Wired.com
85737 items (80 unread) in 29 feeds
Technology
(30 unread)
Director
(1 unread)
Fun
(9 unread)
Music Technology
(6 unread)
Music
(6 unread)
DIY Electronics
(28 unread)
A lot of Director developers do work for museums ranging from creating kiosks to designing programs that would allow you to control robots that dig around in a big pile of sand (a virtual Mars).
When I lived in Michigan I would occasionally help out at COSI Science Museum in Toledo. It was always great to see kids learning a wealth of science in a true hands-on fashion. Unfortunately, COSI had to close its doors to the public at the end of 2007.
They are currently trying to get a levy passed in Toledo (Lucas County) this November so that the museum can be reopened. A number of people have been working nonstop for the past year in this effort. If you live in the area I hope you will help out and Keep COSI going with your vote.
[Ralph] Stanley is the survivor of the Stanley Brothers, one of the few remaining figures of the first generation of bluegrass musicians. He’s from the part of the mountains the Carter Family came from, and has had a recent career revival for his part in the Oh Brother Where Art Thou music.Ralph Stanley cuts the best radio ad of the cycle (folo.us via Ned Sublette, via TPM)
They've embedded a classic Dr. Stanley television performance clip at folo.us, below is another -- they're playing the Clinch Mountain Backstep, on an old television show with Pete Seeger. This is my favorite Stanley Brothers song ever, "Little Maggie," but I can't embed it. I know all the lyrics, and sometimes sing it to myself (and anyone in earshot unable to run screaming) on long car trips along old American roads. Whenever I hear this old-time music, I feel really proud to come from Virginia.
Now, a Swedish adman and former CEO Dag Soderberg is leading a team called Illuminated World that's reinterpreting the Bible as a magazine - complete with sidebars, coverlines, and subheads. He's using the straight text, for the most part, but embellishing it with Bennetton-style photos and pull quotes.
On the one hand, I feel like objecting to the project outright. Something about the combination of an advertising perspective with the Bible feels like a contradiction. This project is provocative, but it's also oh-so slick, and comes off a bit like what happens when an adman hires a team of people to manifest his vision for selling the Bible to a new generation. The Illumination is there to make the Bible easier and trendier, not truer. On the other hand, I tend to feel about St. Paul's modifications on Judaism much the same way.
As someone who reworked Bible stories to promote my own cultural agendas, I'm in no position to criticize someone else for doing the same - even if the agendas are a bit different than my own. Plus, it's only the New Testament Soderberg has reworked (in English) so far. And the message there is a bit different than the one in the Hebrew Bible - which he's releasing shortly.
This is an interesting object to peruse, and it does make you consider both the Bible - and efforts to illuminate it - in a new light.
General Semantics spawned everything from cognitive psychology to NLP, and informed everyone from William Burroughs to Richard Bandler.
This year, I was invited to present the 56th Annual Alfred Korzybski Lecture. Besides being a tremendous honor, it's also an opportunity for me to take everything I've been talking about and rethink it in the context of general semantics - which might really mean beyond any context at all.
In any case, the talk itself is free, it's an important annual event even if I'm not as important as the usual annual speaker, and you're all invited. It's followed by a one-day symposium that I plan on attending as well. Here's the way they described my talk after I described it to them - as well as the details.
We are in the midst of a new renaissance fostered largely by a revolution in the way that we relate to our symbols and symbol systems. The new media of computers and computer networks invites an ethos of interactivity that empowers users and invites creativity, an ethos that might best be characterized as playfulness.Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.With our newfound access to participation and collective authorship, we now have the potential to gain control over our symbolic communication and semantic environment, and thereby promote true agency and more responsive social and public institutions. To do so requires that we become conscious of the biases of the languages and technologies through which we choose to perceive and create, and that we ask ourselves the question: Are we willing to play the future?
$90 per person for dinner and lecture
Lecture alone, free.
Friday, November 14, 2008, 6PM at the Princeton Club
15 West 43rd Street, NYC
(A Symposium titled Creating the Future: Conscious Time-Binding for a Better Tomorrow will be held on Nov. 15 and Nov. 16 at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus. Admission is free.)
1. Robots and Monsters: A Charitable Menagerie, is back. They launched in 2007 to fundraise for SF AIDS Foundation, and now they're relaunching to support the EFF. For fifty dollars, Joe Alterio or another fabulous artist will pen a custom robot or monster for you - defined by three words you supply - and send it to your door. You get a cool picture and the EFF gets fifty bucks to help keep the net a happy and good place.
