Posted in March 2009 …

Mar 31 2009
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Irregular

50 Things I Want to Learn

My friend Pippa is strong and driven. Well, that’s how she comes across; she freely admits to having all the same flaws as us ordinary mortals in person, but actually getting to hear her say that in person can be tricky. Why? Because she’s one of those people with enormous amounts of energy who actually try and do stuff with their lives.

Right now, Pippa is living in Berlin and working a project she calls the DIY Masters. As part of that project, she produced a list of 100 things she wanted to learn, and invited others to do the same. I managed to get to 50 before I started feeling really low on ideas. Here they are:

One Hundred Fifty Things I Want to Learn

  1. I want to play a song and sing it in front of people
  2. I want to learn to be happier
  3. I’d like to learn how to cook
  4. Concentration
  5. Something that I can earn money from
  6. A style of writing that anyone would want to read
  7. How to smell good
  8. How to make cake
  9. How to bake
  10. How to use an oven
  11. Normalisation
  12. Programming in Processing
  13. Enough electronics to get me through
  14. To speak another language
  15. Speaking another language that most people can’t, but is still useful
  16. To be able to identify quotes when I hear them
  17. How to relate to poetry
  18. Yoga
  19. Better awareness of my body
  20. How to juggle four balls
  21. Some bar flair; maybe not enough to get a bar job, but enough to show off
  22. How to give great presentations to groups of people
  23. How to teach
  24. I’d love to learn what I’m obsessed with, because it seems like everything
  25. Dancing in public
  26. How to make a neat wordpress theme that works for me
  27. The secret of having less stuff
  28. How to ignore it when people really hate you
  29. Read less crap
  30. An awareness of literary genre’s outside of SF
  31. The best things to do with my damaged knee
  32. How to have a stable life
  33. Writing long form
  34. Drive a car
  35. Be tidier
  36. Personal presentation
  37. How to be less attached to physical gadgets
  38. Understand what draws me to a person romantically
  39. How to learn in a structured manner that suits me
  40. Be less self-critical
  41. Think of projects that can be completed
  42. Do more things that I think of
  43. Work harder
  44. Learn to sail a boat
  45. Swearing with maximum effect
  46. Remembering to say sounds like ‘th’ instead of ‘f’ and the ‘r’ in brought.
  47. To take ‘away time’ from computers
  48. Better mark-making skills
  49. Refresh my drawing skills
  50. Learn how to keep plants alive
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Mar 26 2009
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Review

The Engines of Our Ingenuity (book review)

I’m doing a lot of reading for the course at the moment. I’ve been reading a lot of different books that tie into my main project, and these academic books aren’t always a gripping read. Sometimes I find that they aren’t even that relevant to my subject, they just have all the correct buzzwords on the cover. In order to stop this from happening, I’ve taken to sitting in the library with a large pile of books, sampling and dipping into them, so as to decide which ones should be carried back to my house.

One of the books I’ve taken back from the library recently is a series of essays by an engineer, John Lienhard, originally broadcast as part of a radio show on American Public Radio (a bit like the BBC, but more American). This is a really well written book, which might be because it the material is supposed to be followed verbally, but Lienhard’s argument’s are easy to follow and well constructed.

The subject matter of the book is the effect that engineering has had on contemporary culture, and the reverse. From this starting point Lienhard is free to explain various technological tidbits that he must have picked up during his career as an engineer, always bringing back his audience to the point that technological marvels do not exist seperately of the culture they originate from.

While I found this book interesting, and worth spending time reading, it wasn’t actually that relevant to the subjects I need to be researching. His chapter on technology and literature is well-researched and immensly readable, but of course most people working in left-wing computer fields are familiar with the links between the Byron family and early computer programming. Lienhard’s point that it’s not possible to remove technological innovations from the culture they come from seems almost redundant here, but I’m willing to allow that – in this case – it might be due to the fact that I already have specialist knowledge.

This did not make his writing any less engaging though.

If you do have a chance to pick up this book, you might find it engaging enough to spend a few hours with. Lienhard’s storytelling and grasp of the field is comprehensive without being dry, and his essays are well balanced pieces of writing.

