Push the Other Button

Magnetotron Featured on MAKE and Hackaday

2011-12-16T18:18:00.001-05:00

So the folks at MAKE did an awesome profile of me and my Magnetotron, plus I just found out that Hackaday featured it as well. Very excited here in NYC.

BTW, if anyone's interested in the Magnetotron, I'm accepting offers for its sale. Email me - colombo.michael [at] gmail.com

Magnetotron World Debut

2011-12-15T12:52:00.001-05:00

I performed with the Magnetotron, my cassette tape-based instrument, at the ITP NIME show at Cameo Gallery in Brooklyn on 12/11. Accompanying me on bass is Kevin Bleich, and Justin Storer on drums.

It was a great time - special thanks to my fellow musicians and the videographers Alex Kozovski, Roopa Vasudevan, and Rose Schlossberg.

Spines of Theses' Past

2011-11-18T05:52:00.000-05:00

Over the summer I worked at ITP, and one of the jobs I had was to help in scanning every single thesis in ITP's archive from the past thirty years.

Papers had to be taken out of folders, binders, and bindings.

Unfortunately some of the theses were professionally bound, which would have meant scanning each page individually rather than running them through the automatic tray.

I found a solution to this by cutting off the spines of every thesis on the bandsaw. I amassed quite the collection of spines so turned them into an art piece.

My Blue Sculpture

2011-11-08T06:18:00.000-05:00

To those paying attention, I took a mixed media sculpture course in the fine arts department at NYU. It was a lovely time that got me out of my comfort zone. As a musician-turned-builder I never thought of design as a crucial component in my work. Since taking that class I've learned all about presentation and context that now informs my work.

Anyway, here a couple of pics from that course. The assignment was "something blue" so I raided my junk box for all that seemed to fit, then pieced it all together. I hope you enjoy.

Presenting the Magnetotron

2011-10-26T10:26:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, I'm a big fan of old media, especially audio cassette tapes. This will be the realization of an idea I've had for a while, which is to make a musical instrument using tape. A rotating cylinder containing strips of tape with different tones on them will be played by tape heads attached to my fingers. Check out my NIME proposal on Prezi and this nifty hand-drawn pic of the concept.

Eight Games of Tetris at the Same Time

2011-10-23T14:39:00.000-04:00

OctoTetrimino by PushTheOtherButton
A generative piece consisting of eight 2:00 games of Battle Tetris that are perfectly synched. The general strategy of the player dictates the rising and falling action of the piece.

Variable DC Power Supply

2011-10-21T12:56:00.000-04:00

I completed this project for Eric Rosenthal's Basic Analog Circuits class. It was an exercise in point-to-point soldering, but after completion I decided to build an enclosure for it with a voltmeter I bought from Adafruit Industries.

You can also see a complete post and tutorial on my blog post at MAKE: Magazine

Retro-Reflective Flashlight Tag Variant

2011-10-12T12:42:00.000-04:00

This is a variant of flashlight tag that I originally developed with Eszter Ozsvald for the Big Games class at ITP. It stemmed from the frustration of trying to play flashlight tag as a kid. There was no way to reliably verify that someone had been tagged. This changes that.

We used iron-on retroreflective material to create velcro letters that stick to the players' arm bands. Each player picks out letters to spell a word and put it on his/her arm and then run off into the darkness before the game starts. Once the game starts, the object is to shine your flashlight on your opponent's word. If you can spot it and yell out their word, then they're out!

I play-tested the game this past August with around 20 campers at Frost Valley YMCA in the Catskills. Not only did they enjoy playing it, but we even collectively came up with some interesting and successful game variants. I'm planning on presenting the game to the Northeast YMCA Directors' Conference in January (also being held at Frost Valley).

Broke the Water Cooler, Fixed the Water Cooler

2011-10-07T20:37:00.002-04:00

In my zeal to hydrate, I pulled a bit too hard on the school's water cooler spigot, and broke the durn thing off. But within minutes, I had it working again, though with quite the kludged together solution. They should have it fixed by wednesday. Until then, I left instructions on how to use this new contraption.

Modular Scrap Metal Percussion Instrument

2011-09-24T22:15:00.002-04:00

The first assignment for my class "New Interfaces in Musical Expression" was to build an instrument in one week and perform a one-minute performance using it in class.

I based the instrument on a solid steel piece of aircraft surplus I picked up at the Pratt and Whitney Surplus Store. This piece made an appearance in another work of mine, the Fruit Powered Sound Generator. What can I say, its become a favorite.

The piece has two rows of machined screw holes. I taped a contact mic to it and just started screwing in parts from my scrap metal bin. After some experimentation, I found that I was able to get a few tonal sounds, and some interesting percussive sounds from the instrument. I hooked the whole thing through a distortion to give it a bit more industrial grit, then a delay pedal set to a long delay time. It was fun to do, and could be interesting in the future because I could swap out parts depending on the type of sound I want.

Flexible Venn Diagram Crowdsources Comparative Relationships

2011-08-22T00:09:00.000-04:00

This was a quick project, borne out of a piece of scrap MDF left over from someone's laser cutter project. The circles were joined just so to make a venn diagram, and sized perfectly for post-it notes. The idea came as soon as I picked the piece up. As you can see, over the three weeks it remained up on the ITP floor it was used quite a bit, often with quite hilarious results.

Lamp Painted Honda Glacier Blue

2011-07-24T22:55:00.000-04:00

Since my wife and I moved back to New York City after a two year stint in upstate New York, we quickly found it difficult and impractical to hang on to our 2008 Honda CRV with the Glacier Blue finish.

The car, which brought us on an epic cross-country trip in 2009 (during which I proposed to her in Albuquerque) was recently sold. But I plum forgot to give the buyer my touch-up paint kit.

During an aimless drive through Putnam County once, I salvaged an interesting looking lamp with a dated color scheme - natural wood and brass. I just got around to revamping it with the chrome and glacier blue theme of the Honda. It's fitting that it should bear the colors of the vehicle with which it was discovered. I'm quite pleased.

How To Build a Loft Bed

2011-07-14T20:23:00.001-04:00

When my wife and I moved back to NYC last year, our new apartment was still packed to the gills despite some significant downsizing. Since we moved into a turn-of-the-century brownstone in Brooklyn with high ceilings, a loft bed with plenty of storage space seemed ideal. After our wedding, we promised to treat ourselves to a brand new queen-sized tempurpedic mattress.

The hunt was on, but after some local inquiries, we discovered that major furniture stores simply don't carry queen-sized loft beds. They can be special-ordered, but only at great expense. The more I looked at pictures online of loft beds, the more confident I was that I could design and build one myself. Soon I found myself designing what would become the largest and heaviest object I had ever built (and one that had to be sturdy enough to hold two adults and three cats for several hours at a time).

I erred on the safe side, and overbuilt the heck out of it. I planned on using 2x6's and 2x4s for the framing, and plywood for the mattress platform, and put together with bolts, nuts, and washers.

My father and grandfather both spent time as draftsmen at some point in their careers, so I suddenly found myself with a board set up with graph paper, meticulously laying the bed out to scale in three dimensions.

The construction itself took a lot more time and effort than I anticipated (this is always the case), especially hoisting the heavy bedframe up onto its 5.5 foot tall legs.

In the end it worked out wonderfully - sturdy, clean, with about 160 cubic feet of storage space!

This past month we moved yet again, so I broke the bed down into pieces the movers could handle. Since our new place has lower ceilings, and we've downsized even more in the past year, I chopped the legs down to a more reasonable height. It still has plenty of space underneath, but climbing into bed isn't as much of an ordeal.