2. Scott Draves Software Artworks, 1992-2008. This short film chronicles the work of software artist Scott Draves. And it's pretty cool. Dreams in High Fidelity.
3. Consumatron. Do you know this guy? He writes down and reviews everything he buys. It's kind of obsessive, but tells a story.
4. Trajal Harrell Dance Style is a totally different approach to dance - an effort to rewrite the language of dance by using real world movement (from fashion show walks to bar room swagger) instead of whatever that stuff is we usually think of as "dance." His performances are infrequent, but there's one coming up this month at DanceTheater Workshop and if you're near NYC I'd suggest you be there.
5. The Atheon: A Temple of Science for Rational Belief. If I were going to join a church, this would probably be it. It's like a church for brights, but it's not as serious or anti-God as Richard Dawkins. Just an effort to make faith rational - but still fun and inspiring.
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.
Their conferences fall somewhere between a traditional academic conference and a DisinfoCon. And, best of all, they're open to papers and presentations from anyone. My favorites of the past few years were one by Lian Amaris on the World of Warcraft funeral raid, and Corey Anton on the Tao and media.
I just received the call for submissions for the next conference, and I encourage anyone with interesting ideas about any aspect of media to make a submission. This isn't one of those stodgy academic groups, so you don't have to present in any officially recognized format. Just tell them what you want to talk about, or do. I can promise you'll have an audience of smart, weird, and friendly people giving feedback you can use. In the flesh.
Call for papers Media Ecology Association 2009 Annual Convention June 18-21, 2009 Saint Louis University St. Louis, Missouri"Ecology" a word derived from the Greek words meaning "household knowledge." For the 2009 MEA convention, we seek papers on any aspect of media ecology. Special interest in the places and spaces of media interactions: Silicon Valley or St. Louis; screen, studio, library, or street. Does place matter? Local systems, larger systems, and changing relationships in the ecology of media. The role(s) of media in different ecological systems. The changing geography of media: Why do some forms emerge and others recede? The ethics of (not) setting boundaries. Living in information systems: Are we the center, the web, the flaneur? What is the I in the culture of iPods, iPhones, and iGames? Because the 2009 MEA Convention will meet at Saint Louis University, where Walter J. Ong was a faculty member, papers on any aspect of his work are especially welcome. Papers and session proposals should be sent by January 15 to Prof. Sara van den Berg, Dept. of English, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO 63108-3414. Electronic submissions (preferred) to vandens@slu.edu. All submissions will be acknowledged.
This meeting will be sponsored by the Walter J. Ong Center for Language and Culture, the Department of English, and the Department of Communication at Saint Louis University. This conference will feature special exhibits and tours of the Walter J. Ong Archives and a reception at the Pius XII Library. Housing (single rooms/private bath) will be available at Reinert Hall ($44/night) or the Water Tower Inn ($85/night).
My two-weeks is almost up (I heard that), but not before I post my first actual wonderful thing to this blog of wonderful things. Graphic designer Jesse Milden's Subhead Premium Grip Anti-Slip Stickers!
These are the flat black things you'd usually see applied to an outdoor deck or staircase - someplace that might get wet and become dangerous. Even the edge of a subway platform. Seeing an opportunity for graphical treatment where none was envisioned before, Milden designed some cool and retro patterns, making these stickers suitable as a functional decor statement - or even a customized skateboard grip.
I'm using them in strategic locations for toddler traction.
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.
Veitch split from DC for many years, and became a sensation on his own, publishing extremely bizarre yet resonant psychedelic fables. Psychedelic being the operative word.
Now they're back - bigger and brighter than ever before. And in my experience, it's the first time a second dose has packed more wallop than the first. His seminal 1980's graphic novel Brat Pack which will finally be republished in a deluxe edition in spring 2009, read like Teen Titans on crank, and served as a template for those super-bad-ass do-gooders in The Boys, Authority, and Kick Ass. He's also reprinting very high quality editions of his classics The Maximortal (free preview) and my personal favorite, Heartburst (which includes a reprint of the almost forgotten “Mirror Of Love” with Alan Moore and S.R. Bissette).
Veitch also drew a story for Harvey Pekar in Smith's fabulous ongoing Next Door Neighbor series (disclosure, my wife has one coming up, as well), and is starting his second year of a disturbingly entertaining war comedy-horror series for Vertigo called Army @ Love.
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

