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technology

A story for every object RFID

By: ste!!a
16-05-2009
design, technology

iPhone RFID: object-based media from timo on Vimeo.

What if every object could tell its own story? Haven’t you wished that you could just google any­thing? Well if you use RFID you can get infor­ma­tion from any object that has an elec­tronic tag. Each object in a way is a smart object.

If you have a reader attached to a device like a smart device, in this case an iPhone. You can come in prox­im­ity of the object and tell you the object’s story. It’s pretty inter­est­ing tech­nol­ogy that can be used say for tour­ing muse­ums. You step up to a paint­ing or sculp­ture and put your iphone next to the label. It rec­og­nizes the paint­ing and allows you to see con­tent about the work. Add links to sources on the net and an expan­tion of infor­ma­tion based on your interests.

This is a nifty video show­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of using RFID. If you want to know more Check out this post: http://www.nearfield.org/2009/04/iphone-rfid-nfc

What if every object could tell its own story? Haven’t you wished that you could just google any­thing? Well if you use RFID you can get infor­ma­tion from any object that has an elec­tronic tag. Each object in a way is a smart object.

If you have a reader attached to a device like a smart device, in this case an iPhone. You can come in prox­im­ity of the object and tell you the object’s story. It’s pretty inter­est­ing tech­nol­ogy that can be used say for tour­ing muse­ums. You step up to a paint­ing or sculp­ture and put your iphone next to the label. It rec­og­nizes the paint­ing and allows you to see con­tent about the work. Add links to sources on the net and an expan­tion of infor­ma­tion based on your interests.

This is a nifty video show­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of using RFID. If you want to know more Check out this post: http://www.nearfield.org/2009/04/iphone-rfid-nfc

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iPhone app encourages inner abstract expressionist

By: ste!!a
13-05-2009
birthday month, gadgets, technology

Jackson Pollock application

What kind of draw­ing and paint­ing tools are avail­able for artists in a dig­i­tal space? I don’t know. Because some­times I actu­ally am under a rock. Why didn’t I know about this cool app so I could vote for it in the Webby’s? Some­times you just miss cool stuff until most peo­ple think it’s old and tired. Well, It’s new to me. Here is a cool app where you can get your inner Pol­lock out.

I spent hours play­ing with this soft­ware toy. You prob­a­bly will too.

wikipedia:
Paul Jack­son Pol­lock (Jan­u­ary 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influ­en­tial Amer­i­can painter and a major fig­ure in the abstract expres­sion­ist move­ment.
see the arti­cle here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock

How about mak­ing the paint­ings on your iPhone? Here’s a lit­tle movie of the appli­ca­tion in action.

Try it or down­load the iPhone app here : http://jacksonpollock.org/

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Kindle — kardboard prototype

By: ste!!a
06-05-2009
design, talking, technology

Do you usu­ally pay to be a beta tester? Not me. I usu­ally get some­thing free for debug­ging somone’s product.

Well today Ama­zon released the big­ger dog of their reader and will charge you about $500 bucks for a device that looks like a card­board pro­to­type of a tech­nol­ogy prod­uct from the 80’s.

Expec­ta­tions for elec­tronic devices are con­sid­er­ably more sophis­ti­cated than what the Kin­dle offers. Now of course Ama­zon is just warm­ing up the mar­ket for a smart inno­v­a­tive com­pany like Apple or a smart startup to take over much like Apple did with the iPod. I actu­ally think that Ama­zon doesn’t care. Ama­zon is all about the dis­tri­b­u­tion chain. They want to sell you the con­tent not the device. They just cre­ated the device to cre­ate more inter­est in read­ing. Cer­tainly the pub­lish­ing indus­try doesn’t under­stand how to do that. But will this actu­ally rein­vig­o­rate the read­ing mar­ket? That remains to be seen.

