All submissions are summarily photographed by curators Garrett, Adam, and Ophelia, and catalogued in their ever exanding archives (currently 797 submissions and growing).
The gallery now includes a huge array of artfully mutated envelopes, as well as a few other items, such as ketchup, macaroni & cheese, throw pillows and toast!
Fans of my Whitney Music Box will certainly want to check out IanniX, a highly graphical music composition software program based a pioneering system (UPIC) developed by the late Iannis Xenakis.
Xenakis was an influential stochastic composer who had a background in architecture (he was the principal designer behind the Philips Pavillion at the 1958 Brussels World’s fair). He made rigorous use of mathematical concepts in music, creating clouds of sound using statistical techniques.
From the site:
“IanniX is a graphical score editor based on the previous UPIC developed by Iannis Xenakis during the 70’s. It allows the user to draw, edit and manipulate forms and objects within a multi temporal space (ie, multiple timelines) which, when read, sends out OSC packets that you can get with any software understanding OSC, like pd, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Csound, OpenMusic, Usine, Processing and others, to name just a few. It also works as an OSC client, so you can write and modify your IanniX score from another software or another computer.”
IanniX is available for Macs, Linux and Windows machines.
MINDPOWER is a brand new self-working magic trick I made, in which the computer actually reads your mind, using subtle hints from the way you move the mouse, as well as the little-known but very useful ESP opcode in the Intel instruction set.
Using these techniques, the computer is able to not only guess your card, but also a four-letter word!
I’ve always been a sucker for bands and artists that rock critics deride as “pretentious”. Thirty years ago, I aspired to be Rick Wakeman in his heyday, wearing a floor length golden cape, and surrounded by banks and banks of mellotrons, synthesizers and organs, the London Philharmonic, and a choir; making a truly majestic noise as my bank account rapidly dwindled from the expense of making it. Today, I am indeed often surrounded by keyboards, and my bank account is generally dwindling, but alas, I have no golden cape to show for it!
My current favorite ultra pretentious band that nobody’s heard of is Sophe Lux. This is a little outfit out of Portland that is powered by the uber-talented Gwynneth Haynes, who channels Kate Bush and David Bowie in equal measure. You’ll either love her or you’ll hate her, but you can’t say she’s boring!
This month, I’ve made a couple of minor changes to the puzzle pages, in response to feedback from puzzle solvers like you.
Firstly, I have added a scratch area to my collection of Tough Sudoku Puzzles, as shown here. My Super-Tough and Insane puzzles have always had this extra grid for working out the puzzle solution, and now the tough puzzles have it too. If you’d like a scratch area on any of the other puzzles, let me know.
Secondly, I’ve made my Jigoku puzzles available in the popular 4-per-page format, for those of you who wish to save some trees.
I’ve acquired a nice little collection of third party apps, freeware and shareware, since switching to a Mac recently. There are three that deserve special mention, because they work together to make using the Mac an even more efficient and harmonious experience, especially if you are multitasking.
My first few days using the Mac, I had a tendency to drag frequently used applications onto the dock, where I could get to then easily. Pretty soon my Dock got pretty cluttered, and I turned on the magnification feature, so I could fit more stuff on, while still seeing the individual icons under selection. Then I found something that reduced the clutter and enabled me to launch apps quicker: QuickSilver. QuickSilver is best described as “Spotlight on Steroids” and it enables you to launch apps by invoking it (typically with Ctrl-Space or Command-Space) and typing in the first letter or two of the app’s name. So, for example, to launch “Remote Desktop Connection,” an app I use once or twice a day, I type Cmd-Space, R, Return. QuickSilver provides visual feedback so that you know that you’ve selected the right app.
QuickSilver is lightning fast, as the name implies and it learns which apps your use most frequently so that usually I only have to type a single letter. It also allows you to do a lot more than simply launch apps. It goes pretty deep, and can reduce a number of common activities (such as sending files via email or creating archives) to a series of keystrokes that are quickly retained by your muscle memory.
I found the continual bobbing of icons up and down on the dock somewhat annoying and lacking in information. The solution to this problem is Growl, a notification system that provides little informative dialog bubbles when interesting things happen in your apps. So, for example, if I receive a quick handful of emails, I can see at a glance that none of them are important, and continue with what I am doing. Using Growl’s control panel you decide what notifications you receive, and how you receive them. You can make important notifications “sticky” so that you won’t miss them if you’ve stepped away.
Growl is supported by a whole slew of my favored apps, including Apple’s Mail, Adium (IMs), CyberDuck (FTP), Colloquy (IRC), Vienna (Newsreader), Acquisition (P2P), and of course many of the apps that you favor as well. I view Growl support as evidence that an application developer is doing the right thing.
