dropping acid. (Suryummy does suggest that this could be Bowie with a cooking show, which I like.) But Suryummy does share his tools:

Maya
Adobe CS3
Particular
Ableton Live
Native Instruments Reaktor
Native Instruments Absynth

Tasty. Keep those videos from vimeo (and elsewhere) coming.

At some point we need to go over what a workflow would be like doing this kind of thing in a live tool like Processing. It's tricky, and of course necessitates some sacrifices in the visual category to allow for real-time performance – but it can be rewarding. (And there's no saying you can't do both.)

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SAUL WILLIAMS BREAKS DOWN CONCRETE COLONY VIDEO

2008-08-11T12:03:00.001-07:00

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SAUL WILLIAMS BREAKS DOWN CONCRETE COLONY VIDEO

via Kanye's Blog on 8/11/08

Click HERE for the video and more info...

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GNU, Linux... More Info

2008-08-11T12:01:00.001-07:00




Some information on the history of Linux/GNU and other related topics.

History of Linux
Anatomy of the Linux kernel
GNU Compiler Collection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An Introduction to GCC - Conventions used in this manual

TrackMe: A Quick Look

2008-08-11T07:32:00.001-07:00

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TrackMe: A Quick Look

via Solo Technology by Chris on 8/10/08

I continue to be intrigued with the idea of tracking or mapping my bike rides. Back in June I found Gmaps Pedometer which I initially liked. However, tracking the longer rides via double-clicking waypoints for each and every turn got old. Fast!

My neighbor sent me over a link to TrackMe this week and I had a chance to give it a run this afternoon.

To use TrackMe, your Windows Mobile (5 or 6) device needs GPS — either built-in or external via something like Bluetooth. You also need to install a load of other "framework" stuff, so the footprint isn't all that light, but it definitely seems to work well.

I took a 16 mile ride this afternoon with it running. When I got home I exported my file (as a kml) and checked it out on Google Maps. Looks like a few waypoints were dropped but in general it's a very accurate representation of my ride. Here's a shot of the top part of the course:

Cool, huh? Click on any of those markers and there's more detail to be had. For instance:

I particularly enjoyed clicking around to see my speed fluctuations.

As you can see by the pictures above, I'm using TrackMe with Google Maps. You can also integrate it with Google Earth. However, I don't currently have that installed… in fact, until just now I hadn't realized that there was a Linux version of it. Guess I'll try it out soon.

There are a lot of features and options for TrackMe. Fortunately, it pretty much "just works" right after an install. But be sure to read the full TrackMe product page. For instance, I just noticed that there's a much easier way to show my data on maps by using Luis's site directly.

The only negative I noticed was related to battery usage. My ride was about 1 hour and it used up about 50% of my battery life — and that was with using the built-in screen blanker. I may have to look at the options a bit deeper before heading out on a long ride.

Have any other interesting or cool GPS / PDA tools that I might want to try with my bike rides? Drop a comment, I'm definitely interested.

Reference

Features

Ability to generate KML and GPX files that can be opened with any tool that supports that type of file.

Realtime tracking with Google Earth or Google Maps.

You can create and manage your own trips

No internet connection is needed when using TrackMe (Offline mode)

Ability to display your current position on your PDA

Geofence with SMS and email notifications

You can send your current position by email or sms to other person

Ability to upload pictures. TrackMe will extract the GPS information/Creation date (if any) from the pictures and it will match it with your existing GPS data

Search for closest user based on your last uploaded position

GPS powersave mode available

You can use your own server instead of my free server

Stealth mode

You can force updates with your own custom icon and comments.

Requirements

Devices running Windows Mobile 5 or 6 (no Windows Mobile for Smartphones)

Microsoft Compact Framework 3.5

SQL Server Mobile 3.5

Internal or bluetooth GPS.

Possibly Related Posts

Who Needs GPS? (15)
Mogul Flash - Win Mo 6.1 Upgrade and New Toys (0)
HTC Mogul with GPS! (1)
Gmaps Pedometer (1)

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The Most Popular Social Bookmarking Services

2008-08-11T07:31:00.001-07:00

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The Most Popular Social Bookmarking Services

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 8/11/08

If you ever wanted to know how people are storing or sharing content on the web, this graph says this all. It shows a list of most popular social services that are used by netizens to share or save web pages.

Email continues to be the most favorite mode for sharing links on the Internet followed by Facebook and Digg though its a formidable lead.

These statistics are provided by ShareThis and if you compare these numbers with what AddThis provided an year ago, you'll see an interesting trend:

1. More people prefer sharing links on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace rather than the regular social bookmarking services like delicious.

2. Windows Live is gaining ground and appears almost as popular as Google Bookmarks. The gap was very wide last year.

3. Don't discount Technorati yet. It looks like lot of people do add blogs / websites to their "Technorati Favorites" and it's more popular than say Diigo, ma.gnolia.com or Mixx.com.

Also see: Most Useful Blog Add-Ons

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080811_0658

2008-08-11T03:58:00.001-07:00

misc things:

WRAP / ALIX - small PC's

How To Speed Up Windows XP - I'm using this to speed up the kids computers


Samba share will not mount - LinuxQuestions.org - learning about linux; this round I'm trying to figure out how to mount a SAMBA share
RE: SMBMOUNT, Could not resolve mount point

VoomPC-2 Car PC Barebone

2008-08-10T14:09:00.001-07:00

VoomPC-2 ™ Car PC Barebone with Intel solutionPC
- Intel D201GLY2 Mini-ITX Motherboard
- M2-ATX car PC PSU
- VoomPC-2 car PC enclosure
- P4-12V to P4-12V cable for M2-ATX Intelligent DC Power Supply
- Slim Cd-ROM to 2.5" IDE Adapter
- Cable harness included
- Case + PSU made by mini-box.com
- RoHS Compliant

http://www.mini-box.com/BoomPC-2-Car-PC-Barebone-Intel?sc=8&category=101

I would order this right now if I could. Think about it:

wireless connection is set to detect my home network and download when I get home = always something to listen to.
GPS logs everywhere I go and spits it to the home network - cool usage data.
put an app on the touch screen that is for when I fuel up = everything I ever wanted to know

and I fall in love with my automobile again, like the early days of CD's and mp3's.

Of course, I think I'd have to add a cd rom and aWIFI board and graphics card to drive the touch screen... so I'm sure it'd be well into the $500-1000 range.

linux - tracking cpu temp (and other temps)

2008-08-10T00:10:00.001-07:00

Linux I/O Redirection- I think I'll use lmsensors and i/o redirect to daily.monthly log
How do I monitor CPU temperature?

Safe CPU temperature

Monitor temperatures with Linux, Nagios, and DS1820- Nagios, sounds interesting

Nagios: Screenshots

sleep = good.

Linux / ClarkConnect info

2008-08-09T22:03:00.001-07:00



Automating Update Notification — NOT Automating Updates » Solo Technology- talks about using yum to email update notifications; would be nice since there is no GUI icon telling you things have become new. Clark Connect uses apt-get, so.. install YUM, right?
Ruckman.net » Blog Archive » How to install DAG, YUM, and BIND on Clarkconnect- details of how to install YUM. I couldn't get this to work right off the bat; will revisit.
dynamic port forwarding - Google Search- somewhere along the way I became curious to know how to forward ports to computers on the local net dynamically (as in, if they are available then forward)
Linux - Which Linux Version / Build / Distribution am I running?- and I also thought it useful to know what version of linux I am using. new to Linux? maybe this is good to know.

