atoms&electrons;

This is the result of my first experiment making a sliceform object from interlocking pieces of cut cardstock. I got the idea and the name “sliceform” from a variety of folks on the web who are experimenting with this. Just as I was posting this I discovered these pictures on flickr from someone with the exact same colors of cardstock.

I tried out two new ideas for Halloween this year. One of them was an ill-conceived plan to carve a pumpkin using a Dremel tool. The pumpkin looked OK, but by the end I was covered in microscopic pumpkin shrapnel from head to toe. The other idea was to make an LED pumpkin light, and it turned out great.

I call it the Spookotron and it uses 3 ShiftBrite RGB LEDs to light up the inside of a pumpkin. The LEDs are controlled by an Atmel ATMega 8-bit microcontroller. I chose the Arduino-compatible RBBB from Modern Device because it’s tiny and easy to program.

Who the hell came up with Pin The Tail on the Donkey? And furthermore, why on earth are people still playing this asinine game? The wisdom of taking a bunch of kids, spinning them around until they’re dizzy, then sending them careening around the room blindfolded with the instructions “stick this thumbtack into something” is questionable at best. It’s one of those games like the 3-legged race where the amusement is not so much for the participant as it is the spectators who hope to laugh at some minor tragedy. Both games are based on the premise of performing under constraints – not being able to see, not being able to move freely, etc.

Constraints show up in creative projects often. The choice of medium for an art project will impose constraints, and those constraints force you to think creatively about how to deal with them. Success can come from turning the constraints into an advantage, like the staples sculptures here. Or it can be less about the actual results and more about the Sisyphus-like effort involved in the creation.

This is still a work in progress, but I took a couple of the LED matrix panels mentioned in a previous entry and combined them with a small OLED display. They’re driven by software on a PC that pulls updates from Twitter and Facebook and shows them on the display.

Eventually I’ll build a few of these into some nice enclosures and hang them on the wall to make a literal Facebook wall.

When I finally get around to writing my self-help book, it will be entitled Everything I Needed To Know About Life, I Learned From The Apple ][. It was my first computer and to really get the most out of it you needed to understand how it worked at the lowest levels. It was the period of my life when I had no money and nearly infinite time, so spending weeks reverse-engineering games and copy protection schemes to understand how they worked was the norm. I learned persistence, dealing with constraints and a work ethic from those experiences. Like any formative experience, it left an indelible impression on me. If I’m ever called-upon to testify in a court of law, I’d like to be sworn in with one hand on The Red Book.