Enjoy this stop motion video I took of the bed's reconstruction. It was hot as the dickens while I was doing it, and I was a bit reticent about putting a video up of me in shorts and an undershirt. But then I read this article about ITP students vs. MIT Media Lab students and figured f*ck it. Enjoy!

The song accompanying the video above is called "Green Thumb" written by the lovely Ann Courtney (now frontwoman of the band Mother Feather). I helped arrange and engineer this tune in 2005.

I Circuit Bent the Hangout Feature In Google+

2011-07-07T16:06:00.001-04:00

I'm definitely a big fan of Google+ so far, and yesterday a group of friends and I decided to use it's "Hangout" video chat feature. We thought it would be fun to keep adding more users to find the breaking point.

I think it was after getting 9 people simultaneously video-chatting that the app froze on my Macbook. I refreshed it, and this is what I saw and heard - a tableau of blank faces with soundtrack that sounded like R2D2 with a head cold. I did not know software could be circuit bent, or unintentionally datamoshed. I recorded the sound with my cell phone and did a screen shot of the page, so this fairly accurately recreates what was going on. Enjoy!

Vintage Macintosh Mouse Case Mod

2011-06-22T19:21:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid I had one of the first Macintosh computers (you remember, the ones that looked like big cinder blocks.) To this day I love the classic styling of the original mac mouse. I happened to still have one, and recently modded it to accept USB compatible optical components while being virtually indistinguishable from its original design. I'm happy to say it works perfectly, and now I'm the envy of all my local geeks and hipsters.

The first attempt at the mod was with this microsoft optical mouse. I had it on hand, and it looked like I could hack it to make it fit. Though in order to do this, I had to saw off the front part of the MS PC Board that contained the buttons and scroll wheel.

This didn't seem to be a problem at first, because there were no other essential components in the part I was planning on cutting off. Also, I would only be needing one button since I wasn't interested in modifying the external functionality of the mouse (some people have tried this with IMHO hideous results).
I tested the IC with some wire probes, and found which pins controlled the left-click. My plan was to break these out and fabricate a new mount for the button. This would've been fairly labor-intensive, not to mention that because of space constraints, it would put the button smack on top of the IC.

I fiddled around with the configuration and tried drawing up a jig to make it work, but decided to scrap the idea and shelved the project for a while.

When I decided to come back to it, I tossed the Microsoft mouse and went for a Macintosh ProMouse instead. When I opened it up I could tell right away it was going to be easier. The PCB fit into the vintage mouse with just some minimal trimming, and the click button was mounted smack in the middle. It was even the same make and similar type switch as the old mouse. You could tell these two mice were part of the same lineage. It was actually a bit eerie.

I traced out the footprint of the ProMouse and cut the silhouette out of the vintage mouse with a dremel. I popped it into the spot with epoxy, waited for it to dry, then sanded the whole bottom flush.

Through trial and error, I mocked up a button assembly that would mate well with the switch on the ProMouse's PCB. Once I found a hot-glue prototype I was happy with, I took it apart and reglued with JB Weld.

The last step was splicing open the rubber piece the cord fits into. Once done, I hot glued the new USB cord in place.

Building a Telepresence Rig at ITP

2011-06-06T20:59:00.000-04:00

For the next two months I'll be working at NYU's ITP as shop and equipment room staff. It's a great gig because I can be within my grad school community, and even get some of my own work done when there's not much going on.

But sometimes I'm asked to do an odd project, and the other day I was given a fun task - rig up a telepresence station in an afternoon. We had the camera already to go, so this was a pure construction job.

Full-time staff member Marlon and I slapped together a bunch of speed rail onto a chair, and secured it from beneath by sandwiching some flat plates together.

All in all it was a quick but satisfying build. The 360 degree, remote controlled camera floated at head height in the chair, and the addition of a Domo head made it seem like it was just another day at the office for Bob.

Scrapwood Box, String, and Text: "Provenance"

2011-05-27T23:55:00.000-04:00

A couple of months I covered the construction of a scrapwood box I've been using to keep materials in. The hacked together look made it an oddity amongst my other functional furniture pieces I've made before.

It occurred to me to turn it into a piece of artwork because I've been investigating this connection between the inherent intrigue in an apparatus that's idiosyncratically constructed for something purely functional or whimsical. Exposing the parts, accentuating ugliness, has been something I've been pushing more and more in my work.

To go even a step further with this, I catalogued the story of every single piece of wood I used in the box. It turns out they fell into groupings because they were scrap pieces from several different projects I've worked on. I mapped all of the pieces into short descriptions on paper by tacking strings from each piece to it's corresponding story. Thus when looking at the piece, one can learn the provenance of each component that went into it.

The Best Way to Store Rolls of Tape

2011-04-27T11:06:00.001-04:00

Whether it's Duct, Gaff, Packing, Electrical, Masking, Painter's, or any other tape roll under the sun, the easiest way to keep them is on a loop of rope with a clasp or carabiner on one end.

Just like using the right tool for the job, using the right tape is also essential. There are folks who are in the cult of duct tape, but frankly, it's comparatively expensive and in many cases there's a tape that can do a better job. Keep them all together in the way I've shown, and get familiar with which one is right for the job.

I learned this little trick when I worked briefly in film production. I didn't see it being used anywhere outside that field, until I met my classmate Luis Violante. I asked him where he learned to do that and he said "oh...when I worked in production." Go figure.

"Fruit Powered" Sound Sculpture

2011-04-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

This was constructed from an obscure piece of aeronautical hardware I procured at the Pratt and Whitney Surplus Store in Hartford CT. I snaked stainless steel wire from it to act as resonators. Then at key points I installed piezo transducers. At the center the stainless steel wires stab into a banana and a pear. The whole works sits atop a speaker that the transducers constantly feed back.

Standing waves appear on the floor surrounding the piece and viewers' position and footsteps alter the resulting drone.

Welding for the First Time

2011-04-11T09:00:00.002-04:00

This semester I've had the privilege of studying sculpture in a studio setting with Beverly Semmes and her students at NYU's Barney Building. A perk of being in the class has been gaining access to the school's wood and metal shop.

Today I met Gustavo Velasquez, a sculptor and professor at the Steinhardt School. He taught me the ins and outs of the shop, as well as how to use all the equipment safely. He seemed relieved when I told him I had experience in building and fabrication - he just needed to fill in some gaps.

Luckily, the bulk of my time with him was spent in learning how to MIG weld - something I've never done before. From what I learned, timing is everything in this craft. Make a zig zag bead at just the right pace, and you've got yourself a good weld. Varying the rate at which the welding rod comes out makes a big difference.

One of the strangest things to get used to was that moment between flipping the welding hood down and actually beginning to weld. Until that bright tip glowed, I was essentially blind. Like Luke Skywalker, I had to "use the force" and trust I was hitting the right spot, making sure to line it up properly beforehand.

He set me up to get some practice in, and I must say that while my welds were still sloppy, they held up well. It's only a matter of time and practice before I really get the hang of it. Here's the first piece I did:

Making Candles from Scrap Wax

2011-04-04T09:00:00.001-04:00

Some of you may remember how my wife Melody and I had to scrape through 4 days without electricity last winter when we lived in our cottage.

Of course we busted out every last candle in the house and used up nearly all of them too! As you know, sometimes candles come in a nice little all-encompassing jar that catches and burns nearly all the wax. Then there are others that don't have receptacles, and can end up making an unholy mess, terminating their lives as frozen, gelatinous blobs that get tossed in the trash.