Real Live Working Girls | GorillaSushi

2008-08-09T16:10:00.001-07:00

Flickr set featuring 800+ pictures of REAL LIVE prostitutes!!!

Now I know I've been online too long today, wow...

delicious and blogger integration

2008-08-09T15:54:00.001-07:00

I've done this with Wordpress already - a long time ago. I did it with some weird method that involved using feedburner to email post the feed to another blogger blog I have.

So why haven't I done this in the direct way yet? It seems like it is easy and I feel better about all these separate forks coming together in one place, blogger.

From Del.icio.us to WordPress or Blogger: How to automatically post daily links | PaulSpoerry.com- how to do it

What is my blog ID number?- how to find blog id.

My WordPress blog = http://hcross.wordpress.com/

My Other Blogger Blog = http://hcross.blogspot.com/ - yucky blob appears at the end of each post ... I'll delete this one if all works well next time delicious updates me.

firefox bookmarking

2008-08-09T14:57:00.001-07:00

firefox organize bookmarks keyboard shortuct - Google Search- I was using MenuX and kind of lost the menu item for "organize bookmarks" in firefox - that's okay - there's a shortcut : Ctrl+Shift+B

How to Auto Export Firefox 3 bookmarks to bookmarks.html?- firefox 3 saves bookmarks in an SQLlite file (note to self: find out about SQLlite) not in bookmarks.html like FF2 ... so this link shows how to auto export to an html file... eh, I can think of some interesting things to do with this - but I won't goi into it right now

080809_1616

2008-08-09T14:50:00.001-07:00

some links I liked as I was scrolling through my feeds this day:

(I've started just opening a million links up from Google Reader and then using Firefox's bookmark all tabs, then export to HTML.. copy the relevant parts, paste into gmail compose window, annotate, delete bookmarks bar) (seems like alot of work, but it's easier than delicious(or alternative)-ing the links - maybe I'll automate this in the future, would be nice if it through in some pics/thumbs, too)

080809_1616.56

Minimalist Fitness: How to Get In Lean Shape With Little or No Equipment | Zen Habits - flashbacks to Army PE at 530 in the morning!
'onigiri house' by nks architects - kinda like a cross between a chicken house and an A-frame ... I want one.
Wireframe of Toyota Corolla - Fubiz™ - I think this would be so fun to get payed to do things like this... or I'd just like to have a lot of money and time and create wireframe art with pipes
Design Showcase Of Creative Online-Shops | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine - a collection of sites that do the store design thing well... I like the designer toy one, rotofugi, I'd love to buy and collect these cool jap style toys
Home-built Batman Tumbler invades the suburbs - Engadget - I want it!
'timeless watch' by ondrej vaclavik- watch that looks like a computer part - very nice
FFFFOUND! - giant soccer ball stuck in the side of a building
10 free fonts that don't suck. | Design You Trust™. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration.
Mike Mitchell | Design You Trust™. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration. - bad ass pics... pirate, mario, and mickey - guess you would call this art low brow?
Jesus is my Homeboy | Design You Trust™. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration.- da lass suppa!!
What's Your Vision of the Future of the Web? Mozilla Wants to Know - ReadWriteWeb - sedond thing I've heard about Mozilla and their idea collecting for the future
Offerings and Everydaylife Portraits | Design You Trust™. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration.- rotten food still life in HDR(I think) very cool a la Kurt Cobain art and some NIN videos (Hurt?)
Inspiring Work Environments | Inspiredology- some cool work spaces; I love architecture (what am I doing in Cleveland, TN?)
Tomer Hanuka | Design You Trust™. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration.- think I used to see some art by this guy in playboy, perhaps just someone similar - I like it
The Future of Blogging Revealed - ReadWriteWeb- LifeStreaming, the New Blog... wtf with the 2.0 names? eating = Food Streaming? Regardless, how about a blog that isn't stuck on itself? In the future you will share EVERY detail of your life with EVERYONE and nobody will care... <<< bad me for thinking neg. - that said, I enjoy reading this
products for the single guy- crazy table, but I think it just .. may ... work!
iRing Controls Your iPod » Yanko Design- wtf with all this iStuff... I'm so over it, but the ring is cool.
35 Beautiful Music Album Covers | Monday Inspiration | Smashing Magazine- gonna have to check this out... a compendium of cool cover art
Five Amazing Color Palette Generators - ReadWriteWeb - I know about colourlovers
Talking about logo design #3 | Logo Design Love- cool logos
Jules Julien Beijing 2008 - Fubiz™ - rendering of an oriental kid with corporate logo for eyes, suppose it relates to the olympics
ZSoft Uninstaller helps keep your PC tidy - Download Squad- seems like a cool utility, wonder if I'll ever have the time to try it

Asus Eee Box B202: Our First Look, Plus Official Specs (Only $300)

2008-08-08T21:30:00.001-07:00

due out mid July of next year. 2GB Linux + 160 GB hard drive... plus, aren't these things solid state? (no moving parts on the hard drive), maybe I'm thinking of something else.

I'd love to buy one for everyone I love and a couple for myself.

http://gizmodo.com/394563/asus-eee-box-b202-our-first-look-plus-official-specs-only-300

Games and thinking about games

2008-08-08T12:39:00.001-07:00


Commander Keen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I used to play this game series circa 1992

CloneKeen Screenshots

This software is a fan made deal that uses parts of the old games to , I think, create new levels - this uses SDL? dunno.

DOSBox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I have a version of this on my xbox, used it to play commander keen for a minute or two. This begs the question: could I make a dos game and then play it on the XBOX? That would be cool, esp. if it accessed the network, perhaps.

The Daily Click

This is a repository for games that people make using the Click and Play platform - I think it's supposed to make game making easy.

GP2X

Gp2x
GP2X - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I've wanted one of these for a while. Basically it is a handheld that plays pretty much every emulator out there. You can also develop SDL games for it. SDL seems cool cause it can be completely cross platform; like Java?

File Sytems - WinFS, etc

2008-08-07T23:16:00.001-07:00

wtf about the WinFS

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=future+file+systems&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/29/windows_on_a_database_sliced/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

VBA - some info about VBA

2008-08-07T23:15:00.001-07:00

I was using this the other day in Excel.

if statements - http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/ifthen.htm

set row height - http://www.exceltip.com/st/Set_row_height_and_column_width_in_millimeters_using_VBA_in_Microsoft_Excel/489.html

on select - http://exceltips.vitalnews.com/Pages/T003070_Mouse_Click_Event_in_VBA.html
- http://www.contextures.com/xlDataVal08.html

more:

http://vba-corner.livejournal.com/1041.html

passing variables - http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/showthread.php?t=292990

http://www.mindspring.com/~tflynn/excelvba3.html#Input

program based on / connected to the weather, etc

2008-08-07T23:14:00.000-07:00

for a while I entertained having my own certified weather station; I suppose I will some day. Ah, the lust for data.

