Some more fun with Blender. Introducing… My Little Pwnies. enjoy.
My Little Pwnies. Sure, they LOOK cute. But they can frag you like nobody's business.
original pony models are here (no longer available, but i have copies if you want lemme know).
For Philly Tech Week, we’re opening our doors every night of the week at 8pm, extending our normal Open House format to the entire week, for this week only. We have a variety of different activities planned. Check it out.
It's gonna be hot!
Monday, 25th: Open Work Night
For the first night of Tech Week, we’ll be working in the space on projects together. Come stop by and say hi, lend a hand, or just to jibber-jabber about your own projects. This is a little different than normal Open Houses in that we typically curb work sessions for the night.
Tuesday, 26th: Micro-controller Show and Tell
Have an Arduino, MSP430, Propeller, or other MCU project that you want to show off? Want to learn some basics of gettings started with the MSP430? Come out this night and have fun with bit-twiddling, speaker beeping, and LED-blinking.
Wednesday, 27th: Regularly Scheduled Open House + Late Night Karaoke
Our regularly scheduled social hour. We have a hacktastic “karaoke machine” running on a Macbook that lets you queue songs through our IRC channel. We don’t usually start the Karaoke until 10pm, but if enough people are interested we’ll get it started early.
Thursday, 28th: DIY/Electronic Music
Step-tone generators, electric guitar effects pedals, sequencers, keyboards. Whether you’ve made your own instrument or not, any way you want to make music tonight, come on down and jam with us.
Friday, 29th: “Bricks and Grips” – Arm Wrestling/Puzzle Game Tournament
Based on a similar concept that we are not permitted to mention due to trademark issues, this game is a standard 2-player, head-to-head Tetrimino Puzzle Game, where players manipulate their pieces through an arm wrestling competition on a specially designed arm wrestling table-shaped controller.
Saturday, 30th: Artemis Game Session
For all you trekkies out there, Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator is a networked multiplayer game that simulates a spaceship’s bridge; much like what you’d see on Star Trek®.
On 04.18.11, In Random, Uncategorized, By Sean McBeth
This is a broad-concept idea that I’ve had in my head for a while and have discussed with a few people. This post is mostly a direct adaptation of those discussions. I’ve taken to calling the idea “User-Literate Technology”, mostly because, in the same way we might say that a particular person is technology-literate, we should also be able to say that a particular technology is user-literate.
In some ways, this is similar to “user-friendly”, except that it places the burden on the technology to adapt to the user, rather than the technology making it easy for the user to adapt to it. Does some particular technology in question create its own gestures and idioms, while seeking to make them easy to learn, or does the technology capture idioms that are common in the culture for which the technology is intended? If the technology errs more on the latter side, then it is “User-Literate”, more than “User-Friendly”.
Before systems can become more User-Literate, they largely need to dispense of their most prevalent interface: the keyboard and mouse. The keyboard is a text and data entry tool, but as an interface into consumer computing, it is roughly 150 keys of confusion, distraction, and indirection. For example, why do we still have a Scroll Lock function on our keyboards? Scroll Lock hasn’t been a useful feature for the last 20 years; in other words, one of the most important and significant markets for consumer computing has never lived in an era that needs a Scroll Lock. It’s like issuing every new driver a buggy whip with their driver’s license.
Mice are nice for tasks that involve precise selection of elements on a 2D plain. It was designed in an era when graphical displays were not much larger than 640×480 pixels. Nowadays, I have a laptop with a native resolution of 1600×900, and I can hook up a second monitor to it to double that space. We’re talking about screen real estate that is five to ten times larger than when the mouse first became popular. To give you an idea of what that means, take a look at the 640×480 highlighted area on my desktop screenshot (and yes, I paid for Photoshop).
Imagine using only the lower-left corner
Computing has seen more huge leaps and bounds in usability than it has incremental improvements. Check out this screenshot of the Xerox Star GUI. I remind you that this is from 1981. Try to identify any functional elements from modern computer interfaces that are not in this image (protip: from a technical perspective, there aren’t any, they are all adaptations of concepts shown here).