Most of the apps mentioned in this post are freeware, and therefore, free. This last app is one of the rare shareware apps I’ve actually paid for since switching to the Mac; a rare thing for me, since I’m a cheapskateDad. The app with the honor of cracking open my wallet is Path Finder, a replacement for the Mac’s (already pretty decent) Finder.
I found, in my first few weeks of using the Mac, that I would often end up with a bunch of finder windows on my Desktop (or minimized on my Dock), and would periodically have to close them all to clear out my dock. These windows were the detritus of my Finder activity, in which I navigated to various folders. Also, it seemed that I was continually navigating to the same folders over and over again.
Path Finder eliminates much of this needless activity by providing a highly functional tabbed browsing window (much like the tabbed browsing in Firefox). Folders that you continually revisit can be saved in a tab and reinvoked with a single click.
The window has a number of useful and customizeable “bat wings”, including a list of running apps (perfect for dragging files onto), a “drop stack” which acts as a convenient tray for moving files from one folder to another, a terminal window which automatically plops you into the desired directory, and more. There is also a preview pane which allows you to preview the contents of text files, images, movies, sounds, and a pretty decent built-in text editor. An incredible amount of functionality for a measley 35 bucks.
Path Finder speeds up my work by reducing the distance I need to drag documents to open them in my favored apps, or to copy them to another folder. After a few hours of using PathFinder, I opted to have it automatically shut Finder down when it starts up, and I haven’t looked back. The number of (path)Finder windows on my Dock is now typically one – my main work area, which contains a few tabs for my current projects, and that one window has been tweaked and batwinged to perfection.
Wolfgang’s Vault has an impressive collection of live recordings of concerts at the Fillmore East, Fillmore West and other Bill Graham venues. The concerts cover a period from the mid 1960s to the 1980s and include many famous bands in their prime, include Cream, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, James Brown, David Bowie and others. They also have some very expensive T-Shirts.
I heard on the radio that the operator of this site is under some legal pressure from some of the acts involved, so you may want to check these recordings out soon, in case the site goes dark.
While we’re on the subject of concerts, I’ve added a new coverpop of the most highly rated concert videos on YouTube.
I have built up a pretty large collection of cool perl scripts that use the Image::Magick perl extensions – some of these are documented in Flickr Hacks. Recently I switched to a using a Mac, and I’ve been having a devil of a time using these scripts, because they require ImageMagick, and LWP, and I was getting all kinds of errors trying to install these into the version of Perl that shipped with the Mac.
I finally managed it today. First of all, I installed ActiveState Perl on my Mac, and set up my PATH variable to look in the /usr/local/bin directory first. I modified my various perl scripts to use this version of Perl, instead of the built-in one. ActiveState perl has built-in support for more of the basic CPAN modules that I tend to use, and a pretty good cpan utility for getting more of them. Unfortunately, ImageMagick is still a little too fringe and is not supported in their collection of CPAN ports.
So… I followed the instructions at Josh Clark’s excellent blog to install ImageMagick. This requires first installing MacPorts which is another tool for easing open source installations on the Mac (similar to Fink, which I’ve used, but which didn’t help for this particular problem).
A big thank you to Josh Clark for providing these instructions – I’ve been banging my head against the wall on this one for weeks!
UPDATE (7/2008): I recently went through this process again on a newer Mac with the Leopard OS. This time, I found it easier to use the Perl & ImageMagick that comes with MacPorts, rather than using ActiveState Perl. There were still some issues though… There is currently no MacPort port of the LWP::Simple package, so I had to use CPAN to install that, and it wasn’t painless. Also, the MacPort version of ImageMagick should be installed with the +perl option, rather than using the standalone p5_perl_magick package (which is no longer needed).
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I thought the winter solstice would be an appropriate time to make another one of these graphs, and here it is.
To build this graph I collected about 40,000 thumbnails of photos that have been tagged “Sunsetâ€.
I positioned each thumbnail horizontally according to the day it was taken, and vertically according to the hour it was taken.
By making each photo translucent, I created a “hot spot†which shows when the most photos were taken, each day of the past year.
The bright band shows the approximate time of sunset for each day for most of the photographers (who are in the northern hemisphere). You can see that as the year progresses, the time of the sunset changes.
The deepest dip in the band corresponds to the summer solstice (about June 22), and the high parts on each end correspond to the winter solstices (about December 22).
The photos which are not in the bright area are anomolous for various reasons. They may not be photographs of the sunset or they may have incorrect time information in the metadata.
The gallery now includes a huge array of artfully mutated envelopes, as well as a few other items, such as ketchup, macaroni & cheese, throw pillows and toast!