Just you try and make sense of this all.

http://m.wund.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?brand=mobile&query=37323

how to read raw METAR http://www.met.tamu.edu/class/atmo151/tut/metar/metar4.html

http://www.foresite.cc/sites/57/index.php?page_id=15

Cleveland Weather Stations - http://www.wunderground.com/stationmaps/gmap.asp?lat=35.15903473&lon=-84.87072754&zoom=10

local citizen weather - search for Cleveland

http://www.wxqa.com/states/TN.html

http://www.weathershack.com/education/aprs-weather-stations.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=APRS+Weather+Station

ubuntu graphics - visual effects

2008-08-07T23:13:00.001-07:00

I'm not using Ubuntu any more, but here are/were some items of
interest while I was. Btw, I'm still using Linux - ClarkConnect
distro, based on Red Hat Enterprise (I think).

about window managers:
http://linux.about.com/b/2006/05/26/tired-of-window-managers-kde-and-gnome-try-fluxbox.htm

visual effects:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=requirements+ubuntu+enable+visual+effects

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=596548

sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl compizconfig-settings-manager

http://www.searchmarked.com/ubuntu/how-to-enable-compiz-fusion-on-ubuntu-710-if-your-video-card-is-blacklisted.php

panels on top issue (I wish they would go to desktop level):

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=341549

Win 2k3 and Negro Elmer Fudd

2008-08-07T23:11:00.001-07:00

http://www.petri.co.il/disable_shutdown_event_tracker_in_windows_2003.htm

I like the shutdown event tracker in 2003, but it's just annoying for what I'm using this computer for. I can't be coming up for reasons every time my kids want to shut windows down. (Shame on me for using Server 2003 for my kids)

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:Bunnytime.JPG

crazy picture of bugs and Fudd(?)... was Fudd REALLY a black man at his conception?

Fuelly | Share and Compare Your MPG

2008-08-07T21:23:00.001-07:00

http://www.fuelly.com/

check this one out

The Mostly Complete History of VJing: Jean Poole Back Catalogue on skynoise

2008-08-06T13:19:00.003-07:00

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The Mostly Complete History of VJing: Jean Poole Back Catalogue on skynoise

via Create Digital Motion by Jaymis on 8/6/08

CDM friend and deep thinking visualist Jean Poole has been migrating a swathe of articles from a defunct web host, and some great interviews and reviews have bubbled to the surface:

Artist interviews…
A Brief History of VJing in Australia ( longgg interview heavy piece focussed around late 90s onwards), The Light Surgeons (UK), VJ Honeygun Labs(US), Jasch (Switzerland), Eye-Fi(Sydney), John De Kron ( Germany), Falk (Germany), Lalila (Sydney), Semi-Conductor (UK), Rawbone ( Perth ), DJ Spooky on cutting film ( US ), Falk on VJ blogging (Germany), Solu ( Finland/Spain), Runwrake (yes he VJs sometimes as well as being an amazing animator)(UK), DJ Yoda (UK), Neotropic on music and film (UK), audiovisualizers.com interview, meta, QBert on Wave Twisters (US), and Addictive TV ( UK) and 242 Pilots ( US/Europe) both of which slipped through as 'recent' posts.

VJ related Software reviews :
Comprehensive overview of VJ Software in 2004 with screenshots, interviews, smaller VJ software round-up in 2005, vdmx 2, VDMXX 4.0, Grid Pro Vs Arnold Schwarzenegger, v-track, Arkaos video sampler, Arkaos VJ 3, Wildform Flix, Isadora, Livid 1.1

There's some fantastic material there, much of which is still exceedingly relevant. Be careful, it will be easy to lose your day to reminiscing for the old days of Motion Dive and VDMXX, and longing again to see Arnold Schwarzenegger's epic battle with Grid Pro.

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Ableton Live Shortcuts in Infrasonik Video, Live Tutorial Player

2008-08-06T13:19:00.001-07:00

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Ableton Live Shortcuts in Infrasonik Video, Live Tutorial Player

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 8/6/08

Live beginners, want to graduate to Live ninja? Sample pack maker Infrasonik has posted a video that walks you through a number of shortcuts for Ableton's software. (Via wire to the ear and Synthtopia; I agree with Synthtopia that the narration is a bit cheesy at moments, but yes, it's still quite useful to have!)

I do find that video, while friendly, can be the least efficient way of getting at information. So here are the shortcuts in text form. These were also in Mac form, so I've provided Windows "translation":

Option-F11 (PC: F11 alone): Full screen mode
Option-Cmd-B (PC: Ctrl-Alt-B): Open/close browser (and arrow keys scroll).
Shift-TAB (PC: TAB alone): Switches between Arrange View and Session View (the linear track view and live performance-oriented clip view, respectively).
Shift-SPACE: Starts/stops playback at the current playhead position; i.e., it's a pause function. (SPACE alone starts at the beginning of the song.)
Cmd-1,2,3,4 (PC: Ctrl-1,2,3,4): Adjusts the active quantization grid in current clips while editing. This one is really essential, of course.
Cmd-arrow keys (PC: Ctrl-1,2,3,4): Controls Loop Region length. This really speeds up editing in a big way. Up/down uses a large increment (doubling/halving), whereas the right and left arrow keys use a small increment.
Cmd-D (PC: Ctrl-D): Duplicate (and it duplicates everything, so it's handy in Session View)
Cmd-I (PC: Ctrl-I): Insert silence
Cmd-B (PC: Ctrl-B): Draw Mode – essential for being able to switch between drawing and selection in clip piano roll, envelopes, etc.
Shift-Cmd-I (PC: Ctrl-Cmd-I): Capture and Insert Scene. This cleans up your set by taking combinations and automatically inserting them in scenes.

(Okay, yeah, I sometimes call it the "Apple" key, but technically, that hasn't been its name since the Apple II. Really. The sound of "open Apple – X" still makes me sigh with nostalgia, though.)

If you want all the keyboard shortcuts in Live, they're in the Live manual. Choose Help > Read the Live Manual… and you'll find it as the last chapter, chapter 28. But Infrasonik did a terrific job of picking out all the best ones, including some that even us old-hat Live users might have forgotten. (Yeah, I'll admit is. I didn't know about Capture and Insert Scene.)

Show those Canadian gurus some love:

Infrasonik

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Radiohead House of Cards Data: Time Lapse Rendering in Real Legos

2008-08-06T13:18:00.001-07:00

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Radiohead House of Cards Data: Time Lapse Rendering in Real Legos

via Create Digital Motion by Peter Kirn on 8/6/08

When the creative team behind Radiohead's new video for House of Cards released 3D imaging data of Tom Yorke's head, I'm sure they looked forward to finding out what people would do with it. I'm guessing one thing they didn't expect was for someone to go manually through the data and painstakingly reproduce it in actual, physical Legos, one … brick … at … a … time, then make it into motion again with time lapse photography.

Be sure to go watch the high-quality version on YouTube for the full effect. (Check the direct YouTube link and look for the option directly below the player.)

I think I'm going to go just watch TV for the rest of the day or something.