I've hung on to all that leftover wax and recently melted it all down to make a new candle with it!

Here's the scrap wax I started with.

Then I put it all in a standard aluminum can and set it on the stove to melt.

I hung a piece of cotton string in the liquid wax.

When it had solidified (this takes several hours) I cut the can open with a hacksaw.

Now I have a beautiful, fragrant, candle!

The Bounce Announce Automated Musical Instrument

2011-03-28T09:00:00.002-04:00

This project completed as my final project for both Physical Computing and Introduction to Computational Media at ITP.

Briefly, ping pong balls roll down 4 individual tracks, and are launched at the bottom by solenoids. The solenoids are triggered rhythmically by an Arduino.

The ping pong balls bounce sequentially onto carefully placed musical instruments. On the instruments are several piezo-electric transducers that send serial data to Processing, which responds with a visualization scheme projected from above.

Here's a video documentation of the project. Enjoy!

Organizing Resistors

2011-03-21T09:00:00.001-04:00

If you ever want to test your brain's limits on color discrimination, try sorting a few hundred resistors. Was that a blue stripe or a black stripe? Was that a brown stripe or an orange stripe?

While this process was completely maddening at times, it's great to have all my resistors organized. I separated them into these cups, and then put them into tiny baggies, labelled with Sharpies.

Now my components cabinet has two resistor drawers: 1 Ohm through 1k Ohm, and 1.1k Ohm through 1 Mega Ohm.

Snappy!

Hacking Together a Scrapwood Box

2011-03-15T01:16:00.001-04:00

I just can't stand to throw my scrapwood in the trash. Unfortunately, it tends to pile up after a while, and I'm forced to think of new ways to use it. As you may know, in the past I made scrapwood shelves that seemed to be a success, so this time I tried my hand at making a scrapwood box for holding some of my materials.

I had been using a cardboard box that was slowly disintegrating, so this was definitely a step up. Like scrapwood projects I've done before, I set myself some ground rules. I used all pieces of wood as I found them in my scrap bucket, no additional cuts were allowed, and the only fasteners I used were screws and nails.

It's great to not only have created something new, sturdy, and unique, but due to the scrapwood's involvement in prior projects, the box itself becomes a chronology of my own work. I can point to the black bottom and remember that it used to be part of my workbench, then became a TV stand, and finally was dismantled, with the tabletop becoming my drafting board.

Other pieces have stories too, and I'm reminded of them whenever I dig around in this box now.

Enjoy this time-lapse video of the build. The backing track is "A Scene Unseen" by Kinetic.

Apparatus As Art

2011-03-07T09:31:00.000-05:00

While at NYU's ITP program, I'm given the opportunity to take classes outside my own program.

Given my recent penchant for construction and assemblage, I decided to enroll in a sculpture studio course at NYU's Steinhardt School.

Being in the mix with fine arts students has resulted in some interesting results and revelations.

For a recent assignment, I made a sculpture with a kinetic element, and asked the class to ignore the apparatus controlling the "artwork", as this was intended to be concealed in a final iteration.

During the crit the apparatus was all they could think about.

I'll reserve that day's piece for another blog post, but will show you the apparatus from it alongside two similar constructions from other projects. These were never intended to be artworks, but it seems that my most successful "art" comes when it is unintended as such.

Fishing with Rare Earth Magnets

2011-02-28T08:33:00.001-05:00

For Fun and Profit

In the Shop Vac.

Hardware Hacking for Zevs' "Hip to be Square"

2011-02-25T13:48:00.001-05:00

Recently I completed a hardware hacking gig for the French street artist Zevs. He wanted to take an old school Sony Dream Machine clock radio and enable it to play "Hip to be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News at a greatly reduced speed. The piece premiered along with several other works last night at Gallery De Buck in New York City, as part of Zevs' "Liquidated Version" exhibition (running through April 7th).

I was excited to work on this project because it combined my skills as a musician, hardware hacking, fabrication, and electronics.

The piece needed to look exactly like a standard Sony Clock Radio, except for two small buttons in the back to control an mp3 player and FM transmitter. The big challenge was to neatly fit all the hardware into the enclosure and make the design robust enough that the piece could withstand travel and continuous use both in the gallery and by a potential buyer.

I considered saving space by using discrete electronics and circuit boards, but decided to forego this in favor of off-the-shelf components. I did this because I was working on a deadline, and was more confident in the fabrication skills it would take to make space in the enclosure than my electronics expertise.

It turns out the space was much tighter than I thought, so I had to remove a considerable amount of material with the Dremel. There was a lot of plastic in the trash by the end of this, and part of this process left a circuit board floating with no support, so I had to fabricate a new one and glue it to a sidewall.

With this done I set about fitting in the components. I took the buttons from a similar clock and mounted them to the on/off switches of the mp3 player and FM transmitter, then drilled out holes for the buttons and LED indicators on the back plate of the clock.

After mocking up and testing the electronics, with separate transformers for the clock, mp3 player, and FM transmitter, I carefully epoxied all the pieces in with JB Weld.

To make everything fit, I had to do a lot of chores like making a custom USB cable to power the mp3 player, and hardwiring the power cord to the circuit board on the FM transmitter.

I'm proud to say the artist was pleased with the results, and he called the piece the "cornerstone" of the exhibition.

More shots from the exhibition:

Custom Ukulele and Alto Horn Stands

2011-02-21T08:34:00.000-05:00

One thing I learned from my poppa about playing music was that if one wants to practice often, one needs an instrument that's readily accessible. He'd always keep his acoustic guitar next to the couch and play during commercials while he watched TV. Sometimes if he was really getting into something, the mute button would stay on for even longer.

Lately with my life's focus switching more to fabrication, art, and technology, music has taken quite a backseat. In fact, several days can go by now without me so much as touching a musical instrument.

Remember my Dad's tried and true technique, I decided to build stands for two of the instruments I'm most interested in right now: the ukulele, and the alto horn.

I welcomed the challenge of this build, but my main reason for undertaking was purely practical - ukulele and alto horn stands are a bit hard to come by.

So I rummaged through my junk boxes and found some parts that looked promising. The materials laid out below are CDs, an old outdoor lighting timer unit, desklamp hood, piece of stage PA hardware, brass streetlamp finial, part from a floodlight mount, and a cheap, old cymbal stand.

I ended up using most of these parts in the build, plus some others. Most notably, a 1950s era Ludwig Speed King kick drum pedal to hold the uke up at an angle.

Making a Mouthpiece Fit My Horn

2011-02-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

Recently I made an exquisite trade through Craig's list - 5 beat up student violins and a student model trumpet, in exchange for a 90 year old Alto Horn. Since acquiring it I've played it a whole lot.

The problem was, the mouthpiece that came with it was for a mellophone, which has a shaft size that's too small for the alto horn. I set about increasing the shaft size instead of holding it together with scotch tape.

First I covered the mouthpiece shaft with a liberal amount of JB-WELD. Initially I thought it would be possible to sand it down by hand to a cylindrical shape, but this proved to be difficult.

My next idea was to sand while it was turning, as on a lathe. This required finding just the right size bolt and nut to secure the mouthpiece, but once done I was able to mount it in my hand drill. which I then mounted in my bench vise.

Then it was just a matter of sanding it down while the drill ran. I'm quite happy with the results, and glad I didn't have to go out and buy a new mouthpiece.