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Hulu for the iPhone

By: ste!!a
20-04-2009
news, technology

Hulu -coming for the iPhone

Rumor has it an app is com­ing to the iPhone that Hulu junkies will be thrilled about. I watch a lit­tle hulu here and there. I’m usu­ally unim­pressed. I don’t watch tv and don’t really appre­ci­ate the story for­mat. But, hulu has a ter­rific inter­ac­tion model and with lim­ited titles to view; the selec­tion inter­face remains simple.

I watch much more video than I thought I would on the iPhone. I’m always check­ing out what’s on YouTube and it’s great to have a video for­mat that isn’t an immer­sion at times. Can’t wait to test the iPhone and hulu. Let’s see if the app can be as approach­able as hulu in the browser.

The iPhone plat­form con­tin­ues to grow with each new dis­tri­b­u­tion method that develops.

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Exquisite letterpress, Igor Kopelnitsky and ME.

By: ste!!a
07-04-2009
news, objects of desire, technology

Card Shop | Sparked.png

I knew it, some­one would notice this amaz­ing project by Exquis­ite Let­ter­press, the shop of my long­time co-conspirator Peter Fra­ter­deus. Peter and I have known each other since the begin­ning of time. From his Mice­type newslet­ters in the early days of laser print­ing Post­script™ tech­nolo­gies, first third party type house to cre­ate mul­ti­ple mas­ter fonts, the first online com­mu­nity for design­ers designon­line, first AIGA com­mu­nity online, and his Alpha­bets foundry — we have exper­i­mented with offline and online tech­nolo­gies together.

Ya need to go over and BUY a pack of these cards or bet­ter yet print a set of your own design. These are lus­cious. Amaz­ing amounts of ink cov­er­age on cot­ton paper. Pleeze! Show some love for letterpress.

from Crane Paper’s blog :
Geof­fry said the art card series offers eight humor­ous orig­i­nal designs printed by Peter Fraderdeus of Exquis­ite Let­ter­press on Crane’s Let­tra paper. “Each design is a unique and amus­ing com­men­tary on issues rang­ing from energy inde­pen­dence to the evo­lu­tion debate,” said Geof­fry. Themes and titles include Play Date with the Devil, Bright Idea, Heavy Thoughts, Don’t be Shy, Bal­anc­ing Act, Peace Out, Drill Baby Drill, and So Evolved.

Big kudos to Peter! Now he can get ready for our Spring Fling an all-out sprint to print a set of my ink draw­ings, egypt­ian waters as a full­size lim­ited edi­tion and a set of blank note­cards. I think he can han­dle it.

We’re plan­ning an open house event around the print­ing of these draw­ings. Details to come.

Please note trade­marks on Mice­type, Post­script, designon­line, Alpha­bets and any oth­ers we may have for­got­ten to men­tion.

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new wordpress themes give me the blues

By: ste!!a
11-01-2009
technology

I’ve been look­ing at some cool new themes for Word­Press that use Sand­box. It’s a great envi­ron­ment to get in and use css to con­trol the look and feel.

Prob­lem is that most of the really cool skins that cre­ate thumb­nails and size images can’t cope with pho­tos from flickr. I almost never upload images twice. I refer to their loca­tion usu­ally at flickr. These cool mag­a­zine and cre­ative lay­out require that I upload the image I want to use. This means that blog­ging about an image located else­where requires a down­load and then an upload. I want to be able to linkback to the orig­i­nal instance for sev­eral rea­sons includ­ing giv­ing proper credit for the image.

I don’t want to ask some­one to write a plug-in or sript for this. Any­one have any ideas?

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Playing with Skitch is fun!

By: ste!!a
11-01-2009
technology

Hey… this is fun! This is my first attempt at using Skitch. I found out about it from a Flickr friend Colin Devroe. Go over and sign up for the pub­lic beta.

I use SnapZPro for my screen cap­tures and now I have Skitch. I’m using Skitch for fun right now but I imag­ine many other prac­ti­cal uses. But heck, let’s just stick with fun first.

More on this cool app as I experiment.