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Adaptive Path posts second Aurora video

2008-08-06T13:17:00.001-07:00

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Adaptive Path posts second Aurora video

via Waxy.org Links on 8/6/08

a futurific Upcoming is featured, and a G-Man sighting

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Website Not Loading in Firefox? Try Again, Automatically

2008-08-06T07:12:00.001-07:00

Website Not Loading in Firefox? Try Again, Automatically

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 8/6/08

When browsing web pages in Firefox, it often happens that the site you're trying to access doesn't load in one go.

May be the web server is down momentarily or there was too much load or maybe your own Internet connection dropped. Whatever be the case, such issues are often temporary and get resolved as soon you press F5 to reload the same web page.

If you work with too many browser tabs, a better alternative to F5 could be Try Again. This is a Firefox add-in that will continuously try connecting to web pages that didn't open successfully in the first instance.

TryAgain v 3.2 - Thinks of this as robot pressing F5 every 5 or 10 seconds.

And if the web server fails to respond even after several tries, you can always see a copy through Google Cache or the WayBack Archive.

Website Not Loading in Firefox? Try Again, Automatically - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Architecture: Prefab Housing

2008-08-06T05:54:00.001-07:00

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Architecture: Prefab Housing

via Abduzeedo - graphic design | design inspiration | design tutorials - by Francisco on 8/5/08

One aspect of design that I really like is architecture. From huge buildings to small homes, I'll always admire a great design. On this post I'm going to focus on one of my favorite types of architecture design, Prefab Homes. I'm a huge fan of prefab housing for 3 main reasons:
1. first and foremost I just love their design, which tends to be very unique and different from the usual home design
2. because they tend to be environmentally friendly, often re-using large items like those big shipping containers (which has become a huge trend in prefab housing)
...and...
3. because they seem more attainable financially (to me) than regular homes.

In New York City right now there are 2 great exhibits that involve Prefab Housing. One is at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney is having a Buckminster Fuller exhibit. Fuller designed Prefabricated Housing back in the 1920s. He's best known for inventing the geodesic dome. The other exhibit deals directly with prefab housing and is at the MoMA. Both are great exhibits, if you're in the city you should definitely check them out.

There is a blog that I highly enjoy reading called Inhabitat. Every friday they highlight a prefab home and I'm always looking forward to those posts. Here a few of my favorites:

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Pioneering Composer Paul Lansky Quits Electronic Music

2008-08-05T14:05:00.001-07:00

read this.

Sent to you by Jay via Google Reader:

Pioneering Composer Paul Lansky Quits Electronic Music

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 8/5/08

Paul Lansky, a titanic name in classical computer music, Princeton professor, and real-time algorithmic pioneer, has gone acoustic. He's also known in more popular circles for having been musically quoted on Radiohead's Kid A. The New York Times reports:

After 35 years immersed in the world of computer music, the composer Paul Lansky talks with wonder about the enormous capacities of primitive objects carved from trees or stamped from metal sheets: violins, cellos, trumpets, pianos.

"To create the sound of a violin - wow!" he said in a recent interview. "I can't do that on a computer."

Paul Lansky: An electronic-music pioneer pulls the plug

The Times seems to want to spin this as the end of an era. But while it correctly argues that electronic music is out of the lab and onto the laptop, to me this is more about Lansky's own personal reinvention. I like this quote:

"Here I am, 64, and I find myself at what feels like the beginning of a career."

Whether you're 64, 84, or 24, the ability to feel like you're making music as if for the first time is truly invaluable. Whatever you have to do to achieve that, it's worth it.

Lansky does reveal that some elements of electronic music and computer music no longer appeal to him. But we should be clear about how specific he's being when referring generally to computer music. Of course, the world of computer music as embraced by many CDM readers is not only technologically different from traditional, academic acoustic music. It also represents a different approach to process. The Times' Daniel Watkin says, "what drives many creators of computer music is the desire to have total mastery over how a piece of music sounds." And that indeed seems to be true for an earlier generation of computer composers.

By contrast, the last decade or two, even in the academy, has been dominated by musicians interested in building interactive instruments and interfaces, "playing" electronic music live, introducing uncertainty into composition and sound, and – in conjunction with a much wider, non-academic underground of hackers – doing strange things with DIY electronics and hacked digital gadgets. These to me are the electrically-powered equivalent of some of Lansky's primitive devices. And many of these people also like playing things made from trees. Some of this exploration has much earlier roots in those same laboratories, but those experiments were often a minority, or limited by available technology.

That's not to say any one working style is better than another. I love going back to the tightly-controlled worlds created by people like Lansky. I likewise enjoy talking about electronic music with one of my teachers, David Olan, who was one of the punchcard-using composers – he has a perspective that I don't have. In fact, I never cease to be struck by the way in which early electronic pieces seem to change over time – not because the piece itself has evolved, but because our ears have. And I find that lots of people inside and outside academia are likewise falling in love with tracks that, previously, they would have thought un-listenable.

I think it would be a real tragedy if the conventional wisdom that "everything's been done" were allowed to apply to electronic music, when it remains very young. There are plenty of new sounds to discover in electronic realms, and they're in no way mutually exclusive to working with acoustic sound. Acoustic instruments have a millenia-long head start. I hope we can approach electronic sound with the same freshness Lansky did – and now will bring to things made of wood.

Maintaining that freshness, though, does require occasionally unplugging. Personally, after months of electronic composition, I have a piece to work on for the rebec, which hasn't been big since about the 16th Century. Now that's retro.

If you want to check out some of Lansky's music (plugged and unplug), plenty is available. Here's where to start:

PAUL LANSKY - "Notjustmoreidlechatter" [paperthinwalls, with free stream by So Percussion]

Paul Lansky MP3s

Discography (many available via iTunes)

Thanks to Jacob Joaquin for the tip!

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Behind the Scenes: Cute Generative Animated Characters with Squishy, Open So...

2008-08-05T14:01:00.001-07:00

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Behind the Scenes: Cute Generative Animated Characters with Squishy, Open Source Code

via Create Digital Motion by Peter Kirn on 8/5/08

The making of: Nokia Friends, generative characters from postspectacular on Vimeo.

Karsten Schmidt sends us a behind-the-scenes mini-movie that reveals how he created pudgy, bouncy animated characters using generative code in Processing. It's fun to watch these cute creatures evolve through a process of iteration, from bare-bone physics to the finished product. The results are now in flagship Nokia stores worldwide as well as in a big installation at England's Heathrow Airport in Terminal 5.

From Karsten:

This is the process documentation of this collaborative project with & for Universal Everything, our journey creating a generative motion graphics piece of unique squishy characters commissioned by Nokia originally for their Heathrow Terminal 5 presence, but used throughout their flagship stores worldwide too.
The physics engine used for this project is available from: toxiclibs.googlecode.com
Credits:
Concept & Creative direction: Matt Pyke ( universaleverything.com )
Design, Behaviours & Code: Karsten Schmidt ( postspectacular.com)
Music: Mike & Rich (Mike Paradinas & Aphex Twin)

Sure, the recent Radiohead video gave you a little bit of source code and some data, but toxiclibs is an even more important free download, with a range of terrific utilities and functions Karsten (aka Toxi) has developed in his work. (See, from late last month, New toxiclibs for Processing: Must-Download for Visual Coders, covering the most recent update.)

Toxi promises more background on his blog later today; I'll update this post when it's up.

And even if you don't fancy a dip into the deep, complex waters of Processing, this video is certainly a benchmark in how to make great documentation. If I could print it out and paste it to my wall as a reminder to document projects this well, I would. (Also, a bit thanks for keeping it short and sweet. I wish DVD extras were compact like this.)

Last seen here:

Happy Floating Generative Peoples at Heathrow, Verlet Physics, And Global Felt-Tip Animation

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UPS info

2008-08-05T12:00:00.001-07:00

some info I found on UPS equipment for my little server:

I want my computer to go for 5-10 minutes before it starts to shut down or standby. Even if it's instantaneous (or 5 minutes), I want it to hibernate or standby until battery is too low to hold up, maybe. Most importantly, I want computer to power back up after power is restored for a significant period of time (5 minutes?).

UPS Battery Backups under 700VA, UPS Backups, UPS Backup Protection at TigerDirect.com- a search for cheaper UPS's at TigerDirect

Belkin Home Office 6-Outlet 375VA 110Watt UPS with Shutdown Software F6H375-USB at TigerDirect.com - Belkin model; kind of looks like a power strip.
APC - APC model; everyone likes this one.
APCBE350RManual.pdf - APC model manual
Runtime Chart for Back-UPS ES - how long UPS lasts when power goes out

UPS, Automatic Shutdown, and Linux - info regarding UPS's and linux
Automatically hibernate on power failure? - Ubuntu Forums - more info on the hibernate issue

Tripplite FAQ Item - tells you how to find the right rating for your equipment; helps to find the right size UPS.

I think this will cost me about $50. It's sort of hard to justify, but I'd really like to have this.

HowStuffWorks "Why are my power bills so high? Which appliances use the most power?"

2008-08-05T10:47:00.001-07:00

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question272.htm

another of those pages that tell you all about how much power your appliances are using.

Energy Star Software

2008-08-05T10:46:00.001-07:00

software that allows all monitors to be turned off on a network.

tipped off from here:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=question272.htm&url=http://www.cio.com/archive/080101/tl_save.html

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=healthcare.ashe_sep_oct_2003

To make implementation of power management simple, ENERGY STAR created EZ Save, software that allows IT professionals to activate entire networks of computer monitors from a central location, and EZ Wizard, a tool that helps individuals to enable their own desktop computer monitors. Both can be downloaded from the ENERGY STAR website for free at www.energystar.gov/powermanagement.

USAA / Wiping Out Debt ? Q&A's from USAA's Webinar

2008-08-05T09:54:00.001-07:00

https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=advice_wiping_out_debt_Q_and_A

I like this info:

"Q: I thought debt-to-income ratio was determined without the mortgage payment. Your slide indicated otherwise.
Laura

A: You have a hawk eye. During the webinar, I illustrated the "total debt-to-income ratio" which is all debt payments (including mortgage) divided by your gross monthly income. That number should not exceed 36%. There's another ratio you can check out called the "debt-to-income ratio." It is total monthly debt payments without housing expenses divided by net monthly income. This ratio should not exceed 20%. This simpler ratio could be used by service members living in on-post housing. There's actually a third ratio called the "housing ratio." It is simply all housing costs totaled including principal, interest, taxes and insurance divided by your gross monthly income. This ratio should not exceed 28%. You sort of opened up a can of worms!"

my total debt-to-income ratio = 49.27%

my debt-to-income ratio = 14.3%

my housing ratio = 36.04%

It's clear that my house payment is a bit disproportionate; this could be remedied, though. Low debt-to-income ratio helps.

Audio Damage's Automaton, audio plugin controlled by cellular automata

2008-08-04T13:34:00.003-07:00

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Audio Damage's Automaton, audio plugin controlled by cellular automata

via Waxy.org Links on 8/4/08

Conway's Game of Life as a beatmaker

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Easy Digital Distortion with a Lo-Fi Arduino Guitar Pedal

2008-08-04T13:34:00.001-07:00

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Easy Digital Distortion with a Lo-Fi Arduino Guitar Pedal

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 8/4/08

Lo-fi Arduino Guitar Pedal from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

CDM regular Kyle McDonald keeps cranking out wonderful projects. Following up on a tangible music sequencer powered by Skittles (taste the rainbow of fruity beats), and last week's cheap-but-effective DIY 3D interface, he's now put the popular DIY electronics platform Arduino to work as a lo-fi effect. He writes:

There have been a bunch of projects bent on getting audio out of the Arduino, using them as synths — even Lady Ada's more recent Wave Shield (http://www.ladyada.net/make/waveshield/). A friend of mine was looking for a sample rate reducing/bit crushing pedal, and I thought "I could probably do that with an Arduino". It turns out the audio isn't as terrible as you'd expect (except when you want it to sound terrible!) so I put together an instructable for anyone interested in making their own.

http://vimeo.com/1460684

http://www.instructables.com/id/Lo_fi_Arduino_Guitar_Pedal/

Kyle's site, complete with lots of other projects

Great stuff! Of course, the advanctage of these lo-fi digital effects is just that – they're cheap digital effects to achieve. But this makes me wonder, will anyone be able to hack these effects for some twists of their own?

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Insane Eboman Live Remix with Sensor-Covered Body, Live Sampling, 3D Video a...

2008-08-04T13:33:00.003-07:00

this crazy body suit music stuff...

Sent to you by Jay via Google Reader:

Insane Eboman Live Remix with Sensor-Covered Body, Live Sampling, 3D Video and Visual Videodrum

via Create Digital Motion by Peter Kirn on 8/4/08

Are we approaching a visualist technology singularity? This video from live visualist virtuoso Eboman might make you a believer. With live camera, live video drums, live camera as instrument, a sensorsuit body performance instrument, and custom software, this set has no shortage of live gimmicks. The beauty of it, though, is that there are so many technologies happening at once that it comes down to live performance chops. The pace of technology accelerates to the point that the technology disappears, and the only way to survive is not with a gimmick but mad skills.

You just sort of find yourself living in the future, a future that strangely combines the ancient, surreal art of the one man band with modern software, with hyperkinetic, attention span-warping results.

The cast, as described on YouTube:

This composition was produced for the Stranger Festival by Eboman and performed live in Amsterdam, 3 July 2008.

www.strangerfestival.com
Sensorsuit = played by Eboman
Videodrumkit = played by Guillermo Kardolus
Camera = played by Mascha Rutten
Software = SenS IV by www.smadsteck.nl

SmadS-Sens is an actual product. Then again, tools like Processing and OpenFrameWorks and Max and Pd could all achieve some of the same results, if you think you want to rumble with these Netherlandish mad scientists – just prepare yourself for mind-blowing amounts of practice and work, as with anything. (Good thing we enjoy that sort of thing.) I also expect some of the 3D video manipulations going on here to become more commonplace.

For the single master of live music – complete with visuals – look no further than McRorie, the legendary, kilt-wearing, sensor-driven electronic artist. So, to the SmandS team, I say, consider kilts! They're not just for Scottish people any more!

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Increase Your FeedBurner Subscriber Count With an Easy Hack

2008-08-04T13:33:00.001-07:00

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Increase Your FeedBurner Subscriber Count With an Easy Hack

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 8/4/08

While you should avoid tricking visitors with artificial numbers, this video does give an hint that FeedBurner numbers are very easy to manipulate.

Joop shares a simple hack that will enable anyone to artificially inflate the FeedBurner subscriber count of any RSS feed that's syndicated via FeedBurner.

Some may feel that the onus lies on Google & FeedBurner to provide a fix for this issue but that's not the case because FeedBurner is simply adding the count - the actual numbers are provided by aggregators like Netvibes, Newsgator, Bloglines, etc.

Increase Your FeedBurner Subscriber Count With an Easy Hack - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

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Ligeti’s Artikulation: What Might Future Digital Notation Look Like? (Plus T...

2008-08-04T13:32:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by Jay via Google Reader:

Ligeti’s Artikulation: What Might Future Digital Notation Look Like? (Plus Twitter Finds)

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 8/4/08

Ligeti - Artikulation
by tonicadominante

What does music look like? With new sounds and new technologies, the question is more apt than ever. Tom of Music thing points, via his Twitter feed, to this interesting post regarding Ligeti's Artikulation:

Visualizing Artikulation [Bad Assembly]

Music notation takes on a different meaning in the age of computers. After all, the essential divide in notation – between sound representation and realization – is blurred in the digital domain, in which we move between visual and sonic information seamlessly and a sound can be reproduced exactly. But, perhaps in that fluid context and without the musical conventions that grew up with notation, the importance of notation becomes that much clearer.

In this case, the classic experimental electronic composition Artikulation by composer György Ligeti has already had a visual score associated with it. Rainer Wehinger created the visuals above after the fact as an "aural score," intending visuals to present a visible "reading" of the sounds of the piece. That makes the score itself closer to the digital visualizations we see as motion graphics works all over the Web (and on our sister site Create Digital Motion). The point isn't to create a set of instructions by which you can perform a piece, but a visual counterpart that allows you to (presumably) hear it differently.

To be honest, I'm not always certain what to make of these results. Does this score really help you hear the piece? I'm curious to hear different reactions. But I wonder if the real holy grail comes back to software and interface. Seeing a pre-composed score is already interesting. But make that score interactive, and, in short, you have music creation software. Perhaps we'll get beyond simple sequencers and step sequencers and start to see a growing number of interactive software designs that play around with that concept. (See Tom's other thoughts on that today as he looks to Audio Damage's new Automaton plug-in.)

Side Note: Twittering

If you want to follow us music bloggers on Twitter, I'm (uncreatively) peterkirn; Tom Whitwell is tombola. FriendFeed for me is the same. I haven't made a CDM Twitter account; if for some reason that interested you, let me know, but otherwise I'm inclined to think RSS is just fine.

And if you have Twitters/FriendFeeds you think I should follow, please do holler.

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Making sure the server stays up

2008-08-04T13:21:00.001-07:00

http://www.google.com/search?q=site+uptime+tool
http://www.google.com/search?q=site+monitor+tool

I've been entertaining the notion of emailing myself when my site goes down or comes back up.

I'd also like it to come back up more quickly than 5 minutes after power comes on.

My main concern is creating a consistent experience so that I can count on the internet staying up at my house (server resets connection if not available) and my site remains usable from outlying locations. Basically this will involve something on my computer looking to see if it can detect google.com. If google is not there then it when wait a little and restart or refresh the connection. I can't make the router restart itself, but I do have it on a timer to go off at least once a day. I'd also like to know if, when, and how often my site is going down so I can act accordingly. I'd also like a UPS. When power goes out my computer will shut itself down or go into hibernate. When power is back it will come back up.

I think these things will save me some trouble, but I don't think I'll be able to afford the UPS.

Some ideas I came up with for domain names

2008-08-04T12:52:00.001-07:00

I don't suppose I'll be purchasing any of these because cash is tight, but I'd like to have a domain name so I could use sub-domains. Right now I use a free service and it's hard to do sub-domains, I think. I'm at http://hcross.homeip.net .

Show Large Images with Deep Zoom Composer - Video Tour

2008-08-04T00:13:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by Jay via Google Reader:

Show Large Images with Deep Zoom Composer - Video Tour

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 8/3/08

Deep Zoom Composer is a free software from Microsoft that lets you place high resolution photographs and other large images in a web page without resizing them.

Your viewers can then navigate through the images using standard zoom and pan controls similar to what we have in Google Maps. The only thing they would need is Silverlight*.

It take three steps to create a composition (or collage) in Deep Zoom Composer.

Step 1: Import your pictures into Deep Zoom Composer.

Step 2: If you have just one picture to showcase, you are ready to go. Else your may arrange and resize the pictures in any manner you like. There're are helpful on-screen guides to help you with the alignments and resizing.

Step 3: The last step is to export your composition. You can either export them onto your local drive or let Deep Zoom Composer upload it to Microsoft's PhotoZoom website from where anyone can view your pictures.

You may also watch this screencast video on how to quickly create a composition with Deep Zoom Composer.

With Deep Zoom Composer, you can not only put high-res images on the web but the software can also be used for stitching panoramas on the fly. Just select the images that are part of the panorama, right click and select "Create Panoramic Photo."

Deep Zoom Composer | Get Silverlight | Photo Zoom | Team Blog

If you have Silverlight on your machine, check this photo gallery of Vista wallpapers made with Deep Zoom Composer. Click anywhere inside the image and use your mouse to pan or zoom.

*If you are looking for some non-Silverlight options for embedding large photos, check out Google Maps Viewer and Zoomify.

Show Large Images with Deep Zoom Composer - Video Tour - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

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The early days of my Linux exploration

2008-08-01T21:41:00.001-07:00

I decided to step back in version of Ubuntu and change to Xbuntu. The alternative is/was to use a different distro; I may do this some day, but time is limited. I'd really like to find a distro that runs very light, but comes with everything. I want flash, firefox, java, a great media player, etc. installed by default. My approach would be to turn everything off when not needed.

My decision to step back is related to a hope that my nvidia drivers will install in a previous version or that Envy will work.

I chose to go to Xbuntu because it uses a different windows manager that may be quicker on this machine. I've read that 7.04 is great because it doesn't have Gnome dependencies.

I'll probably find a quicker CD-ROM to install with. This one is 24X.