Repairing a Vintage Hohner Harmonica Case

2011-02-07T16:18:00.000-05:00

My Grandfather bought a Hohner Chromonika while serving in World War II (ironically, a German brand). When I was a child I had my own little blues harp, and seeing that I had an interest in it, he gave me his harmonica, in a lovely finger-jointed wood box.

Being a child at the time, I was a bit rough on the whole kit, and the box ended up broken with a couple of the pieces lost. I took the time recently to fabricate new finger-jointed pieces, and attach a new pair of hinges. Here's how the build went:

The Harmonica Case and the blank I cut from scrap stock.

I used the dremel to cut out the finger joints, after scrolling the existing joints on the box. Some adjustments were necessary to get a tight fit.

The joints were attached with wood glue, and clamped for drying.

I jacked these hinges off a box that I hardly use. They're pretty weathered, and a decent fit.

I'm happy with the results, and glad I was able to try this detail work with the dremel.

Sneak Peak of "Bounce Announce"

2010-12-19T03:06:00.000-05:00

This is video taken by Jason Stephens at ITP this evening. The Bounce Announce project has legs, and it's taking it's first steps toward ping-pong musical madness. Enjoy this clip.

Workshop Tour

2010-12-17T20:19:00.000-05:00

After a feverish build session on the "Bounce Announce" project, I trashed the workshop and re-organized in the aftermath. This is probably the cleanest it's going to get for months, so I decided to document it.

The "Bounce Announce" instrument will be completed by Sunday, at which time I will post video of it in action. If you'd like to see it (and lots of other awesome projects) live, make sure to go to the ITP Winter Show.

"Bounce Announce" Visualization Element

2010-11-28T21:54:00.002-05:00

I've decided to take the Bounce Announce project and add visualization to it utilizing piezo sensors and processing. Every instrument will have a piezo trigger attached to it, that will be processed by Arduino and fed to a Processing visualization sketch.

On a projected backdrop, the effect should appear to be differently colored expanding concentric circles that originate from each impact point.

Hooking an Electric Fence into an LCD Monitor

2010-11-24T07:15:00.000-05:00

I found this half-dismantled LCD monitor o the junk shelf, and grabbed it because it looked pretty. After reading up on LCDs a bit, I had the notion that sending voltage through it might make for some interesting effects.

Since I've moved out of the country and don't have any use for my electric fence controller anymore, I hooked the thing up to the LCD and backlit. Just look at the trippy results.

"What's New at ITP" at the 10th annual Dust or Magic Conference

2010-11-18T07:36:00.000-05:00

I had such a great time at Dust or Magic this year, and was so glad to be able to show the attendees what is being done at ITP in the field of Children's Interactive Media. A video of my talk is below.

My Thoughts About Facebook (For the Naysayers)

2010-11-15T07:34:00.001-05:00

I've gotten rewarding freelance work through facebook referrals. I learned about, and conversed with, my future classmates over the summer before graduate school began this past September. Facebook gives me a way (and a reason) to communicate in a casual manner with folks I wouldn't otherwise keep in touch with. It's a great way to warm up a prospective client without resorting to a "pitch letter".

Facebook is a "take it or leave it" communication network. If I receive an unwanted email from someone I know, I'll either feel obligated to respond to it (which wastes everyone's time) or ignore it (which causes resentment). Facebook transfers the power from the sender to the receiver, making everyone benefit. If a status update starts an interesting thread, then YAY! If not, no big deal.

Facebook helps me realize which social groups are interested in what things. For instance, if I post an update about food, there's a nearly universal response. If I post about hacking my 1st gen Macintosh mouse to accept USB, I'll probably get comments mostly from other people in my (super geeky) graduate and a smattering of other friends.

Facebook creates connections I didn't know existed, and organizes my contacts into a system that makes sense. I've always been amazed at the handful of times when I've discovered that friends from completely different social circles have a friend in common with each other. You know, the whole "six degrees, small world after all" stuff. It's great!

Eventually, Facebook will no doubt become a historic "document" with countless future benefits. I can imagine retiring someday and going through the archives for source material when writing my memoirs or biography. All sorts of other applications will surely coalesce - ethnographies, trend-tracking...all kinds of stuff.

I (and quite a few other people) probably update my status around once every other day. Imagine if you started emailing everyone in your address book every other day. You'd be labeled a spammer so quickly your head would spin.

Facebook serves a purpose, however flawed it may be (500,000,000 is a lot to manage).

It's a series of tubes.

Test Audio/Video for the "Bounce Announce" Audio Installation

2010-11-11T16:57:00.000-05:00

I'll soon be building a sound installation consisting of several hundred (ping pong?) balls in a series of hopper assemblages. At the bottom of each hopper will be a feed tube with solenoids at the end. The solenoids will be triggered by Arduino, and pop out the ping pong balls at prescribed times.

The ping pong balls will bounce sequentially onto carefully placed musical instruments on the floor below, before finally coming to a rest in a cushioned collection area.

The Arduino will be communicating via midi on the computer, and following instructions from a pre-conceived score written specifically for the installation.

Video below is of balls bouncing onto different combinations of instruments, to give an idea of the "Bounce Announce" setup.

Below this is audio I captured from the above video, in layered form, to give an idea of the possibilities of the installation. The final product will hopefully be much wider in scope, with perhaps a dozen solenoids with corresponding instrument arrays.

Bounce Announce Test 1 by PushTheOtherButton

Scrap Wood Shelves Featured in Stop Motion Animation

2010-10-09T15:16:00.000-04:00

Last week, my classmate Will Jennings and I created this whimsical stop motion video at ITP using my scrapwood shelves, and their assorted corresponding knick-knacks. We created it using IStopMotion, which is a fantastic program if you're looking to do that sort of thing. Enjoy!

Pez ZomBie from William Jennings on Vimeo.

Tapescape and Tapelake - 2 Cassette-Based Robots Meet for the First Time

2010-10-04T20:44:00.001-04:00

At Maker Faire last week, my booth had the TapeScape robot on display (which I made with Ilan Schifter - made almost completely out of a tape deck, broadcasting the sound from the "scape" of "tape" it would roll over), prompting several people to mention that there was a very similar robot inside the Queens Hall of Science.

I had to check it out for myself, and had the pleasure of meeting Dan Perrone. His project is not only very similar to TapeScape in it's design and action, but has quite a similar name: TapeLake.

It turns out that we developed our projects independently of each other, but came to similar conclusions, and are both Brooklyn residents. As Dan said "We're all the same fleas on different dogs."

See video below of our encounter:

Maker Faire Day 2 - Moonisphere is Too Big to Fail

2010-09-26T08:03:00.000-04:00

After a sweltering day building the Moonisphere on day one, so far we have merely a Moonicircle, but fear not! We were able to do a lot of prep work in the shade, cutting massive amounts of cardboard into appropriately sized strips to lay down.

Once the framework is made, we'll cut slots with a jigsaw, and fit it all together like an old-fashioned barn raising.

The crew from the New York Hall of Science has been great at redirecting all of their waste cardboard to our pile, and there will be plenty of cardboard from wolphram-alpha swag integrated into the Moonisphere.

If you find yourself passing by our tent, give a hand in constructing a wicked cool piece of temporary art! We're right by the 3d printers at Maker Faire, all day today.

Moonisphere Rising

2010-09-25T06:58:00.000-04:00

Contrary to popular belief, the moon (at least for one weekend) is not made of cheese...

The Moonisphere build begins today at Maker Faire.