The Graphical User Interface from the Xerox Star experimental OS, 1981
The early GUI interfaces like Star and its clones (including Macintosh and Windows) got something very right: they made functionality discoverable. There were two primary ways in which they did this, by providing visual cues on the screen immediately in the user’s field of view, and by providing multiple access points to the functionality to accommodate users who work in different ways. Having a menu option labeled “Help” is very inviting, but advanced users learn to ignore large portions of screen text, so it’s very important to make systems that cater to both the wide-eyed (literally) newb and the hardened veteran.
Regardless, monitors are only good if the user A) has a fully functional visual sense, and B) is able to devote their attention to the display. If the user is blind or distracted by other visual tasks (say, operating a heavy machine) then the display is a large, hot paperweight on the desk.
Luckily, we are starting to see some very basic work in this area hitting the consumer market. Between systems like the iPad and the hacktastic stuff being done with the Kinect, there is a lot going on with removing computing from its keyboard-and-mouse hegemony. Still, in many cases, they often rely on the user being able to memorize gestures and command sequences. If a user has to do something unnatural–even if it is done through advance motion sensing and image processing–then it might as well just be any other button-pushing interface.
This is why I never got into the Nintendo Wii. Yes, the motion tracking of the controller was a wonderful sweet-spot between price and precision. Despite that, few–if any–of the games were doing anything actually unique with it. Instead of waggling a joystick permanently affixed to a controller base and mashing buttons, you were… waggling a joystick in mid-air and mashing buttons. The user still had to learn new motion patterns and adapt to the system.
I think Google kind of picked up on the absurdity of most modern motion-tracking systems with this year’s April Fools prank, the “Gmail Motion“. Also, I think there are some good examples of user-literate technology on the market already.
I have a Wacom tablet here that is not only pressure- but also tilt-sensitive. I’ve found that the primary training hang-up is the disconnect between moving the stylus in one location and the drawing marks showing up in another; without strong hand-eye coordination that can be difficult to adjust to. Wacom has had LCD displays for a while now that have the full touch-and-tilt sensitivity built into them. I can’t imagine how amazing working with them must be (and probably won’t for a while, the smallest one is only 12″ across and costs nearly $1000. The one that I would actually want is 2 kilobucks).
There is a weather station ran by MIT with a natural language processor that you can call on your phone called JUPITER. I’ll be damned if I couldn’t figure out how to trip this thing up. Even with a fake southern accent (though reasonable, I’ve spent enough time in the south to know what they actually sound like) I couldn’t baffle it. Anything that it faltered on, I had to admit that a human would have had a hard time understanding me anyway. It’s best feature was context tracking, you could ask for the weather on a certain day in a certain city, receive it, then make an extremely contextual query like “what about the day after?” and it would get it right, “and the next day?” and BAM, weather forecastery in your ear. I heard about this thing over 5 years ago, why don’t we have flying cars yet? I understand the technology was based on a DARPA project that was being used for automated logistics in battlefield scenarios. People getting shot at don’t have time to remember how to talk to a computer. So they built a computer that could understand a screaming, cussing US Marine.
My sister cued me in to a project being developed by a group of high-schoolers in Portland, OR. A team of two 11th graders are developing voice-emotion recognition technology that; they’ve already won the Siemens Science Award in the team category. You talk into a microphone and the computer judges the emotional state you were in when you spoke. The kids are currently envisioning developing a wristwatch for autistic children who have difficulty assessing others’ emotions. The watch will flash an emoticon indicating the emotional state of the person the child is talking to.
So what is the point of all of this talk? I am organizing a symposium/exposition for User-Literate Technology. I want it to be a spring-board for starting to talk about technology that adapts to and understands how people work, rather than having artificial systems that strive to be easy to learn. Hopefully, we can have it going either by the end of the year or by this time next year. I’d like it to be a multi-disciplinary event, with equal participation from industry and academics, from artists and computer scientists and engineers. If you or your organization is interested in participating, you can reach me through the gmail with the name “smcbeth”.
We haven’t seen a major innovation in human-computer interaction in over 30 years. It’s time to start working on the problem.
There was an excellent article on us by Michael Alan Goldberg at the Philadelphia Weekly, and Andrew Hill from Geekadelphia stopped by to do a piece on 3D printing. Thanks guys!
There’s some outstanding new open-source add-ons for Blender, one of our favorite open-source 3D rendering/simulation/animation programs.
