today and tomorrow

‘Spinal Rhythms‘ is the thesis project of Eva Schindling. The subtitle is ‘Autonomous Embodied Evolution of a Biomimetic Robot’s Rhythmic Motion Behavior’, I’ve read it a few times and I’m still puzzled. It’s all about the physical movement of a stick-creature and its fitness. She didn’t use any electric motor to move the limbs but elastic shape memory alloy springs. Those contract when heated with electic current and expand when the cooldown, an Arduino board controls the whole system (an open source physical computing platform). It is of course very conceptual but maybe the video will clear up a few things.

‘What it is without the hand that wields it‘ is an electronic sculpture by Riley C. Harmon.

Violence is an inevitable, mechanical function of the human brain, hard-coded down through time by culture, genetics, and evolution. Mediated experiences of killing change our perception of violence and death. As players die in a public video game server for Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, the electronic solenoid valves spray a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of nebulous kills.

Custom electronics based on an Atmega8/168 micro-controller are connected to a PC running a dedicated Counter-strike Source server. Players across the internet can connect and play live on the server, and each time a player dies, a java script written in Processing sends serial commands to the micro-controller, telling it to spray fake blood.

found at MAKE: Blog

Drop it like it’s hot! Dropclock, a 137 MB screensaver! Every minute of real time is numerically expressed with Helvetica Heavy dropping into water in super slow-motion. Nifty!
I don’t understand why you need an $15 license, maybe you get extra options …
Made by tha ltd.

Made with Fyre by Holger Lippman.

Tadaa the iPhone SDK is here, ok it’s still in beta though. So if you have seen the presentation video, you might be quite excited too. Just skip to minute 41 and there you have it, nintendo Wii-like controls for gaming. The big advantage that Apple has, is that they have full control over the hardware and software. And that’s where I see the weakest point of the Google Android platform.
And for those of you who are still waiting for the Flash plugin for the iPhone. I guess as long as Adobe doesn’t make a custom player, we won’t see Flash on the iPhone. How would the iPhone / Flash player scale down Flash content anyway? And is the processor strong enough? Battery life? … just forget about it.
I actually had to use someone else’s mac to have a look at the SDK, I still have a G4 Powerbook and you’ll need an intel one.

Do you use Microsoft Excel? Do you make drawings with it? Did you know that you can render 3D objects with it? No? Then read this article.

Yeah, that’s a mobile phone. Well actually it’s a development circuit board for the google Android operating system by Qualcomm. Can you see an iPhone competitor in there?
More info and hardware porn shots at Wired’s Gadget Lab.

E15 is an experimental architecture that places the power of presentation of web content into the hands of those that use it. Based on a dynamic, interactive OpenGL-based scripting engine, E15 exposes an entirely new face to web content, freely modifiable by each individual user.

Yesterday, Google released the software development kit for its mobile platform called Android. Of course I had to install it and give it a try, it comes with sample code and some standard features like a web browser and a maps application.
The standard graphical user interface looks dull to me, especially since I played around with an iPhone before. The screen resolution of the demo phone is only 320 by 240 and it’s not that snappy, maybe that’s because it’s only an emulation.
Although the iPhone is available since last Friday here in Germany, I didn’t buy one for the simple reason that the iPhone and the contract are too expensive. But if I could get one from the States (over a €100 cheaper!), I would.
So Apple, I’m quite curious to play with the iPhone SDK next February! Bring it on!

RGB MusicLab converts RGB (Red, Green and Blue) value of an image to chromatic scale sounds. The program reads RGB value of pixels from the top left to the bottom right of an image. One pixel makes a harmony of three note of RGB value, and the length of note is determined by brightness of the pixel.