Wedding Ring Geek Out

2010-09-24T08:34:00.003-04:00

At ITP I have already met many kindred spirits, one of whom is Nelson Ramon, a longboarding, computer hacking, Colombian uber-geek. This is a photo of him, doing what he does:

He congratulated me on my recent wedding, and it turns out that he also got hitched just a couple of months ago. So of course, we compared wedding rings. I explained that mine was hand-hammered out of titanium by a local artist and New School professor, Paul DeBlassie. But I knew I had been bested when he showed me his white gold ring, also handmade, but with his anniversary engraved on the inside in binary!!! I definitely lost that geek fight, but am proud to have been there. Congratulations Ramon!

Fantasy Project - Junk Pedal Scrambler!

2010-09-23T22:57:00.001-04:00

Lots of guitarists collect effects pedals, and lots of effects pedals end up being set aside, never to be seen again in a guitarist's rigs. This invention aims to take advantage of that trend. It consists of a series of effects loops that are cycled through sequentially, with each loop having controls for clean/effected blend, and on/off - each loop can contain one or more effects pedals, the rate at which they cycle through can be varied by a knob, and the overall blend between clean signal and effected signal can also be adjusted.

I really want to make a prototype of this, but do not have the skills to do it. Here's a mock-up.

On a Rocketship to WhoKnowsWhere

2010-09-20T13:03:00.001-04:00

On September 4th I was married to my lovely gal, Melody - twas an amazing DIY wedding with mismatched dinnerware, handmade papergoods, and an ass-kicking crowdsourced band. Once all the photos and video are in I will dedicate an entire post to it.

I am keeping a project blog of my work at ITP here if any of you are interested.

3 days later, I started grad school at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. My first class was a lecture hosted by the founder of ITP, Red Burns. Our first speaking guest was legendary performance artist Vito Acconci, who spoke right after I found out I was chosen to be in the first group for the following week's presentation, which would be a "reaction" to Vito's talk.

I became intensely close with the members of my group, and over 50 hours of work within one week's time, we conceived and presented this piece: a 40x50 foot sheet of clear plastic was pulled over the entire audience, and text of some of our most personal and controversial opinions were rear-projected onto the sheet. With the screen being wavy and up-close, the audience had to cooperate with each other in order to decipher what was written, and in so doing have a moment in the present with each other. Following this, we asked each audience member to write down a personal/controversial sentence of their own and stick it to the sheet. The sheet was pulled off and onto the stage, where I read several of the audiences' sentences aloud. Then we bunched up the sheet and carried it off stage. Afterwards Red said "this group set the bar very high." I must admit we were unsure whether this would be pulled off, but in the end it worked wonderfully. Pic by Becky Kazansky by and video by Matthew Rader below:

Lots of Projects and Adventures on the Horizon

2010-08-30T16:31:00.000-04:00

Pretty soon I will be updating with a post on my fabulous DIY wedding, taking place this coming weekend. My fiancee have been working hard on a celebration that shall be replete with hand-painted birdhouses as centerpieces, yard sale dinnerware, a swingin' crowdsourced band, and all sorts of other goodies.

Following that, we'll be leaving our fair cottage in the country and moving into an apartment in Brooklyn for my first semester at NYU's ITP program. It's a fantastic graduate school, which can name the founders of ethernet and 4square as alumnus, along with professors such as Clay Shirky, and Tom Igoe of Make: Magazine.

Speaking of Make: Magazine, I hope I'll be seeing some of you at the first ever NYC Maker Faire. It's in Flushing Queens right near the Unisphere, and I will be heading up a team of folks to facilitate the construction of a 33 foot wide recycled cardboard "Moonisphere", which will be at roughly the same scale as the unisphere, and coincidentally, at around the same scale distance away! It's going to be a great time and if you come, I'd love if you could pick up a utility knife and a glue gun to help us out.

Between composing video game music and planning for the wedding, I haven't had much time for projects, but here's some eye candy: the media shelf in my house, including DVD, VHS, SA-CD, CD, cassette, vinyl, card games, board games, video games, and lots of odds and ends. We are anti media-discrimination in this house, and utilize all this stuff regularly for our entertainment.

My Studio in the Throes of Music Production

2010-08-21T21:06:00.000-04:00

As some of you may know, I am a musician when I'm not being a geek. I played for many years in New York City with lots of different groups, mainly the band Kinetic.

I was recently hired to write and compose music for a video game that's in development, so it was time to convert what is normally my hacker studio into my music studio.

I work fast and messy, so here are some pics of my 20 hour audio tirade. Funny how after all that, you can still see tools and materials poking out of the shadows...

Mighty Cat Scratching Post

2010-08-11T21:56:00.001-04:00

I've been a cat owner for a while, and (through research and patience) have found the solution to keeping feline friends from ripping apart my couch.

Half the battle is in giving your cats a sturdy scratching post - nice and tall so they can stretch out, bottom heavy so it won't tip over, and made of something they can dig into, like sisal hemp.

I saw the opportunity to build these when visiting the Tilly Foster Farm in Brewster NY, where they happened to be demoing a host of antique farm equipment engines. One of the exhibits was a working 2 horsepower dragsaw, slicing cookies off a giant tree limb. The owner was letting people take the cookies for free, so I helped myself to two.

These became the bases for my mammoth scratching posts.

First I drilled out and cut a nice big circular hole in the center using my jigsaw.

Then I traced an identical circular piece out of plywood, with which I could attach the actual post (2x4s with the corners cut, then wrapped and stapled with 1/2" sisal rope) with screws. Once done, I drilled some nice beefy screws diagonally into the piece of tree limb to keep it steady, making sure to countersink the screws and fill in all the gaps with my homemade wood filler (screened sawdust and wood glue).

Next I thought up a novel way to make the tops of the post look nice, because they had just the end strand of the sisal stapled to the top - not too aesthetically pleasing and not too pleasant for cats either. So I found a smaller branch that was the same diameter, and cut it to size, making sure to make a crevice for the sisal to sit (first sketched out with a sharpie, then routed out with a spade bit and a rasp bit)

Liked it so much I built another!

Frankenstein Guitar Amplifier Build

2010-08-03T00:09:00.001-04:00

I'm moving from the country to the city soon, and have been making a steady attempt to consolidate and downsize beforehand.

I've had several dead and dying guitar amplifiers in my workshop for quite some time, and I had ruminated enough on how I was going to hack them all together into something unique. So, check out the pic and video of it below, and be sure to read the
instructable for some more detail about how this was all done.

Frankenstein Guitar Amp Build - More DIY How To Projects

Lamp Assembled from Drum Hardware and a Car Jack

2010-07-27T12:42:00.000-04:00

Had this one kicking around for a while - it originally featured a boom arm for better adjustability, but this made it top-heavy - so it's now a humble, but neat-o straight desk lamp (though still somewhat adjustable).

As usual, I had all these things on hand being all lonely and useless. The blue rick-rack on the shade is courtesy of Melody, scored at an estate sale last month. Enjoy!

Report from the Cold Spring Craft Fair

2010-07-21T17:18:00.000-04:00

For it being our first craft fair, it went very well. We weren't concerned with making money, so much as observing people's reactions to our creations.

The scrapwood shelves turned a lot of heads, but a lot of the time there would be a man being interested in them and his wife pulling him away. :) But I did sell one piece, to a happy Martin W (who works for a NYC design firm, and is keeping my card on file - yippee!) pictured here. When he bought it he said he won't "ruin it by putting knick-knacks on it."