The first, LuxRender is a physically based Light Modeler. It’s currently limited to CPU-rendering only, but it creates enormously realistic lighting scenarios based on physical equations that describe the behavior of light. An amazing new feature here is that it stores the contribution of each light to each pixel during rendering, so you can modify the rendered image photorealistically and non-destructively without having to re-render the entire scene again.
The second, SmallLuxGPU is even more experimental but it is able to harness the full power of your GPU for unparalleled rendering speed of highly photorealistic visual scenes. Even better, with SLG you can interact with your scene in realtime to get just the view you want.
SmallLuxGPU v1.6 (OpenCL) from David Bucciarelli.
And here’s some examples of renders we’ve done in the past few days. Keep in mind, these are entirely synthetic images. Jump over to flickr to see at higher resolution.
Probably the single most important decision about me that my parents made was to remove me from the institutional education systems and home school me. There was talk from my teachers of getting me diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, but really I was just bored with my classes and had no socially acceptable concept of how to deal with that boredom (incidentally, I still don’t, but that’s a story for another day). Unfortunately for Mom and Dad, they quickly learned that my disruptive, destructive tendencies would be visited upon them if they did not find ways to entertain me.
Enter: TOPS Science.
TOPS is brilliant. It’s a combination of comic book and pragmatic science lab. Everything in a TOPS science workbook can be done with house hold items. The topics cover a wide range: electricity, chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology–I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually came out with a nuclear physics issue. I couldn’t get enough of them.
The materials were always simple, and something you probably had lying around anyway. For example, the electric circuits module used aluminum foil backed with scotch tape for wires, paper clips to connect them, and clothesline clips and rubber bands to make a flashlight bulb holder. There were never any exotic parts or chemicals in a TOPS module, and if something was slightly out of the ordinary, it would show you a convenient source for scavenging it from some thing else.
Even after all of the worksheets were done, I would still continue to play with the left over pieces, hooking up DC motors vultured from broken toys, making LEGO gears, testing out rubber-band belt drives, building switches made from bent-up paper clips and aluminum foil, and winding solenoids from ballpoint pens and wire from who-knows-where.
Some things that resulted from a combination of my boredom, ingenuity, and youthful ignorance:
- A small catapult with a surprisingly long range and a poorly thought-out target area (i.e., a plate glass window).
- A coil gun that scared the family dog into knocking over a ceramic vase.
- Experiments in electrolyzing water for basic hydrogen and oxygen that resulted in several toxic chemicals as well as one small explosion.
- Experiments in electroplating objects with metal from nails and paper clips that looked suspiciously a lot like the previous entry with largely the same results.
It was that second, small explosion that prompted my parents to buy me a computer as a compromise to prevent me from continuing with my increasingly dangerous pursuits in the physical sciences. But, I still carry the basic principles of analog circuits because of these awesome, little books. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve them because it would often lead to new ways for me to endanger my life/the carpet, but they are perhaps the most significant part of how I came to be a builder and maker of things.
On 11.29.10, In Random, Uncategorized, By Steph Alarcon
A coder for the Diaspora project changed a dropdown to indicate gender into a text field. In the author’s words, “I’ve gotten comfortable with the idea of gender as an n-dimensional space, with two big clusters and a hell of a lot of outliers.” Interesting stuff, with points of discussion about both identity and data mining.
Pipeworks wrench
I visited my parents at home this Thanksgiving in Hillsborough, NJ and rummaged around the house I grew up in. One of the things I found was a Pipeworks wrench from my childhood tinkering. Pipeworks was a wonderful system that used basic PVC pipes with special connectors to make 90º and 45º angles and seat to snap in. They were like LEGO furniture. I created a wheelbarrow and lemonade stand as in the instructions, but of course quickly moved on to my own designs. The last and best being a small cart I dragged around on my bike until it fell apart. Here’s a video of kid actors having fun with the set. Good times.
Of course, the Pipeworks were only one in a string of awesome toys that encouraged making. As any kid, I had LEGO (that is the proper collective noun apparently.) A true LEGO collection is measured in mass, and I still have about 40lbs of LEGO in my parent’s attic; the ABS plastic withstanding the seasonal temperature shift, but the forgotten batteries corroding the contacts of the battery box in my super-awesome death robot on wheels.
