A new product, Reaktor Animated Circuits from Native Instruments has an interesting sequencer called Spiral (shown above) which was inspired by my Whitney Music Box.

I’ve been playing with a version that Native Instruments sent me, and it’s pretty cool!

If you’re interested in getting Animated Circuits, you’ll also need the latest version of Reaktor 5 (their incredibly powerful synthesis construction kit) in order to use the Spiral user interface.

A few readers have written to me in the last few months, requesting Killer Sudoku puzzles, so I’ve been feverishly working weekends to get some ready for the website. They are just about ready to go, and I’m ready to pass out samples.

Killer Sudokus are an interesting hybrid between the Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles currently offered here at KrazyDad. Solving them requires both the complex logical strategy used in Sudoku, in combination with all the arithmetical strategies used in Kakuros. If you have not tried them before, you will find them extremely challenging — a little slow-going at first, but very rewarding. My wife, a former Kakuro addict, is now addicted to them.

I’m providing these sample puzzles both to give you a taste, and also to double-check I haven’t made any horrible programming mistakes. You’ll find instructions printed on the puzzles.

Killer Sudoku Sampler

Killer Sudoku Collection

If you notice any problems with these puzzles, or you find the instructions unclear, be sure to let me know!

UPDATE: I’ve created a new Killer Sudoku section on the site. Currently there are three difficulty levels offered, with more difficult puzzles to come…

In a recent comment here on KrazyDad, Daniel Piker shared some flash variations he made recently of the John Whitney-inspired “Incremental Drift” animations used in my Whitney Music Box.

These are all visual eye candy, without music, but they demonstrate some great flash animation techniques!

• One with semicircles
• One very colourful one – The complementary colours at the half-way point are nice!
• and one where the elements are arrayed on a grid, not overlayed on the same point.

More to come on Dan’s blog.

I’ve moved KrazyDad and Coverpop to a new private server at Dreamhost, in hopes of improving performance. Performance does indeed seem to be better and so far everything seems to be working okay. However, this here is a big complicated website, and I may have missed something.

Let me know (by commenting on this post) if you encounter any parts of the site that are newly broken, and I’ll take a look.

– Jim

UPDATE: It’s come to my attention that both Flickr Random and The Big Picture are broken. Keep me posted if you find anything else.

UPDATE: Both fixed…

It suddenly occured to me as I was driving to work yesterday that the songs “Crack that Whip” by Devo, and “Breathe” by Pink Floyd are oddly similar (did I mention it’s a loooong drive?)… So I downloaded the demo version of Ableton Live last night and came up with this mashup at 2 in the morning. I was pleased to discover that the two songs are already in the same key, and the tempi are closer than you’d think!

Dark Side of the Whip

(by the way, I’m using Yahoo’s very handy media player (aka “Goose”) to embed this audio. My friends at Y! Music, Santa Monica, worked on it, and it is a beautiful work of engineering!

More puzzle mosaics here.

Embed codes available here.

I’ve been playing with making these puzzle-style animated mosaics this week, for a Topspin-related project. The final image is made by reassembling parts of the original image.

Here’s a larger Obama/McCain mosaic.

And here’s the first one I made, featuring David Byrne and Brian Eno.

UPDATE

Here are some more I made on Saturday.

Flag/Obama
Marilyn/Mona
Sgt Pepper / Beatles

Have you noticed that both Obama and Biden’s names have five letters apiece? If you stack them on top of each other, you can draw various paths to spell out such things as “BO BI DA ME NA” and “O BIBA DE MAN”

I don’t know if this is actually useful, but then, utility is overrated. Meanwhile, the Internet Anagram Server tells me that OBAMA+BIDEN can be reconfigured to make MEDIA NABOB (my favorite), BABIED MOAN, AMOEBA BIND, and many others…