Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I was at a party yesterday and someone reminded me of the mini series – Ikea Heights.
Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing.
Wonderful and cleverly done… Not super compelling but good fun, if you’ve not checked it out yet go watch it.
For a long while now I’ve had a problem with my pacemaker… The problem is I can’t reliable use the internal mix recorder. It records like midi by recording the actions and tunes then when you export from the editor it flattens the whole thing into a flatten Ogg Vorbis file.
Problem is it seems to screw up the mixes even though I know the mix was correct. I posted details on the unofficial pacemaker forum but people were blaming Linux, 64bit, Wine or Firmware problem.
Well I’m happy to say since I upgraded the Pacemaker with the new official beta it seems to be better (not perfect). I’m going to give it a proper test soon… If its correct, then it was the firmware all that time, and I should be able to rescue the old mixes, which would be fun. Because the Pacemaker is just a linux device, I’ve also backed it up a few times to my server and then to the cloud.
Expect more travels with pacemaker soon including my airplane mixes…
Following up from my posts (here) (here) (here and also now here) about Perceptive Media… I’m very proud to announce Breaking Out, our BBC R&D experiment into new editorial formats.
The prototype requires performs best on Chrome using the new WebAudioAPI, but does work in Firefox, Opera and Safari through a fallback solution (this will eat your bandwidth as it uses WAV’s rather than compressed audio like Ogg Vorbis and Mpeg3). I would suggest keeping memory and cpu intensive applications shut while running the demo because there some serious calculations happening client side.
But most of all I’d urge everyone to leave feedback, no matter how bad or good it is… Then share it around for other people to hear and experience.
Massive thanks to everyone involved in the project…
Writer: Sarah Glenister
Harriet: Maeve Larkin
Lift operator: Anthony Churnside
Producers: Anthony Churnside and Ian Forrester
Media Engine code: Happy Worm
Jplayer Audio engine: Happy Worm
Website code: Yameen Rasul and Matthew Brooks
Illustrations: Angie Chan
With special thanks: Sharon Sephton, Henry R Swindell, Maxine Glancy, Usman Mullan, Elizabeth Valentine and the BBC Writers Room
I’m also happy to say we will be making the Media Engine code available under the Apache License for all you guys who want to hack around with the concept yourself.
Actually there might be some easter eggs in the audio drama to find for those not interested in getting all dirty in the actual code.
Art talking place in front of a live audience. I like the idea but lets get it right, its not crowd sourced or even participatory art. Its more like watching a designer working on a piece of work. There is no input from the crowd, just watching and waiting…
If your in London, this is certainly worth checking out however its ending soon, so you’d better be quick.
I thought I was pretty straight forward with my thoughts about using sonodrome devices with the pacemaker but some people did ask for a clearer description, the picture above this should be all you need.
So instead of plugging the Pacemaker straight into a amp, you plug the line out into the input of a your Sonodrome box. The Sonodrome box can be anything you want to build, I really want to build a Flanger Effect box on my first go, something I love playing with when djing but is sadly lacking from the pacemaker right now. Once you attach the output of the Sonodrome box to the Amp your away pretty much. I know you can buy effect peddles which do the same thing but there usually so heavy, made for bands, use external power and look like crap. What I would build would be unfussy, simple and small enough to throw in the bag alongside the pacemaker for live events.
A couple words of warning however.
The Sonodrome box, needs to deliver totally clean sound when not in use, because un/plugging it mid set would be a nightmare. So no amplification at 0 I guess. The Box should aid that feeling of movement, so big fat buttons and the like. They also need to be pretty solid when mounted, as there expected to get quite a lot of abuse.
There’s also some advantages to this type of setup, like taking a 3.5inch stereo jack on the input but having a selectable 5.5inch jack or even a XLR on the output. The projects seem pretty straight easy to follow. The one idea which really interests me a lot is the wiimote one. With bluetooth and a few selectable effects it should be straight forward to farm all the changes to the accelerometers on a wiimote instead. Although I can kind of imagine how it would work, I have no idea how much work it would take, maybe I’d be better asking someone to build it for me and paying them instead. Any takers?
There’s are two winners from yesterday’s coverage of the ipad.
live.twit.tv and live.gdgt.com. Between the two of them, you could hear and see what was going on live on stage but also get a real feel for the presentation details with the whole host of screenshots from live.gdgt.com. Credit is due to these guys for making this all happen, shame on Apple for not just streaming the whole event. You can’t stop the signal…
This is so unheard of, a super conference streaming live to the world. Only Doug Kaye at IT Conversations could have pulled this off. If your not already listening, I highly recomend you do. Currently its 19:45 in the London and there on the Mind and Body sessions so its about 14:45 in Maine. Pop!Tech is a real mix bag of inspirational speakers and real world challenges. Can I also just say the QuickCast option which bundles up all the Pop!Tech presentations in one large zip file well before they get podcasted again on IT Conversations is a pretty neat deal at 100 dollars for the whole lot.
If your like me listening on there xbox you simply need to create a *.strm file and stick http://www.itconversations.com/livestream.asx
in the first line. Then point the xbox to the *.strm (poptech 2005.strm is mine) file and your away. I've told my xbox to cache about 8megs worth at a time so I dont get any breaks at all. I thought about recording it with xbox media centre but it seems to be greyed out for some reason.
Its kinda of weird listening to Pop!Tech live, you cant just pause and go back if you missed something. So use to time shifting now, its hard going back I guess.