We've written about Jeremy Mayer's typewriter robots before here on Make, but here are a couple new ones he has built that make interesting use of the keys as teeth and the innards as legs on this spider-like bot. He's also bent the body to add more expressive features to the "face" of this bot. Check out the link to his portfolio site for a tour of the rest of the bots.
Jeremy Mayer's Portfolio via Technabob
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

You might remember Mau and his Flush-O-Matic that I wrote about a while back. He sent me his latest work called the ReleShield. It's a relay shield for the Arduino that allows you to control high voltage appliances. No word on kits yet.
This is a prototype for use Arduino protoshield and a few other components, the purpose is simple but very useful. Ever wanted to control the lights from your home computer? Or perhaps some other appliance in the house.
More about the ReleShield
More:
The Flush-O-Matic
In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino
This is a great instructable on making a breakable tombstone. The end result is a tombstone that explodes when you punch it. This is a great prop for your next zombie movie.
So Halloween is coming up and you need to put your neighbor to shame. Well I am going to show you how to make a tombstone that not only is a good yard decoration but can be made into a breakaway tombstone for your movies.
More about making a Breakable Tombstone
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Instructables | Digg this!
Robert sent in this review of the Rovio robot by WowWee. The new Rovio can be controlled via WiFi, and has a built in Web Cam. Somebody please hack this thing ASAP!
Check out the detailed Review of Rovio
More:

WowWee Alive Cub dissection
Matt hacked around with the Esquire cover e-ink screen (see our past posts) and did a cool Knight Rider type pulse... Source included. He writes-
Last month, Esquire magazine published a cover that contained an E-ink screen. I was really looking forward to it, actually... so much so that I marked it in my calendar to make sure I picked one up around the corner. There was quite a bit of hype about it, and a lot of people wrote about it on their blogs and websites, and Esquire even encouraged hackers (does that include me?) to play around with the screen. The local store had a couple of copies left over this past week, so I grabbed one, and decided to see what I could do in a couple hours of playing around.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: Ultimate LED Fan Sign. You can view the video here, grab the PDF here and subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

From now until the awesomeness that is Maker Faire Austin, I'll be highlighting projects that you can find at Travis County Fairgrounds on 10/18-19. Tickets here; see you there!
You know you've got a geektastic event when even the fashion accessories start sporting LEDs. From Jared's project page at Inventgeek:
With the maker faire this month I decided to make some bling to bring. Having made 80 of these necklaces in august that I brought with me to burning man this year, the process is now super refined and easy. The cost to make one of these is very cheap, bordering on about 1.50 each. But the coolness factor is off the charts. At burning man I had a box of several colors of LED's as well as some color fading ones. The color fading ones were by far the most popular. Anyway here is the how to...
You can see Jared, and hundreds of other Makers, 10/18.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this!

Brush knuckles designed by Ken Goldman - for the toughest cleanings via BoJ.

Wooden knuckles.

Cupcake Knuckles.


Brass knuckle cup & purse.

Nerdbots, ound object robot sculptures for your "inner nerd" via NOTCOT.
Oddly obsessed with all things robot, married couple Nicholas and Angela from Kansas City, Missouri, decided on a whim one day to do nothing other than to build one themselves.After piecing together parts found at their favorite antique and thrift stores, they created their first robot friend. Since that first day, Nicholas and Angela have added many fabulously geeky robots to their beloved robotic collection.


Blob Mentality A home-improvement project by Greg Lynn evolves into the Blobwall, a modular wall system produced by Panelite... via Beyond the Beyond.
Its name may reek of science fiction, but Greg Lynn's Blobwall was conceived under pretty prosaic circumstances. Inspired by kids' outdoor toys and 1970s Italian interiors, Lynn had the idea to put a colorful plastic wall inside the home he is building for his family in Venice Beach, California. He designed a hollow plastic form--a blob, as it were--that could function as a whimsical alternative to bricks, with heat-welding replacing mortar. The commercial applications quickly became apparent. "A very big percentage of small-scale construction is plastic," he says. "But it's some horrible beige plastic made to look like wood. I thought, Well, why not tackle this big chunk of the environment that, really, nobody designs?"They look like airbags for homes! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts |