steve cooley presents

Hey, check out my fine art blog to see my new arduino project box. Here’s a little preview video:

arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: arduino, stevecooley

Techshop, The SF Bay Area’s open-access public workshop:

Jim sent word about the Techshop grand opening! – Hey, Makers! If you like to build stuff but you don’t have the tools, equipment, space, or know-how, TechShop is for you!

TechShop’s Grand Opening is Saturday, September 30 and Sunday, October 1, 2006 from 11:00 AM through 3:00 PM both days. There is no charge to attend the event.

Show And Tell at the Grand Opening (Saturday and Sunday) – If you have a project you would like to show to other Makers, bring it along and either show it to people yourself, or make a sign that explains what it is. We will supply tables on which projects can be displayed. Any project is fine as long as you think it would appeal to people who like to make things….

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Wow. Wowow. $1200 for 24×7 access to an insanely huge list of industrial tools for a year… $100 a month, or $30 for one-day access. For a year, that’s about the cost of one three unit university class, isn’t it? I think the trick here is to know what you’re going to need to do, plan everything out ahead of time, swoop in and do what you need and get out. This place is just far enough away that it’s kind of a trek if I were going to go two days in a row or longer… I dunno, maybe when I get my financial independence up to speed, I can swoop in during off-peak hours and it will make sense.

Technorati Tags: techshop

I’ve been working on my projector like crazy because of my upcoming Chabot show date. Here’s a photo of the first test firing with optics, but no LCD yet:

then here it is from last night with the major wiring completed with switches for fans and the bulb. This lets the projector run fans after the bulb is off… glad to get that taken care of… plus I got a cool looking lighted switch to boot.

I wish it were actually this bright.. that’s probably too long of an exposure to capture the brightness accurately.

insert joke about getting an idea here…

I’ve finally gotten out of my indecision cube and ordered a magnetic ballast, metal halide 400 watt bulb, a mogul base, fresnel lenses, and wiring. By hook or crook, I will have my projector. I’m fully anticipating that between the dozen overhead projectors I own, I should have the remaining optics I need…

Technorati Tags: diy, LCD, projector

Hey, this is a video of the code I wrote in processing to take realtime video and create 3d boxes with a height equalling the pixel’s brightness.

I originally had this posted on my blog, but then I had a server failure, so this is being reposted to try to unbreak the links people made to this page.

Technorati Tags: bangin’, embroidery, music, musik, netlabel

here we are DIY-in’ it up again, making a one molecule countertop into about a bazillion molecules.  It’s fun smashing all that shit up, woo yeah.  Clearing it out and cleaning it up, not quite as much fun, but…  doable.  As you can see, we debated how to lay out the granite tiles a lot.  I think that’s an important part of this kind of project where you have no experience, and you have no idea how it’s going to turn out…  talk it over and try things out before you literally set it in stone.

Since this footage, I’ve cut the particle board “underlayment”, so to speak, overlapped at the right angle so as to flatten it out and strengthen it over time… we’ve gotten a good look at how we’ll lay out the tiles. Next comes securing it down and then getting on to cutting tiles for the front trim and the backsplash. This is going to be fun and scary at the same time.

Technorati Tags: demolition, diy, home improvement

Welp, we decided that the original tile countertop in the kitchen was looking too much like a bad design decision. Dark grout and light tiles apparently tended to make you not realize how much crap was accumulating on the grout, so we’re taking it out and replacing it with some nice 12×12″ galaxy black granite tiles, fitted together without any grout.

Click the photo or this link for the timelapse movie of us getting started demolishing the old tile and discovering what lies beneath. An inch and a half of very crumbly cement, as it turns out.

Technorati Tags: demolition, home improvement, timelapse

Ever try to make a collar? Ever try to attach a collar to a shirt? Holy crap, it’s really freakin’ difficult.

I’ve made a leap back into helping develop the back end of the
themes.Wordpress.net theme viewer after a brief hiatus. Things are moving along so nicely. Alphaoide and Shadow have been doing some absolutely fantastic work, and I’m extremely pleased with how cool this project is. There’s a page set up to show you the feature/bug list and the changelog.

I have some embroidery software that only runs in windows, which is lame, but.. I digress…  I’m really not feelin’ it to go license windows, so I’m going to try to run a Linux, and then WINE to run the Win32 binaries. I’ve tried:

• generations live CD
• Suse
• Debian
• knoppix
• Mepis
• SLAX (Kill Bill version)
• Ubuntu
• BeatrIX

Slax is fast, supposedly has WINE preloaded, and has an installer.  So far, so good.  Mepis was fairly smooth as well, but, it couldn’t autoconfigure it’s networking junk…  Knoppix seemed ok, but it was in german, and I couldn’t figure out how to load up the language module correctly.  Debian was ok, but.. is minimal.  I messed around with apt-get for a long long time, but, eventually, I’m finding that my life is too short to become an expert at an OS that I’m going to use to emulate an OS I don’t want to run.  BeatrIX hung on the network configuration. Ubuntu had problems with the disk image not matching the MD5 hash…

Slax is running into problems with the installer.   This is really bumming me out because Slax was really working well for me up until that point.. but, if I can’t install it on a hard drive document in  Virtual PC, that means I can’t save anything, and I can’t  stick any other CDs in the drive…  which ain’t gonna cut it if I can’t load up my embroidery software…  sigh.

Folks, this is why Linux isn’t winning on the desktop. It’s just too hard for a dumb schmoe like me to get it running as cleanly as mac os x. 

This is the new photo studio. I’ve built a couple of light diffusers, and I’m borrowing jono’s 6.3 megapixel canon… No film this time. Last time I did this level of set up, I was shooting slides…. No more of that, I think. We’ll output to slide when necessary.

check it out, This is the free outdoor theatre set up in campbell, on the side of the coffee house building. Every week they play a new movie during the summer. This is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, next week is "Yellow Submarine", to which, I think we’re going to go. There must have been 200 people there!

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, old school style

Popcorn, anyone?

rachel is enthralled. I’m wishing they’d use a stronger projector.. maybe the city could commission one from me, lol.

Check it out, Santa Cruz is down with the free outdoor movie action, too..

Technorati Tags: campbell, ca, movie, projector

here’s a fun little calculator I made that tells you how much you make per second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year. You can punch in, and then have it tell you how much you’ve made at your pay rate since you punched in. This is a work in progress, but, check it out.

life dashboard v1

Technorati Tags: salary, paycheck, finance