Does this make me an artist? One woman said my shelves reminded her of Louise Nevelson, and when I admitted to not knowing who that was, she said "shame on you!" I tried explaining to her that I'm not an artist - this was just something I like to do, but this didn't seem to quell her agitation. All the same I take it as a compliment. It led me to check out Nevelson's work, which I really dig! And read this quote from her:

"When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."

I can run with that...

Scrapwood Shelving for Knick-Knacks and Tchotchkes

2010-07-16T22:42:00.002-04:00

My wife, Melody and I have been hard at work all this week in preparation for the Cold Spring River Festival. Melody designs and sews some awesome and hilarious apparel, and I'll be selling all different sorts of things made from recycled and repurposed materials.

It doesn't take me a lot of time to accumulate all sorts of scrap lumber from different projects, and I can't bear to see it go to waste, so I designed and built these shelf units that are perfect for keeping your odds and ends and action figures and bric-a-brac that you don't know what to do with.

I tried to make everything look a bit less hacked together by filling in the gaps (with homemade wood filler made from screened sawdust and wood glue) with a putty knife, shaping it with the jigsaw, and sanding everything down.

I've got some other tricks up my sleeve for our table at the festival, but I really do hope a couple of these pieces sell.

The Story of My Sockets

2010-07-11T21:53:00.002-04:00

People come into tools for all different reasons - you might have the $40,000 super precision Snap-On Set, or the Chinese plastic molded toolkit you bought in Bushwick when you were scraping by as a college student. Maybe you've inherited some tools - maybe you've bought some specifically for a job, and even today when digging around you can still recall the exact circumstances in which you were made to acquire it.

For most of us it's a combination of all these things, and probably more. This motley set of sockets has come into my possession through many miles and at least a couple of generations. It was always my father's habit to throw his sockets into a box and go hunting for the right one when necessary. But I had just organized my drill bit collection (just as motley, and organized just the same way-back-when by my father) and wanted to put it to use.

I dumped out all the sockets and separated them by metric (aqua) and English (natural) units, then organized by size. After drilling the right sized holes for each piece, I had fashioned my very own socket organizer, perfectly tailored for my needs. It cost nothing but the few pieces of scrap wood I had, and if I ever acquire more sockets I can just cut out the parts I need to change - keep it ever-evolving. And by the way, I'll always remember that the aqua bits were from the picket gate I rescued from the trash to make tomato stakes with.

The easy route would have been to go to sears and buy the super-duper socket set and make sure to keep it organized, but this way I can append some pride to the whole matter - make do with my own design, and come to find that I'm actually the better for it. Now these sockets rest in a drawer in a dentist's cabinet in my basement (scored that gem with the marble base for 50 bucks at a barn sale). Again, it's a matter of seeking the alternative for the better, not just to settle for less, but to push for more! This is what "pushing the other button" is all about. When something seems too easy, or you're not quite getting the satisfaction from your work or yourself you think you should, go ahead and try the other thing - push the other button. You could surprise yourself with what happens...

Evaporative Cooler Update!

2010-07-07T15:58:00.000-04:00

Methinks the evaporative cooling set-up did it's job just fine! Between 11:00 to 1:20 the inside temperature creeped from 85 F to 90 F and has held steady since then (writing this at 3:30). I'm calling this a not-too-shabby success, since the outdoor temperature climbed from 91 to 97 in the same amount of time.

So I didn't quite reach the wet-bulb temperature of 84, but here I am writing this entry - a bit balmy, but if it were 97 indoors I'd probably have passed out before finishing this paragraph :)

Lots of thanks to Make: Magazine for featuring this project!

DIY Evaporative Cooling in a Heat Wave

2010-07-07T11:55:00.000-04:00

At home, we only have A/C units on the second floor, and I do most of my work on the Mac, which is on the first floor. Yesterday the New York metro area wasn't just hot, it was Africa Hot, and today looks to be more of the same, but I've got work to do. This morning I lowered all the blinds in an attempt to keep the heat out, and set up the window fans on tables with shallow baking pans full of water in front of them. The idea is that the air flowing from the fans will evaporate the water and cool down the room.

WARNING: SCIENCE CONTENT BELOW

How much you can cool a room using this method is dependent on the relative humidity on that particular day. The less relative humidity, the more water you can cool the room down. I found a quick and dirty formula for calculating the "Wet Bulb" temperature, which is the lowest possible temperature you can attain by evaporation alone given the current atmospheric conditions. It turns out that today's wet bulb temperature is 84 degrees, which will feel around 80 for me with the fans going - a bit hot, but definitely tolerable. The thermostats on the fans are holding at 85 right now. However, we haven't reached the hottest part of the day yet - I'll update later this afternoon to see how the experiment worked out.

"Ohm Sweet Ohm" Decorative Plaque

2010-07-02T15:26:00.000-04:00

A while back I received a plaque saying "Home is Where Your Story Begins." It was just a bit too kitschy and corny for display in our home, but I didn't want a gift to go to waste, so I re-imagined it with a geeky twist.

"Ohm Sweet Ohm" - complete with the Omega symbol and a lightning bolt is much more our style. I made it by masking over the entire plaque and then cutting out the letters with an x-acto, making an adhesive stencil. Hit it with some silver spraypaint (boy do I love spraypaint) and voila - geektastic!

Using the Internet to Get Free Stuff in the Mail

2010-06-25T14:13:00.002-04:00

In an earlier post, I mentioned how much I love sending and receiving mail through the good ole USPS. One of the ways I ensure that my mailbox periodically contains treasure when I open it, is by taking a few minutes every once in a while to fill out forms online to get free stuff sent to me. I'll do a bigger post soon showing the bounty I've gleaned in the past couple of years since I started doing this, but today I received two free magazine subscriptions with a juxtaposition that just made me chuckle.

Behold, my new bathroom literature, free copies of "Yachting" and "Waste Management World". I have vague interest in both of these fields (what with my semi-obsession with re-using and recycling, and a love of water since childhood) but it was just so funny to see these two gems sitting next to each other in the mailbox - what an unlikely pair!

To get this free stuff sent to me, I use a few different websites that feed into my iGoogle. Beware, because some "Free Stuff" sites can be fronts for scams, but I've been using these ones for over a year and they have been reputable:

fatwallet

freestuffchannel

totallyfreestuff

Papercraft (Cardboard Craft?) Pizza Box Robot Monster

2010-06-22T22:29:00.004-04:00

Recently, due to the hard economic times, I was forced to take a job as a pizza delivery driver to make ends meet. The work was tedious, but allowed my mind to wander to some productive places. I came up with some great ideas while assembling hundreds and hundreds of boxes in the basement. Leaving myself voicemails made Google Voice the perfect repository for my pizzeria pipe dreams.

I'm guessing that pizza boxes are generally die-cut, and as is common in this process, the excess cuttings were sometimes still partially attached to the boxes in all manner of interesting shapes. To pass the time I started collecting them and thinking about what I could make with them. It soon became apparent that I had enough to assemble a mighty creature who could become a menacing mascot for the pizzeria. After four months of steady collecting, I had enough and put this guy together. Though not intended, I think he may be a cross between The Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past From the Future from Aqua Teen Hungerforce, and bad-ass Johnny Five from Short Circuit 2 after he re-assembles himself in the radio shack.

Alas, the pizza gig is over, and they did not adopt it as their official mascot. If you work at, or know of a pizzeria in the NYC area that might be interested in displaying my robot on their counter, leave a note in the comments.

