I’m teaching two summer classes at Art Center, in Pasadena. For professionals with some Flash experience, my night class “Interactive Toys: Advanced Toys” (7 weeks, starting Thursday May 17th) offers a chance to learn Actionscript, and make a variety of software toys, interactive widgets and games. Visit the Art Center at Night website for more […]

I had great fun presenting at the Gel (Good Experience Live) 2007 conference in NYC. My interactive Whitney Music Box (in which the crowd made noises while host Mark Hurst controlled them with a knob) worked quite well. The audience of about 400 was game, and enthusiastically yelled “PI!” (or maybe “PIE!”) when their assigned […]

A Flash-8 kaleidoscope I’ve been making today. Click to play with it (requires the Flash 8 plug-in). The raster graphics added in Flash 8 enable larger and better performance kaleidoscopic effects than in prior versions. I’m finally able to achieve effects that formerly required graphics acceleration, such as C++/OpenGL. I facetiously numbered this 842. Actually […]

I’ll be one of the presenters at next week’s GEL conference in NYC. This is my first GEL conference and it sounds quite interesting. Each of the presenters only gets 20 minutes to speak, so we’re forced to ‘come to the nut’ pretty quickly. I’m planning on exacerbating the information-overload of the poor, addled attendees […]

An interactive mosaic of candy photos by Cybele-LA, from the Candy Blog.

GamePuzzles.com is the website of Kadon Enterprises, a family owned business that builds beautiful puzzle toys to order out of acrylics and wood in their workshop in Pasadena, MD.  Most of their games consist of sets of tiles that fit together in interesting ways, such as Polyonimoes, Penrose tiles, and edge matching games using regular […]

Here’s my latest Quartz Composer screensaver for the Mac. This combines the fibonacci spiral seen in a lot of my graphic images with the harmonic motions from my Whitney Music Box. The motion in this screensaver is actually quite simple — if you look at each disc, you’ll see that it is just sitting in […]

I wrote today about the origins of Lego Mindstorms today on the WIRED blog that I contribute to, Geekdad. You may not know that Lego Mindstorms gets its name from a book by Seymour Papert called Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.  I first read this book in the 1980s, and I took Papert’s educational […]

I’ll be teaching an advanced Flash class at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies (ETech) conference this coming Monday, in San Diego. In this 3 hour hands-on class, I’ll be covering some of the advanced graphics features introduced in Flash 8, which enable you to do make things like high performance games, painting effects, motion blur, and […]

I’ve begun contributing to the new blog geekdad, part of the WIRED family of blogs. If you are a geeky parent, like me, you will love this blog. Still in its infancy, it is collecting some incredible posts full of projects you can do with your kids, like capturing spider webs, stop motion movies, model […]