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Mar 24 2009
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Regular

Data Mining Yourself as Artistic Practice

After my presentation for DMS8002 (the Basic Techniques module that I’m doing on my course) it was suggested to me that using my coursework as a platform to generate visualisations actually means that – to some extent – the artwork I’m creating is a reflection upon the work I’m doing for my major module.

This reminded me of the Mail Trends project, which takes the contents of an IMAP-enabled email address and combs it for information. With that information, it then produces a bunch of graphs relating to the usage of the email address. Above, you can see that I’m unlikely to send you an email at 6am in the morning. Below, you can see that I’m in touch with Brian Degger a lot. But, strangely, not as much as I’m in touch with myself… Why my own name comes up more than anybody elses, I’m not sure; this might be a side effect of having between two or three other email accounts plumbed into my Gmail account.

This project is interesting to me as it gives you the chance to look at a body of work you produce, but it’s a body of work that you produce by accident. Artistically, the output isn’t fantastic; it has colour and shape, but those are really secondary concerns as to displaying the data graphically. The Feltron Report stands at the other end of this sort of practice; it’s the work of an artist who obsessively records whatever he does and produces an annual report on his activity.

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Mar 18 2009
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Regular

8002

Here’s my thing. basic-techniques-500_1

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3783441&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

Mar 18 2009
2 Comments
Newcastle

Recent Developments in Fun

This weekend, over at Newcastle’s Maker Faire, I heard that the guys from the Arduino Project were planning something new. Well, according to a post over at Lady Ada‘s site, this is it:

arduino-mega

Wow. That’s one big card. I don’t have a use for something like this, but the picture turned up on a robotics forum, so it might have some use in that field. However, it might also find it’s way into the burgeoning CNC field.

cupcake-cnc_1

The picture above shows the first reasonable homebrew CNC milling device, capable of producing products from ABS plastic. The website is not too clear as yet as to what it can do; however, they do mention a sugar nosel for extruding shapes in sugar.

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Mar 09 2009
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Processing

Let a Thousand James Hugonin Paintings Bloom

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3539565&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

James Hugonin is an artist who lives in Northumbria, and makes paintings that reflect his surroundings by taking the predominant colour for each day and painting a square in that colour. This is very procedural art, and therefore it lends itself very well to make a computer program that does the same thing.

This would probably annoy the bejesus out of Hugonin. Sadly, this is not my concern, as this is another exercise set my Jamie Allan, my tutor. Obviously, if you’ve seen my last piece of work for him, you might be getting concerned that Jamie is actually running some form of art world Project Mayhem, and that all graduates of the DM course will be changing their name to Bob soon. This is probably not the case.

I am Pete’s complete lack of surprise.

If you’re going to procedurally fake something, why just fake one? Therefore I set the program to stop cranking out fakes at a thousand. The colour’s a bit off, as if Hugonin had suddenly found his Northumbrian idle surrounded by flesh tones, but it holds together. The video ends up being 8.20 long, with two “paintings” every second.

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Mar 08 2009
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Processing

Processing Exercise – Click, Mortal!

This is a small amusement (it’s not a game, it’s too stupid) where you click the mouse to make something happen. This stems from Jamie asking us how we could make the exercise of drawing a five-pointed pentagram ‘more evil’. Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that (in the West) the pentagram was originally a Christian symbol that represented a man standing looking at the stars, but it’s connection with Venus – the Morningstar – in Eastern philosophies later caused the symbol to change meanings.

Anyway, I’ve ‘eviled’ things up a bit. Download the correct version for your operating system (Windows users, you’ll need to have Java installed) after the jump.

Continue reading →

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Mar 08 2009
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Regular

Super Supervisory Meeting

Recently, I had a meeting with both my supervisors and the two lecturers who run my course. This slightly-scary meeting was labelled in my diary as “super supervisory meeting”. These are my notes from that meeting.

(click for more notes)

Continue reading →

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Mar 05 2009
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Regular

Time Passes without Updates…

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