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beauty in numbers : cultural context

By: ste!!a
29-12-2008
reading, technology, unpredictable thoughts

Many Eyes

Got a tweet from Carl Mala­mud today that led me to this arti­cle about Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg. It’s always great to read about a whole yarn­ball of my inter­ests at one time. Cul­ture, infor­ma­tion, visu­al­iza­tion, and the mean­ing we can bring to data by cre­at­ing con­text. See an ongo­ing project at the TATE in the UK. ( MW2MW is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Marek Wal­czak and Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg. Started in 1997, both artists work inde­pen­dently but come together on long term projects such as Apart­ment, Won­der­walker, Think­ing Machine and Noplace.) http://www.mw2mw.com/

These exper­i­ments and jour­neys open up new ways to look at what we see each day in a new light.

The aes­thetic is a bit clumsy for my lik­ing still the work at the con­cep­tual level is very intrigu­ing and the visu­al­iza­tions shed light on the snap­shots he takes.

Take some time to enjoy these works. Inter­ested in your thoughts.

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Mini E an electric car for me

By: ste!!a
10-12-2008
design, news, talking, technology


Mini E con­cept — LA Auto Show — Com­ing Soon, Mini’s Elec­tric Kool Aid Test — List — NYTimes.com

A rea­son not to bail out com­pa­nies like GM.

My favorite quote from the NYTimes piece:

While Gen­eral Motors has been plod­ding along and burn­ing through the dol­lars devel­op­ing its Chevro­let Volt “extended-range” elec­tric vehi­cle (now due in late 2010), Mini, with help from its par­ent, BMW, took a mere 10 months to develop the Mini E.

Why does our auto indus­try find it so hard to respond to the needs of its poten­tial cus­tomers? Not only has Mini responded they have done it quickly.

The bat­tery takes up a lit­tle too much space but mini will work it out. I want one.

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EVDO and me

By: ste!!a
23-11-2008
gadgets, talking, technology

This is the story of try­ing to get high speed inter­net access where i live in philadelphia.

Let’s start with Ver­i­zon.
Call them up. Give them the address. Can’t find the address in their data­base. Hmmm. We’d like to see if we can get FIOS. Wait­ing on hold. Time passes. The rep can’t find our address. Three peo­ple have lived there before us. Still can’t find our address.

Ok so no Ver­i­zon. If they don’t even know our address that spells bad news for the whole process.

Try Com­cast. (I can’t stand Com­cast. I don’t like their iden­tity, I don’t like their new build­ing, I don’t like that they got a huge tax break to build it. I don’t like their cul­ture.) But, I need high speed inter­net ser­vice. No tele­vi­sion, just internet.

Ok, they know our address. They’ll have some­one out to install tomor­row at 11 am. They’ll bill us. Excellent.

We’re mov­ing and our inter­net ser­vice will be up and run­ning before we move in. This is ter­rific. While unpack­ing we can work from home. Cross that off the list.

Ok, I’m pack­ing and my part­ner is at the new loca­tion to talk to the painters and wait for the Com­cast guy/woman. Believe it or not the guy shows up on time. Ok, lets hook ya up he says.

Bad news.

Cable isn’t run to our new abode. It’s out on the pole but they can’t run it from the pole. New con­struc­tion has to run it under­ground and it’s in our court­yard some­where. His­tory is that Com­cast have been out five other times to try to hook up cable. Some­how our cable has been paved over. We could pay to dig and find it. I don’t think so. We rent.

Now what to do? How can this be. This is Amer­ica we have tele­com com­pe­ti­tion that’s bet­ter for cus­tomers. We get choice.

I won’t rant on how I think tele­com is a pub­lic util­ity. But what am I to think when no one really wants to make an effort to give me service?

I call CTO Phil. Mr. Ives­Dig­i­tal.
He says EVDO.

Hmmm, this is a very inter­est­ing alter­na­tive. This means I can take my net­work con­nect to places that don’t have free wire­less inter­net. This is a REALLY GOOD idea.

Now I can stop freak­ing out.

Mar­garet goes to the Ver­i­zon store. She gets an EVDO card, she buys a plan and she heads to the office. We install the soft­ware and plug in the card. We put in the password.

We’re on the net!

Shar­ing my air­port network.

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