some junk we like
Congrats to Sonya Paz on being named the artist of the year for the 11th Senate District of California! I used to work with Sonya at Adobe way back in the day, and have enjoyed seeing her bring her whole game to my hometown of Campbell. I couldn’t imagine it happening to a nicer person, yay!
Check out her website at http://www.sonyapaz.com/…
Hey me and my group are playing a live electronic improvised jam session. Two shows, actually. Tonight at Works/San Jose and then next friday night at South First Billiards on the same street as Works… Check out the details here:
http://3rl.us/subzero/
Hope you can make it to one or the other!
As copiously stated, I have no formal training in electronics, and I’ve reached a mature enough age that I can no longer accept an electronic component as a black box, so when I come across a device and can figure out how to use it without being able to locate instructions, i feel like it’s only right to make a drawing of it and try to explain my hypothesis for how it works.
With that being said, here’s my best guess at how the 10k slide potentiometers (sliders / slide pot) works:
the 3 pin slide potentiometer (10k)
The obvious control at the top sets the resistance. The voltage in (V+) and ground (V-) pins run inline with each other, and the resistance value is read from the pin adjacent to the voltage in pin. I’m using an Arduino to read the value, and in my case, i actually needed an additional resistor in front of the voltage in pin to limit the incoming current. When i hooked the slider up directly to the arduino, it didn’t work very well, acting way more like it was a logarithmic curve potentiometer than the linear curve pot I thought it was. About 2 minutes later, it was blistering hot. Too hot to touch, actually! So, I quickly disconnected it from the arduino and added a 10k resistor in front of the voltage in, and then it started behaving much more reasonably. The values I was getting from the 10k slider were not what I was expecting, so I’ll have to dial back on the current resistor from 10k to maybe 1k and see if that helps get the values from the slide pot more inline with my expectations.
Derek and I have been working hard on building some useful tools for beat sequencing using Rosco and Max/MSP. Poking around at Max/MSP made me realize how much I understand PureData, so I went back to PD and built a comprehensive “data-in” patch to receive the OSC messages from Rosco.
Click to preview what this patch does
Hey there, I’ve created a page for Rosco since I’ve revised it to version 2.0.
Rosco is an app that I’m working on that creates Open Sound Control (OSC) messages. It can generate them with or without taking data readings from an Arduino. Version 1 only had 6 sliders (one for each analog pin from the arduino), but now the new version includes being able to use 12 checkboxes (which correlate to pins 2-13 on an arduino). I’ve revved the app, the quartz composer file, and the arduino code to all show examples how to get it going. Check it out!
This was too cool not to repost:
I do love Omnigraffle. I do not love the … apparent default (?)… behavior of having your whole diagram fly into a new arrangement when you connect things together. This is called automatic layout. Here’s how to Make It Stop Doing That. Command-3, uncheck the “automatic layout” box.
Ahh, much better. Much Better. PHEW.
So I’m tryin’ to learn Cocoa, and so I’ve been poking at an application that I’ve modified from the sample code for AMSerialPort from Harmless Cocoa. I know a little bit about the arduino, and I know a little bit about cocoa, so I poked and poked and poked, and from a well timed piece of help from my cocoa class instructor Malcolm Crawford, I finally got something fairly functional working. It’s called Rosco. All it does is take input from an arduino’s analog pins and transmit the values out to OSC through a cocoa app and out to a quartz composer composition. Nothing too fancy. I’m using it in conjunction with my Arduino Project Box, but really you could send any analog value from the arduino. It’s really such a hodge podge of code and hardware, it’s bordering on being silly. This really isn’t supposed to be useful just yet, but it was useful for me to learn more about cocoa programming. Maybe you might find it somewhat interesting. Here’s a diagram of what’s going on.
Click here to download it to try it out.
I’m starting to feel sick, so I figured I’d just let my mind wander off to go off on a random tangent or two for a minute or two.
how on earth do cats keep track of their baths? They seem to have some kind of uncontrollable compulsion to spontaneously clean themselves. one minute doing absolutely nothing but sitting and breathing, and then the next thing you know they’re laser focused on what I can only assume is some kind of catmap in their heads with a kind of fading color that lets them know of how recently each part of the catmap has been cleaned in the last 24-ish hours. what gets me is how randomly each part of the catmap gets attention. The cat could be covering a large swath of the back and then switch to the face, and then remember a spot on the back it missed and then go back to some other random part.
man, I wish gifraffiti worked on leopard. Clicky.