My hopes are to simply experiment with Compiz, but then change this into a LAMP server; possibly with all the graphics off until needed/wanted.

info on installing compiz with 7.04 - Fiesty Fawn:

http://forlong.blogage.de/article/2007/8/29/How-to-install-Compiz-Fusion-on-Ubuntu-Feisty---tutorial-for-advanced-andor-KDE-as-well-as-Xfce-users

info on installing compiz with 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon:

http://xubuntublog.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/xubuntu-compiz-pretty-pretty-xubuntu/

this script checks your system to see if everything is kosher for compiz install:

http://forlong.blogage.de/article/pages/Compiz-Check

SYSTEM STATS:

Processor        : Pentium II (Deschutes) - 476Mhz(?)
Memory        : 515MB (301MB used)
Operating System        : Ubuntu 8.04.1
Resolution        : 1024x768 pixels
Audio Adapter        : EMU10K1 - SBLive! Value [CT4780]
ATA Maxtor 32049H2
MITSUMI CD-ROM FX240S !B

B come Boh

2008-07-31T21:33:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by Jay via Google Reader:

B come Boh

via EbOY FFFFOUND! by cow6oy on 7/31/08

via http://adamo.tumblr.com/post/30002719

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suicidal2kg.jpg 400×391 pixels

2008-07-31T21:32:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by Jay via Google Reader:

suicidal2kg.jpg 400×391 pixels

via EbOY FFFFOUND! by cow6oy on 7/31/08

via http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://data1.blog.de/blog/k/kairokairo/img/suicidal2kg.jpg&imgrefurl=http://soundopinions.org/forum/index.php%3Fact%3Dfindpost%26pid%3D90343&h=391&w=400&sz=33&tbnid=zpDSXc5qpbd2EM:&tbnh=121&tbnw=124&hl=en&um=1&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsuicidal%2Btendencies%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN&frame=small

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NOTE: Create Digital Music » noatikl: New Generative Music Engine, So You Can Rock Out Like Eno

2008-07-31T13:14:00.003-07:00

Date: Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 12:13 PM

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/12/17/noatikl-new-generative-music-engine-so-you-can-rock-out-like-eno/

NOTE: CLSCC - PTK

2008-07-31T13:14:00.001-07:00

Date: Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 3:59 PM

http://www.clevelandstatecc.edu/students/current/PTK/index.asp

pics containing me from retirement party

2008-07-31T13:13:00.001-07:00

Date: Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 12:01 PM

James Gee retires after 45 years. I was in some of the pictures.

WISH: Prolynkz PGM-06D GO Media 3.5" Internal All-In-One with USB Card Reader at TigerDirect.com

2008-07-31T13:12:00.001-07:00

Date: Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:29 AM

I want this or one like it

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3807055&body=REVIEWS#tabs

NOTE: Fractal Music

2008-07-31T13:11:00.001-07:00

Date: Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 1:12 PM

generative / fractal type music links found while looking for Syntrillium WindChimes program from back in the day

http://www.andyware.com/abox2/

http://www.sounder.com/

http://www.tunesmithy.connectfree.co.uk/

http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/haven/4386/

12 Glowing Men

2008-07-31T13:09:00.001-07:00

Date: Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 4:45 PM

12 Glowing Men

via Waxy.org Links on 7/30/08

also: the 1957 version of 12 Angry Men is on YouTube in its entirety [via]

Don Hodges explains how to control the barrels in Donkey Kong

2008-07-31T13:07:00.001-07:00

Date: Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 4:44 PM

Don Hodges explains how to control the barrels in Donkey Kong

via Waxy.org Links on 7/30/08

I've linked to his kill screen work before; someone get this guy an RSS feed! [via]

Abduzeedo - Inspiration: Adam Spizak

2008-07-31T13:06:00.001-07:00

Date: Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:23 AM

Inspiration: Adam Spizak

via Abduzeedo - graphic design | design inspiration | design tutorials - by paulo on 7/28/08

We begin this week with fresh works from a polish designer named Adam Spizak. He's got great pieces and I would like to share them with you.

Adam makes cool compositions, using pictures, vectors, making awesome, colorful illustrations. We'd love to get this dude interviewed! What do you guys think about it? Anyways, have a wonderful week, you all! Cheers! ;)

You may also visit his portfolio for more great work!

Abduzeedo - Video of the Week #18

2008-07-31T13:05:00.001-07:00

Date: Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:22 AM

Video of the Week #18

via Abduzeedo - graphic design | design inspiration | design tutorials - by paulo on 7/28/08

This week, a friend of mine linked me a video that brought back some bad memories. Every designer knows how difficult is to deal with picky clients, who don't know what they want... instead of keeping all things simple, they want a logo here, a sign there, a title on the top.

This video portraits perfectly the struggle between client and designer, how we get to do most things they want... I said most things, not all things. I'm still willing to pick the jobs I want, not everyone that comes to me. Anyways, enjoy (if you can)! ;D

featherlinux - Google Search

2008-07-31T13:03:00.003-07:00

Date: Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 12:01 PM

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=an8&q=featherlinux&btnG=Search

Ubuntu Lite - Google Search

2008-07-31T13:03:00.001-07:00

Date: 2008/7/27

http://www.google.com/search?q=Ubuntu Lite&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Xubuntu Wiki - Ubuntu Wiki

2008-07-31T13:02:00.001-07:00

Date: Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 11:59 AM

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu

Ubuntu LAMP Server - Setup Guide with Desktop GUI : Zaphu

2008-07-31T13:01:00.003-07:00

Date: Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 11:57 AM

http://www.zaphu.com/2007/08/07/ubuntu-lamp-server-setup-guide-with-desktop-gui/

info on streaming MP3 in HFS

2008-07-31T13:01:00.001-07:00

Date: Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:40 PM

http://www.rejetto.com/forum/index.php?topic=4636.msg1021238;topicseen#msg1021238

So I've made this change on template and changed in any section where appears this script:

Code:

href=\"mms://%host%%encoded-folder%%item-url%\"

with

Code:

href=\"http://%host%%encoded-folder%%item-url%\"

then HFS's Main Menu -> Other Options - > Open directly in browser -> *.htm;*.html;*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.gif;*.png;*.txt;*.swf;*.svg;*pdf;*mp3

I don't know if this the exact solution

but now

all works fine

VMware is such fun » Solo Technology

2008-07-31T13:00:00.001-07:00

Date: Mon, May 19, 2008 at 3:28 PM

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/ - check here too

http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2005/12/27/vmware-is-such-fun-2/

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Jay Cross <hcross75@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2005/12/27/vmware-is-such-fun-2/

would be nice to get this and see what is up with it...

would also be nice to have a MS-DOS or Windows 9X OS to just plug in and go with... eh, Linux, too..

How to install OpenSSH sshd server and sftp server on a Windows 2000 or Windows XP or Windows Vista

2008-07-31T12:59:00.003-07:00

Date: Thu, May 15, 2008 at 1:37 AM

http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html

okay... got SSH.. now what?

I want to ftp to home and change server files... thought filezilla could connect to this SSH server I have here.... now what?

Geek to Live: How to access a home server behind a router/firewall

2008-07-31T12:59:00.001-07:00

Date: Wed, May 14, 2008 at 8:48 AM

http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--how-to-access-a-home-server-behind-a-routerfirewall-127276.php

this UPnP app seems cool... been looking at getting a secure/working way to connect to my server from anywhere and change files

this includes consideration of:

FTP/sFTP,

SSH (client and server),

port forwarding (namely opening port 21 AND 20 << ftp-data ??? ),

VNC,

and (perhaps) some other things that escape me at the momment

The Chronicle: 2/6/2004: The Origins of Occidentalism

2008-07-31T12:58:00.001-07:00

Date: Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 10:13 PM

In the West itself, we must defend our freedoms against the holy warriors who seek to destroy them. But we must also be careful that in doing so we don't end up undermining them ourselves. In the balance between security and civil liberty, the latter should never be sacrificed to the former. We should also guard against the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. To think that we are at war with Islamism in the name of Christianity, as some zealots believe, is a fatal error, for that is to conform precisely to the Manichaeistic view of those who seek to defeat us. Muslims living in the West should not be allowed to join the holy war against it. But their rights as Europeans or Americans must be respected. The survival of our liberties depends on our willingness to defend them against enemies outside, but also against the temptation of our own leaders to use our fears in order to destroy our freedoms.

http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i22/22b01001.htm

a good read, perhaps

NOTE TO SELF:

Manichaeistic view - the idea that the world is starkly good versus evil.