Father's Day

2010-06-20T13:40:00.002-04:00

The memory that keeps occuring to me this Father's Day is this one time we went bluefishing when I was a teenager. I was reeling one in on an umbrella rig with multiple lures and snagged a second fish on the same line! I brought them both into our little boat with its' little cockpit and everything flopping around chaotically - The lures with their barbed hooks, two 5 pound blues with sharp teeth that have been known to bite off a toe (we were not wearing sneakers that day), and my dad with his spectacles jumping up and down at the end of his nose, one hand on the tiller, and the other hand wildly swinging a pair of vise-grips in a valiant attempt to crush some fish skulls- all with Andres Segovia's classical guitar blasting from the boombox. This had to be one of the most hilarious, bizarre, and scary moments we had shared together. That day I was glad he was my dad, and I think he was glad that I was his son.

The pic in this post was taken after our last sail together. When the conditions were right, we had developed enough rapport to sail the boat off the mooring at the start, cut a course through the LI Sound, tack back into the harbor, and luff the sails, coasting to a stop with my arm stretched into the water to grab the mooring line. An excursion like this, without needing to turn on the motor, we dubbed a "perfect day." This was a day like that, and a couple weeks before his failed surgery to remove a malignant tumor - he passed away six months later...I don't want to end on a sad note, and after 8 years past I feel no sadness- only gratitude. This is my favorite picture of the two of us. Happy Father's day to all dads everywhere, always.

Pliers Turned Magnets, How Do They Work?

2010-06-19T14:15:00.008-04:00

I had to cut some metal today, and was happy to be able to use the angle grinder that was given to me recently by a kind co-worker. Sparks flew and my workbench was soon covered in a fine layer of iron filings. I went to grab my trusty pliers, and noticed that the ends of the handles had little afros made of iron filings. How did this happen?! It's not like I magnetized them on purpose, and can't recollect ever storing them near anything magnetic.
Could it be that from the friction or proximity to the angle grinder's motor that the filings themselves became electrically charged? Anyone care to shed light on this?
One thing I know is that these guys won't be able to give me a satisfactory answer.

But I'm only a hardware hacker....

2010-06-17T18:25:00.004-04:00

Thanks for stopping by, especially if you came here via Boing Boing's Notepad page - their post there just beckoned for me to guess at their password, so I did.... I hope you like the projects I've been working on - no harm intended to the Boing Boing folks. When opportunity knocks....

Artistic Interpretation of The Cube Root of Three

2010-06-15T15:00:00.006-04:00

My wonderful sister is a high school math teacher, and in our family the geek apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. With that in mind, I made this extra-special birthday present for her this past year. For a native New Yorker you might pronounce this "Da Cube Root o Tree" - It's a wire frame papier mache tree sitting atop a wood cube, with the cube root of three expressed in different ways on the four visible facets of the cube - decimal, hexadecimal, binary, and integral (click here for pic showing the other two facets).

For the cube, not only did I not have a thick enough piece of wood available, but I was eager to experiment with a method of scrap wood laminating I read on Lifehacker a while back. With wood glue, clamps, and varnish, I was able to make a durable, interesting looking cube for the base. I then stenciled and spray painted the letters and numbers, and spray-lacquered the whole thing.

For the tree, I shaped a wire frame, then covered it in papier mache - old school, like in kindergarten with water, white glue, and newspaper. After applying green spraypaint and letting it dry, I hit the tree with some 3M Super 77 spray adhesive, and rolled it around in soil. After brushing off the loose bits, I lacquered it several times to keep it all together.

Epoxy holds the two pieces together, and now it sits on my sister's desk, awaiting the curiosity and/or bewilderment of her students.

The Tapescape Audio Robot

2010-06-13T14:00:00.000-04:00

Keeping in the spirit of this blog, I should mention that I'm the co-creator of a robot that was built almost solely from a dual tape deck and could transmit sound from a "scape" of "tape" as it rolled along. This was called TapeScape -

After moving out of NYC after my tenure as bassist for Kinetic was over, this was the first major "maker" project I undertook with my collaborator, Ilan Schifter (who encouraged me to enroll at NYU's ITP program.) We originally entered the robot into an Instructables contest, and then received attention from several well-known blogs.

It was after this that the gears started turning for this website idea. It excites me immensely to know that there is "obsolete" technology and materials languishing, just waiting for others like myself to snatch it up and re-imagine it as something fantastic!

If you have ideas along these lines, I'd love to hear what you've been doing. If you have something laying around and don't know what to do with it, let me know, and we can think of something. Cheers!

Recycling Plastic Bags into Childrens' Blocks

2010-06-12T11:16:00.000-04:00

I learned about the method of "stewing" plastic bags from this instructable a while back, and decided to try it for myself. In short, it's done by placing the bags in canola oil, in which they acquire a gummy consistency, suitable for molding into rigid pieces. I decided to make some childrens' blocks out of it. As far as I know the plastic is all #2 HDPE which I assume is safe for children. Can anyone shed some light on this? (don't worry I wouldn't give this to kids until I'm absolutely sure).

The swirly, marbled patterns have potential, although just mixing all the different colors together make it ugly as sin. Perhaps in the future I'll use various color schemes and they'll come out nicer.

On further thought, what basically gets created from this process is plastic lumber . Perhaps I can hang onto all my #2 plastic and slowly make enough plastic bricks to build a house. :) or even better, raid the bins on recycling day and live within other peoples' waste. Oh the possibilities....

Check out build pics at my flickr page.

How To Rewire Roland DS90 Speakers (For Humanities Students)

2010-06-10T08:56:00.003-04:00

After so many years of literary analysis and myriad other right-brained ventures, I've become quite sluggish in mathematical type analyses. So, when I accidentally blew the internal amplifiers on my Roland DS90 desktop monitors, it took six years of procrastination before I finally opened them up and converted them to passive speakers.

Wiring in series and parallel I could understand, but when it got into the heady world of impedance and frequency crossovers, my brain started to swirl. I'll try to give the condensed version of how I figured it all out.

First, these monitors have two speakers, one standard for all frequencies, and one tweeter for only high frequencies.

A "crossover" is a speaker wired in parallel that has it's frequency limited by wiring in one or more capacitors.

I found out the "crossover frequency" of my speakers, then checked out this site to calculate the proper capacitance

Then it was a matter of rummaging through my junked circuit boards to find the right capacitors. That same site I linked to has a nifty little calculator that tells you how many farad you get when wiring the capacitors in different series or parallel combinations.

Now for the build pics:

The monitors with their butts ripped off.

The capacitors wired in: 2 10 microfarad caps in series, and 1 2.2 microfarad cap in parallel = 7.2 microfarad

Hacking the input: After I went all Om Nom Nom on the preamp circuit board...

I used the existing RCA input jack, and kept the rest of the amplifier guts intact, guessing that their physical presence has an effect on the overall sound of the monitors.

Thinking Inside the Box

2010-06-06T19:58:00.007-04:00

     I'm a pretty decent wood butcher - have slapped together a compost bin, workbench, shelves, even an adirondack chair made of shipping pallets. But what I've never tried to do is a carpentry project that fits edges together snugly, where everything is perfectly square, and it looks somewhat decent (like a wood surgeon would do it?)
     So, after feeling restless and watching this video, in which Adam Savage claims to start going a bit nuts if he isn't regularly building something, I made it an afternoon project to construct a simple, clean, elegant wooden box.
    I must give infinite respect to my friends who are carpenters. It is an art that takes a lot of practice to do well. I feel like my box will hold up for a while, but it ain't the prettiest, nor the straightest thing in the world. All the same, I learned a bit while making it, so it's all good.