Technorati Tags: cat
I won’t be giving Joe Escobar any of my business anymore. Recently we brought in two rings for resizing (to make them smaller) and they wanted to charge us $85 a piece! Even after I gave them thousands of dollars, specifically to purchase a Canadian conflict-free diamond that I special ordered from them, and now they want to nickel and dime me in this economy… incredible enough. But! It was the delivery of their demeaning lecture about the quality of work done on the rings is what really pisses me off. Educate the customer, but don’t be rude about it. Don’t make the customer feel bad. I thought this was the most basic concept to run a business!
My wife was left feeling bummed about the experience, and I’m completely livid about it. I don’t know how they can be so completely conditional with their level of customer care and maintain their business. I’m not a big spender, so I know I can’t leverage any kind of reversal of their staff’s incredibly rude behavior. But, I can tell you about it and I also won’t give them anymore of my business.
Technorati Tags: joe escobar
Saddam Hussein unavailable for comment.
my piece “exploration two” sold at auction for $225. 
Technorati Tags: art, sanjose, stevecooley, works, Works/San José, workssanjose
File under: “PEOPLE UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT”
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1403369.html
Many Mormons believe they are being unfairly targeted and compare the anti-Mormon sentiment to a witch hunt.
“This is not fair – a lot of people wanted this passed, not just Mormons,” said Lynnette Black of Sacramento who rallied in support of Eckern in front of Music Circus last week. “We (church members) worked hard and within the law. It’s very hard to see this attitude toward Mormons.”
West, spokeswoman for the church, said the Mormons were part of a coalition that supported the ballot measure.
“We’re only 2 percent of the population,” West said. “We feel we’re getting too much credit.”
IRONY ALERT!! WOOP! WOOP! WOOP!
They wanted to unfairly discriminate against a minority class of citizenry, now they don’t feel like it’s fair to be the TARGET of that kind of sentiment?
The REALLY ironic thing here is that while prop 8 will likely be overturned in the courts, the self-selection and identification of these people as homophobic hate mongers will last forever.
Technorati Tags: bad judgement, irony, mormon, prop8, LDS
My brother in law Justin just sent this to me. It’s a No-on-8 rally in LA that went on.
Chetry: It’s very interesting the grounds for which they are challenging. At least in one of these lawsuits they said that it was a constitutional revision rather than an amendment. And that means it would need two-thirds approval of the House in the legislature. So do we think it could go to the state house in California as well as being fought in the courts?
Hostin: I really think this is going to be a legal issue. I think this is going to go before the California Supreme Court. And we already know as you mentioned that there are three cases pending before the California Supreme Court. And what is interesting to note is that it’s the very same court that allowed these marriages in the first place.
The one comforting thought I had when I contemplated the passage of this legitimized bigotry and hatred was that there’s no freakin’ way it would stand up in court.
In my opinion, the best thing we could do for the state is amend the campaign finance laws to abolish out of state funding entirely for state ballot propositions. That would keep big businesses and evil rich people out of my state’s politics.
It cost the church members $35M+ to pass this, and forced an equal amount of wasted dollars on trying to fight this stupidity. What an amazing waste of money. What could we have done with $70M+ dollars instead? how about help get people on the streets some help? Maybe bolster early childhood education? How about k12 teacher retention programs? How about maybe just sticking that money right back in your wallet for a rainy day instead?
Wasted wasted wasted money. Down the tubes. And for what? What does the church get out of this? That’s one hell of a weird recruiting campaign. I don’t know who their target market was for this. Nobody I’d want to congregate with, that’s for damn sure.
The Specials sang a great song, it goes like this:
If you have a racist friend Now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end
If you are a racist or a bigot, you are not my friend.
Technorati Tags: prop8
Fox news doing it’s own post-mortem of Sarah Palin and dishing dirt. This would be the first time I’ve heard something actually fair and balanced from Fox news entertainment. thanks milk and cookies…
