July 26, 2004
iTunes for the cellular
apple is putting iTunes on some motorola phones... pretty cool, wish I had a nice motorola phone now.
July 20, 2004
fijuu
fijuu is a 3D, audiovisual performance engine imagined by the authors of q3apd .The player manipulates 3D instruments with PlayStation2-style gamepads to make improvised music. The suite of instruments in fijuu will include a non-linear beat pattern sequencer, granular synthesis tools and a graphical filterbank. fijuu is built ontop of the open source game engine 'Nebula' and runs on Linux.
fijuu will be released as a live CD Linux project, so players can simply boot up their PC with a PS2-style gamepad plugged in, and play without installing anything (regardless of operating system), turning their computer into a console for game based audio performances.
link via we-make-money-not-art
ball rolling game soon to be in english
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3133550
finally beat the japanese version of this game, and now namco is releasing it for ps2 in the US. I will have to buy it simply to figure out what the hell the king is saying all the time.
July 18, 2004
soundabout
Just read a really interesting article about sony's first generation of the walkman, then called the soundabout.
It didn't record or come with a speaker. But it was sociable: Two could listen at once through a pair of headphone jacks, and an orange button called the Hotline let you talk over the music.
It's pretty strange in retrospect to think about the concern sony execs had about the social impact of people walking around with headphones. (Makes you wonder what they would have said if someone told them that everyone and their mother would be walking around Tokyo with a phone pressed against their ear...)
"The Walkman was critical in altering the rules of being with other people," Schiffer says. "People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability."
At least initially, sony was hip to this criticism, and equipped the soundabout with a hotline function, which reminds me a lot of the current trend in iPod land of sharing your music over rendevous -- letting people physically close to you listen in, share your experience. Certainly, there is something to be said about the power of synchronicity in these shared, social situations.
Anyway, it's kind of a shame Sony took the hotline function away after just a couple of years.
link to the bellville.com article.
July 12, 2004
elephant paths
Elephant Paths is a project that explores a geographical and social space by mapping paths. It reveals a point of view connected to a space, telling a short story of a moment via video triptychs and texts. It links these places together with mapping traces and social relations. Altogether it creates a spatial map that can be experienced via GPS –devices (Global Positioning System) and the Internet. Mapped paths are marked also with a note.
July 09, 2004
GPS for Mars
Future explorers of Mars will always need a way to know where they are, regardless of whether they're rover automatons or flesh and blood humans.
To do that, NASA researchers and scientists alike have been studying the requirements for a potential global positioning satellite (GPS) system around Mars that could also function as a communications network. Their vision is a small flotilla of Mars spacecraft conducting their own science while watching over future robotic or human expeditions, then relaying data back to Earth.
July 07, 2004
July 06, 2004
porting, interface-ing
porting patholog over to flash...quicker loading, more reliable than the applet it was running in. also trying out a number of different interfaces to see how best to do things. right now am currently busy parsing a lot of the content data from the db into a more flash friendly format, which has been really the only pain in the transfer from java to actionscript. but once that's done, it won't be a huge step to pipe all the annotation stuff over to flash also. it adds some more headaches, but it will be probably good to start thinking about this interface.
July 05, 2004
mozilla rich-text buttons
just added some additional blog functionality for us non-IE users (should be more of us after the homeland security folks publicity brought the hammer down on microsoft). Those using mozilla can now markup your entries via the MT web interface. This works under safari as well, except a little differently (ok, a little worse). just added some additional blog functionality for us non-IE users (should be more of us after the homeland security folks publicity brought the hammer down on microsoft). Those using mozilla can now markup your entries via the MT web interface. This sort of works under safari as well, except a little differently (ok, a little worse). Anyway, this should be working on IE since it uses browser detection, but pls. ie folks email me with problems if you have them. code for this was
here via Scott Fisher