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 place, rotating at a constant rate. However, each disc spins slightly faster than the next largest one, which produces a series of very interesting patterns over about a 10 minute cycle.

Mac Users: To install these as screensavers, drag them into your Library/Screen Savers folder. If you don’t see a ‘Screen Savers’ folder in your library folder, make one. Any .qtz files in this folder will appear in your list of screen savers on the control panel.

By the way, if you don’t have a Mac, or just want to see the effect without downloading the screensaver, click here to view a flash movie which uses the same effect (although not as elegantly as the screensaver).

I would love to figure out how to produce a mechanical version of this screensaver, using real discs or spheres, driven by a single chain and controlled by a crank, but I haven’t yet figured out a simple way to construct it.

One of the reasons I produce so many screensavers is that I really don’t like having screensavers I didn’t personally write running on my computer. Since I get bored easily, I make new ones from time to time.

I think the Yahoo logo works well in this screensaver (and I work there, so it’s appropriate), but feel free to edit this in Quartz Composer and swap in your own logo.

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 philosophy to heart when I started teaching Lego Mindstorms classes to younger kids (that’s one of my students in the photo).  Papert’s ideas continue to guide me in my Flash videogame programming classes for high school kids.


more…

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 video processing. I’ll also cover some of the techniques used to create my Coverpop website.

See you there!

UPDATE: The slides for my class can now be viewed here. Of the most interest to Flash developers will be the project files for project 1, which demonstrate (using the same magic 8 ball) 8 different ways you can get information into Flash, ranging from the simple (HTML parameters) to the esoteric (JSON via Pipes).

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 rocketry, aerial video and proving the theory of relativity in a minivan. There is a profile of this amazing tinkering summer camp in the Bay area (shown above). My first post demonstrates how to teach your kids to talk backwards, a fun activity I did for my daughter’s slumber party.

I just made this trance-inducing screen saver for my Macbook Pro using Quartz Composer.

If you watch it long enough, especially in a dark room, you will eventually see the eye of God.

Or maybe you’ll throw up. I’m not sure.

It is definitely doing weird things to my eyes… The walls are bulging…


(Note: To install it on your Mac, just drop it into the “Screen Savers” folder inside your library folder. To install it on your Windows machine, first find a software engineer to port Quartz Composer to Windows, and then follow his instructions carefully…)

A little something I made for my students during today’s actionscript class. Here’s the flash source code, and here’s an article that explains the technique I use to generate those groooovy colors.

…and thanks to Sherrie Graham, whose quince blossoms adorn the top of my blog this spring.

You know, it’s funny how these little seasonal adornments work. I get an idea in my head that I want a little seasoning; a little sumpin-sumpin up there, and thinking there must be a million of ’em, I go to the usual places to hunt for clip art to stealslap on there, and nothing is quite right – no bare branch with a blossom is exactly like the perfect bare branch with a blossom that I have a model of spinning around in my head.

But then I went over to flickr, and searched for “branch closeup blossom” and there it was, staring me in the face! Serendipity…

While I’m on the subject of seasons, I just learned that in the US, honey bees have some kind of horrible AIDS-like disease that kills entire colonies. You know what bees are, right? Those little critters that are usually inside of those beautiful blossoms, fertilizing the plant so it can make things like, oh, apples. I’m trying to imagine a life without apples. Even scarier is the thought of life without bees. How many countless other things are dependent on them, directly and indirectly?

Feel bad yet? Sherrie has a lot of other pretty photographs. Check ’em out!

Daylight savings, whose ostensible purpose is to save energy, is an incredible annoyance to those of us in the US, and the recent changes in the system only make things worse.

If you want to find a computer that hasn’t been fixed to compensate for the three week difference in DST this year, try calling the time. Our local service, 818-853-1212, is currently providing times that are an hour in the past. I suppose this is evidence of the diminishing powers of the phone company, whose heyday was also in the past.

Feel free to use this as an excuse to be late for work tomorrow.

When I made 4,800 kakuro puzzles for this website, it never occurred to me that some of you would run out. But apparently, it’s happened, or at least that’s what the emails tell me.

So here’s 1,600 more.

Big ones too.

Enjoy :)

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know I’m a bit obsessed with radial symmetry. Flickr’s prolific Leo Reynolds (LeoL30) made this lovely movie out of (what else?) those round things I like so much.