Why Nerds are Unpopular

2008-07-31T12:57:00.001-07:00

Date: Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 3:18 PM

from: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

February 2003

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on nerds than there are nerds.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.

For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.

As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.

Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.

In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.

The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.

Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are unpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."

Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.

The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.

Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, and Jackie Weicker for reading drafts of this essay, and Maria Daniels for scanning photos.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Google Calendar Sync: Getting Started

2008-07-31T12:55:00.003-07:00

Date: Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 10:13 AM

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955

I wonder if this would be better than GooSync

I'd have to bounce back and forth between SD mode and ActiveSync mode, I think

list of lists best of - Google Search

2008-07-31T12:55:00.001-07:00

Date: Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 4:34 PM

Point in putting this here is that I never get time to go through the list of bests that come out near the end of the year, partly because they are scattered and also because I have little time.

I would love to dedicate more time to this - probably would if there were a place to do this. I imagine someone will figure out how to monopolize on this one day.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=list of lists best of&btnG=Google Search

Vincent King | Bibliography | AuthorWars.com | Wizards.pro

2008-07-31T12:54:00.001-07:00

Date: Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 11:51 PM

NEED:

SF8, Bantam

http://authors.wizards.pro/books/titles/67271/the-wall-to-end-the-world

SF15, Dobson

http://authors.wizards.pro/books/titles/67276/report-from-linelos

SF14, Dobson

http://authors.wizards.pro/books/titles/67280/the-eternity-game

SF19, Corgi (paper), Dobson(hard)

http://authors.wizards.pro/books/titles/66888/the-discontent-contingency

Another Page:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/k/vincent-king/

http://authors.wizards.pro/authors/writers/vincent-king

Combining XML and databases

2008-07-31T12:52:00.001-07:00

Date: Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 3:53 PM

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-22-1044928.html

I'm looking to combine everything I know, think, etc into a central location that can be queried and has the advantage of being all in one place

my instinct is to start with one file, "My File.htm", and get bigger by starting new files when an old one gets big... I know what I want, but I've had little experience with this

I know that xml is set up to encapsulate data in relevant tags with useful metadata... I'm not sure that it's what I need in this case...

so I'm reading about it.

I wouldn't be beyond using a native windows deal after I've learned something (more) about it... I've also fooled with MySQL though I'm not sure it's what I need here as it was for my PHPNuke (and other) site - not sure it would be useful for local storage

Momentshowing: Linking inside of a video post

2008-07-31T12:43:00.001-07:00

Feb 9, 2008

http://www.momentshowing.net/2004/09/linking_inside_.html

I've been thinking about this for a while

-it's a damn shame I can't save a link to a video I'm watching AT the point I'm watching it... we lead busy lives; it's important to set things down and resume them later...

- I'm not even just talking about video or internet content

Banned From YouTube: Parody Guitar Videos | The Underwire from Wired.com

2008-07-31T12:42:00.001-07:00

Feb 9, 2008

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/02/watch-the-parod.html#more

I BAN YOU AS A BROTHER IF YOU DON'T WATCH THESE... OMG... so FUNNY!!!!

dude(s).. the santa and steve vai one's are F-IN HIGH-larious!!!!

strike one for the teams

watch ems!!! HAHA HAHAA

I AM

Windows PowerShell Week

2008-07-31T12:41:00.000-07:00

Feb 7, 2008

Welcome to the home page for Windows PowerShell Week, a series of five Webcasts that were held November 6 - 10, 2006 on TechNet. These Webcasts will provide you with a thorough introduction to Windows PowerShell. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/webcasts/ps.mspx

Locus Online: Locus Magazine Back Issues

2008-07-31T12:40:00.001-07:00

originally Feb 6 2008

https://secure.locusmag.com/About/BackIssues.html

#474 has obituary of Vinson, Rex Thomas aka King, Vincent

per

http://www.locusmag.com/index/yr2000/t76.htm

MakeTorrent Homepage

2008-07-31T12:39:00.001-07:00

originally: Feb 1, 2008

http://krypt.dyndns.org:81/torrent/maketorrent/

this first one is a tool to be used by users that want to upload a torrent

http://xbtt.sourceforge.net/tracker/

this is a tracker, a "pure" tracker- to be exact - that means it only handles stats and keeps up with clients that are trying to join the swarm(?) ... you have to query the tracker with some PHP to get stats into a web page...

man, this seems like alot - I just would like to make the torrent protocol as seamless as possible - maybe I could do this as a school project

ThinkGeek :: USB Microscope - QX5

2008-07-31T12:38:00.001-07:00

originally: Jan 15 2008

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/77aa/

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=USB+microscope&btnG=Google+Search

I was thinking it would be nice to view some paramencium or some shit

maybe just save some money and look at other people's pics

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=microscope&w=all&s=int

Hcross Blog

080818_0021.31 - after I read my feeds today ; must sleep now.

080817_2254.06 - things on my mind

I love TOMATO!!!

Coign of Vantage

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080814_1213

EyeDefender Helps You Avoid Computer Use Injuries

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Interact with Websites via Easy to Remember Email Addresses

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Edison Helps You Green Your PC

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Send an Anonymous Email Message With Note2Email

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The Joy of Interlacing: Video Answers Everything You Were Afraid to Ask Abou...

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080811_2241.22

Ableton Live Rack Tutorials: Slicing and Drum Racks, Vocal Slicing with Simp...

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Audiovisual Inspiration: Suryummy Imagines Interstellar Cooking Show

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SAUL WILLIAMS BREAKS DOWN CONCRETE COLONY VIDEO

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GNU, Linux... More Info

TrackMe: A Quick Look

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Reference

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The Most Popular Social Bookmarking Services

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080811_0658

VoomPC-2 Car PC Barebone

linux - tracking cpu temp (and other temps)

Linux / ClarkConnect info

Real Live Working Girls | GorillaSushi

delicious and blogger integration

firefox bookmarking

080809_1616

080809_1616.56

Asus Eee Box B202: Our First Look, Plus Official Specs (Only $300)

Games and thinking about games

File Sytems - WinFS, etc

VBA - some info about VBA

program based on / connected to the weather, etc

ubuntu graphics - visual effects

Win 2k3 and Negro Elmer Fudd

Fuelly | Share and Compare Your MPG

The Mostly Complete History of VJing: Jean Poole Back Catalogue on skynoise

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Ableton Live Shortcuts in Infrasonik Video, Live Tutorial Player

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More Live Tutorials

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Radiohead House of Cards Data: Time Lapse Rendering in Real Legos

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Adaptive Path posts second Aurora video

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Website Not Loading in Firefox? Try Again, Automatically

Architecture: Prefab Housing

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Pioneering Composer Paul Lansky Quits Electronic Music

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Behind the Scenes: Cute Generative Animated Characters with Squishy, Open So...

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