Construx helicopter
But every kid had LEGO. I also fondly remember the more obscure Construx. This set was like a smaller Pipeworks with beams that could be connected to make stuff. I had a set like the one pictured here with pulleys and wheels, and I kind of remember breaking those beams quite often with the wrong amount of torsion. It was very architectural though.
I had some K’nex too, another beam toy, but a bit more flexible and durable than Construx. K’nex came out in 1993, and by the time I got some, it was a bit too late for my tinkering age. I was sliding into the deep abyss of adolescence and the darkness of CompuServe image boards.
As a kindergartner I would also play with the lacquered wood blocks at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Grandma had a special set of blocks that she kept high on the mantle away from kids hands. They were heavy stone and rounded from years of play; she played with them when she was a kid. It’s amazing that while researching this post, I found those same blocks: Anchor Blocks, or Anker-Steinbaukasten as they are known as in Germany where they are still made. They are quite expensive now too. Is this the best present for my pieces and nephews? Maybe they can share a set.
Zaks
There was also a crazy toy called Zaks that I had a bag of. Zaks are equilateral triangles and squares that snap together at the edge. When completed, these polyhedral models look a bit like the STL mesh files I build today with the makerbot at Hive76. What made this set especially cool was that some pieces has a 4-stud LEGO pattern on them that allowed for easy attachement to LEGO models. I don’t know why I didn’t use this mind-blowing connection more in my models, but I remembered it just fine. Maybe I didn’t want to get my toys mixed up. I should have been building super intensive toys with Construx and the frame, Zaks, the moveable skin over a upper skeleton of K’nex with all the inner workings and details handled by LEGO attached to the top of a Pipeworks cart. Sigh. These are the regrets of a youth misspent. Today you can print out a Duplo block to Brio track adapter which to me seems like the greatest thing in the world. I wonder if I can print a Zaks-Construx adapter, or a new line of Pipeworks connectors with LEGO studs …
I got to get to work making stuff!
Get outside this Sunday, and spend some time with other makers, crafters, hackers, designers, and a lot of other ‘-er’s at Make:Philly’s summer BBQ. As usual there will be food (bring some of your own), frisbee, people hanging out, and Water Rockets. Bring your or, or make on on the spot using whatever happens to be lying around, and prepare to get soaked when you take your turn at the launcher.
If you were around last year, you got to play with The Wondergy team’s “Solar Smores” machine, a parabolic mirror perfect for toasting some mallow. They are bringing it back for this years BBQ, along with some new toys, like a trash-can launcher, that will send a trash can on a 20-50 foot flight.
In Short:
Sunday, August 8th, 1-3PM
Lemon Hill, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia
Kid Friendly: Yes
Food: Potluck – please bring something to share with 3-4 other people.
Water Rocket: Build yours at home and bring with you, along with a bottle of water
March is Women’s History Month and today is International Women’s Day, woohoo! Over at Geek Feminism there’s an open thread for Women’s Day events. From the blog: “If your geek group is doing anything for IWD, let us know in this thread, particularly if it’s online and open to participants around the world. (If it’s a meatspace event, please remember to be clear about which area!)”
Who are your favorite women in science and tech? Maybe Hypatia, the Egyptian mathematician and astronomer? Are you in luv with Ada Lovelace, considered the great grandmama of modern programming? Can I get a hell yeah for brilliant evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis? How about the team of women who programmed ENIAC? Myself, I’m partial to one Voltairine DeCleyre, an anarchist, feminist, BFF of Emma Goldman, and the namesake of Philadelphia’s own Radio Volta.
Dr. Clelia Mosher debunked Victorian myths about womens’ frailty and out-Kinseyed Kinsey by about 50 years
Is there a professor, colleague, friend, kin, internet celeb, garage inventor, or other brilliant lady in science and tech, ancient or modern, living or dead, local or halfway around the world, who you just have to shout out? Let us know! If you want to write or record a snip about someone you <3 during Women's History Month, get in touch and we'll make it easy to get your thoughts to our blog.
In the meantime, here's a laundry list of inventive women that will keep you Wikipedia-ing into next week.
