It’s becoming a Friday tradition. Judy He, the front end engineer at my office appears to have started a weekly tradition of photoshopping Knewton employees into movie posters. This week I got put in in place of Anthony Hopkins in the poster for Legends of the Fall (which I might add was a truly wretched film. In Brad Pitt’s place is Sven Northcott and for Adian Quinn it’s Dave Cascino.
Here’s the original for comparison.
My friend John as reading an article on Ars Technica about Darwin’s birthday that had a pic that was just screaming to be made into a magnet. So I present to you my second work of magnetic commentary:
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| Darwin’s 200th |
They just arrived fresh from the presses, and they look fantastic!. If you happen to want your own tribute to darwin, you can pick it up at cafe press.
My parents recently visited my aunt and uncle in china, and while there they picked up some rather nice high end watches direct from the factories. Most of the time, my father prefers his digital, and only wants to wear the watch he picked up in china when he’s in more formal dress. Thing is, the watch he bought is autowinding, so it’s always either dead, or at the very least really wrong every time he puts it on. So he asked me to come up with a crazy contraption to wind his watch. This is what I came up with:
You can see some more pics in my flickr photostream. The part I’m most proud of is turning the pipe into a bushing to create a pretty good bearing at the top.
Here’s some video of it in action: (and a second video here)
Materials:
NYC Resistor in the New York Times
While I was out for the week in Rome over the new years, a New York Times article about the hackerspace I’m a member of was published. In the photo I’m the one on the right with the Tinct.
As a note, it was a Club Mate not a beer 😉
Last friday I was approached by Wazi to write an article about the release of Python 3. Go take a gander: Python takes a great step forward: Python 3
Some time ago I built an ambient orb to watch over the build process for the code at my office. Recently I used upgrading it to RGB leds as an excuse to get my first board cut by Advanced Circuits in Colorado (Why buy from China when you can buy from the U.S. at a lower cost?), and it’s turned out pretty well.
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| My first board, ain’t it pretty? |
The new orb is substantially brighter, with colors that are visible (and even border on vivid) even in direct sunlight. I’m really quite happy with the results.
Here’s the board diagram and schematic:
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You can grab the source and eagle files (All under the GPLv2 & CC Attribution/Share Alike licenses respectively). It’s got 3 sample apps now. The build warden for cruise control, a biff for email, and for tonight it’s got a electoral college meter that goes blue or red based on live results.
(Warning, everything is only tested under linux. The applications are written in python and ruby, and should work under windows and mac os, but I haven’t tested them)
A few months ago I built my own take on Ryan Straughan’s Third Hand ++. Well, about a month ago I was hanging at NYC Resistor, and Skiff did a video about my set up that just got posted to NYC Resistor’s blog.
Well, after this hit make I realized I needed to get my photos up post-haste. Instructions for each piece of this will be added as the comments on this project’s flickr photostream.
This is the first of a set of posts detailing projects that never made it to the blog. This last winter, I was working on a relationship with an ex of mine, and I decided to learn a new trade skill to make her something impressive. So I etched some copper plates using the electrolytic etching method outlined at steampunkworkshop.com and attached them to moleskin notebooks. It’s really quite an interesting process, and the results are spectacular. This is the first of the two plates:
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| Copper Plate Electrolytic Etching of Justice and Athena |
And this is the second:
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| Copper Plate Electrolytic Etching of Justice |
The rest of the photos are in my Flickr photostream.
My work is one of the most political environments I’ve ever set foot in. Smoke and mirrors, backstabbery, setting up other managers to take your fall and empire building are all daily events in the building. Well, today I had a set of magnets made as a tribute to middle management everywhere. I present to you my first work of magnetic commentary:
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| What Would Machiavelli Do? |
For those of you who don’t know, this is the esteemed Niccolò Machiavelli. A 16th century diplomat, political philosopher, musician, poet, playwright, author of The Prince, and all around political badass. Far and away, his most famous quote from The Prince is “It is best to be both feared and loved; however, if one cannot be both it is better to be feared than loved.”
Personally, I plan on giving these things out like candy. If your work happens to also be a political nightmare, you can get your own in the evilsoft store at cafe press.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on various electronics projects, but for some reason I haven’t been posting the results. Well, I’ve decided to end that with my latest project. A bit over a month ago, I was reading Jonathan Guberman’s call for other people to join his project to make an RGB 40h monome clone. It looked like a lot of fun, so I decided to get in on his board order and join the project.
So after a few weekends of soldering, and lots of waiting for numerous part orders from digikey and sparkfun, I have gotten my Tinct (since dubbed Tinct 1) up and running about 7 days after Tinct 0 first bathed Jonathan in it’s cool LED glow. So, here it is, along with some other photos in my new flickr photo stream
Now I need to get crackin on making some useful command line utils for Tinct, as I’m on a linux box, and the vast majority of the software for monome appears to be for the proprietary Max/MSP environment, which does not run on linux. Besides, I think that this has a lot of potential as a visual feedback device for a unix box.