What's it Worth to You?

2010-06-04T21:59:00.004-04:00

     One of my favorite quotes is, "You tell me 'Looks like someone has too much time on their hands,' but all I hear is 'I don't know what it feels like to be creative.'"
     Every day we experience a conscious state taking up what Clay Shirky calls cognitive surplus. In two nights' worth of TV time (watching the NBA finals game 1 last night, and a TV movie this night) I've organized all of my loose hardware: nuts, bolts, nails, screws, washers, and whatever else I might dive into for inspiration from time to time.
     One on side, I paid less attention to what I was watching on the tube. But how much attentions do we really pay to the act of watching television anyway?

Now the tip: sorting hardware is a devious task when you feel like you've gotten so much accomplished, but it's really just because you sorted the big stuff first. Then it's a marathon of drudgery and fine motor exercise. When you're down to a handful of fluff and the tiniest of pieces, I suggest throwing it all in a tin can, going outside, and burning it from a safe distance with a splash of accelerant (isopropyl, gasoline, kero, what have you...).

Once you're finished, dump it onto the pavement, blow away the ash, and scoop up the spoils!

Scrapwood Trellis

2010-06-03T19:19:00.000-04:00

It's June and the plants are going vertical for sure now. Our snow peas needed some help with their ascent so I put together this trellis from scraps I have lying around. Kept my Triangle Square (def my fav new tool) out on the ground while framing it up. The design looks haphazard but keeping everything at right and 45 degree angles makes it coalesce I think.

AppCamp in Monterey CA

2010-05-03T16:48:00.001-04:00

Here's a quick synopsis on how AppCamp has been going for me so far, then some photos of the action from my cellphone at the end.

Daren, Warren, and I arrived at SFO within twenty minutes of each other on Saturday, drove down to Monterey and made a mad dash to pick up supplies for the conference. This was followed by a lovely dinner and even lovelier company at the beachfront home of Bill and Marilyn Evans. Bill is the co-founder of Evan Moor Publishing . He's also a master martini maker, and showed Warren and I that he really can "impart ice crystals" into the gin.

That night we met up with Living Books creator, Mark Schlicting, and I was happy to find out that he had homesteading in an intentional community in Tennessee many years ago. Melody and I have often talked about buying some acreage in Kentucky and living the simple life - I'm sure I could learn a lot from Mark about this if I picked his brain some.

Sunday was a day of check-in, putting welcome packets together, setting up the PA and projectors, etc. Had some great presentations and the panel of legends telling their stories about the pioneer days of software development (including Oregon Trail!)

Looking forward tonight to a campfire with an attempt at an "iphone" symphony. Peeped some apps that could be very appropriate for this little experiment - video will surely go up on youtube.

Pics here!

Papermaking

2010-04-06T21:18:00.001-04:00

Every week I diligently separat e commingled recyclables from paper and trash. In the back of my head I realize that this is a somewhat futile act because in New York, carting corporations are not required by law to recycle unless it is a profitable venture.

But, I do it anyway, perhaps just for practice for when it actually will be kept separate throughout its recycled lifecycle! At the end of the week most of the garbage ends up being paper, then commingled (recyclable plastic and aluminum), and finally organic material. With all of these paper products being discarded, I started to wonder if it would be possible to efficiently recycle waste paper as new paper. The results were interesting.

From a total hands-on, crafting viewpoint, papermaking by hand turns out to be extremely inexpensive, yet very time consuming. However, I can't imagine it being very time-consuming to automate the process a great deal, reducing the labor involved to something akin to an automatic bread maker.

Recycled CD Mosaic Table

2010-03-11T10:21:00.000-05:00

Just finished this little end table after perfecting my CD mosaic skills. It's got a pour-on lacquer finish and is taking up too much space in our little cottage. Threw it up on ebay if you're so inclined to bid...

The Magic of the Mail

2010-03-11T08:13:00.000-05:00

I love sending and receiving snail mail - I really do. We have X number of ways to connect with each other digitally now (skype, facebook, email, cell, gmail chat, text) that the most intimate form of written communication we have has been largely forgotten. I say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it's time for snail mail to make a comeback. Here are some ways you can get back into the game:

1. Send away for free samples. This is a no-brainer- there are several sites online dedicated to this where links are posted for free samples. Try www.fatwallet.com - I just have a few free stuff gadgets on my IGoogle and click on the links that seem interesting. Set up a dummy email account and usually you just have to fill out an online form and answer a couple of questions. Usually they take 4-6 weeks and by the time they arrive you've forgotten them and are pleasantly surprised. I've gotten free granola bars, a hospital sharps container, tons of stickers (which I cut up and use for other projects), and I haven't bought soap or shampoo in months thanks to all the products I get in the mail.

2. Write to companies you think are awesome, and write to companies you think are lame. One time I bought an "easy to clean litterbox" that required no less than 9 steps to cleaning out the box! I wrote a letter to the company and they sent me a personalized letter of apology, free litterbox liners, and a Paul Bunyan sized litter scoop. Win! And when I proposed to my wife at Garcia's Kitchen in Albuquerque, we were so smitten with each other we forgot to get some souvenirs. I wrote to the restaurant with our story of true love and burritos and they sent us a care package with t-shirt, mug, pen, and fridge magnet!

3. Reconnect with old friends. We all have a few interesting people in our lives who we've just lost touch with. We think of reconnecting but feel awkward writing an email, don't want to get trapped into a phone conversation, or bristle at Facebook's "suggestion" for us to "reconnect" with them (damn robots telling us what to do!) Just scribble a quick hello down and mail that sucker out. As it goes into the ether the onus is suddenly on the other person now to get in touch.

4. Get a bunch of different denomination stamps, and a postage scale. Use the USPS' online postage calculator to send them on their way. I send slinkies and books and toys and presents of all sorts to my friends through the mail, and it's cheap! Parcel post is the biggest transportation thing going for inanimate objects, get on the gravy train!

Wood Gasification Stove Saves the Day!

2010-03-07T10:16:00.002-05:00

The blizzard that hit the northeast states recently left many without power, running water, or heat. I was one of the many who found myself in this predicament, envying those neighbors of mine with generators. Luckily, my homemade wood gasification stove, fashioned from tin cans, saw me through the worst parts. One of these is super easy to make, and I was inspired by this simple instructional video:

When my wife and I awoke the first morning after the storm hit and were still without electricity, I loaded the stove up with scrapwood, grabbed the grill from our toaster oven, and brewed some espresso in the Moka Pot.

Then Melody started work on breakfast - scrambled eggs and toast! We cooked it up on the living room floor, just making sure to keep the stove on top of a few ceramic plates for heat dissipation. Be sure you're adequately ventilated when using one of these stoves- these gasses are not so safe to breathe in large quantities.

After nightfall the house would get really chilly so we curled up and played some scrabble or listened to the radio, generating heat with the stove one batch at a time. By breaking up the combustion process into discrete parts, this stove generates an even, virtually smokeless heat. All that's left at the end is a small pile of ash. All you need is a squirt of lighter fluid or rubbing alcohol to get it started. If you have trees nearby you'll be with heat for a long time. This thing can run on twigs!

The next plan is to build an even bigger one with a longer burn time. It was a drag to have to reload the little guy- introducing fresh wood to a live batch seems to disturb the gasification process and generates smoke. A coffee can sized stove would burn for quite a while.