melinthropy

I just finished attending MWRC2010, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The presentations were all excellent. Below are the notes I took during the presentations, really for my own reference…

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My husband and I took the dogs for a walk in the snow this afternoon — it was really coming down!  While we were having some hot chocolate afterwards, I started improvising a snowy day piece on the piano.  Here’s what came out of it. I called it “Snowy Day”. The descending piano runs represent the snow as it makes its way down.

(Click the play button to hear it…)

As usual, I used GarageBand. I improvised the piano part through my midi keyboard (although at a slightly slower tempo to be honest). I recorded the bass part through my midi keyboard as well, and I recorded the violin with an Electro-Voice Cardinal condenser mic.

Apparently it’s been over a year since I posted a piece.  Here is the last one, “Good Morning Mr. Fish”, incase you missed it…

(Click the play button to hear it…)

Yes, the marvels of modern science have concluded what was extremely obvious to the casual observer.

My husband and I recently sent in a sample of our dog Doobie’s DNA to BioPet to find out what the heck he is.  We got back the results a few days ago and we were very surprised.  Before the test, I was convinced that he was a german short-haired pointer mix, but according to the test, that isn’t even one of his main breeds.  The test returns approximate levels of ancestry of each breed, which I have summarized in a pie chart below:

 
So, now we know.  When people ask what he is, we can state with confidence that he is a Golden ChowBull Dallie, and then act a little surprised when they don’t know what that is.  But even if he’s a mixed breed dog, he’s still 100% sweetness.  (Awwwww.)

For Christmas, I asked my husband to get me an Arduino starter kit (specifically, this one from Hacktronics ) along with the book Getting Started with Arduino .  What is the Arduino?  Arduino is basically a little electronic board with input/output capability (meaning it can read from sensors – input, and control things – output) that has a tiny computer on it (an AVR microcontroller) that you can program from your computer.  Here it is:

Some cool things about it are the USB port — you can upload programs, power the board, and receive communications from the board all using USB.  (Or you can use an AC adapter for power). Also, the Arduino app you can use to interface from your computer runs great from my MacBook.  And, I love how everything on the board is just so small and cute.

The book Getting Started with Arduino is excellent.  It is written for someone with no particular electronics or programming experience, and despite that, it manages to walk through several little projects which anyone could do and which should demystify the whole thing.  The examples seem simple, and the book is pretty small, but in the end, it really does give you a starting point, and it points out web resources if you want to go into detail on, say, some particular type of sensor.  There are plenty more involved projects online for further reference.

As to why I’m interested, I have a top-secret project in mind, which I’ll reveal if it ever gets off the ground.  And then you can think, “wow, that’s lame.”  But it would be even worse if I revealed my lame project idea and then it didn’t even work.  Anyways, I have this idea for a project, and I thought it should use a microcontroller.  I was originally thinking I could use my Motorola 68HC11 from college, so I pulled it out of the box.  I paid over $100 for it in 1998, so surely I could put it to good use, right?  Here it is on its evaluation board:

The MCU itself is the square chip on the lower left.  Immediately, I realized that (1) it requires serial cables, (2) it requires something to power it (+12V, -12V, +5V and ground), (3) the software I have for interfacing to it is on floppy disks and runs on DOS, and (4) I have almost completely forgotten assembly language, and really, everything about this board.  And it has been discontinued by Motorola, so if I ever wanted to make something else, I’d have to start over anyways.

So, after these realizations, I went searching for something new, and the Arduino seemed to be the way to go for a hobbyist.  I am very happy with my Arduino kit, and I’ll be sure to post about my project if it ever works.

BTW, a couple great resources for Arduino projects:  http://www.embedds.com/ posts a new project every day.  I haven’t tried any of them yet, but I hope to soon.  The projects sound very interesting, like this one for an Arduino Theremin .  And of course there is Make Magazine but the blog is a little more prolific than I can actually keep up with.

[Update: I forgot to mention that the hacktronics arduino starter kit didn't quite have all the components used in the examples in the Getting Started with Arduino book.  In particular, it didn't have a pushbutton switch or a light-dependent resistor.]

That’s right, I’m seriously addicted to World of Goo .  I’ve been playing it for the last day or two or three straight.  (Yeah, I’m not sure what day it is.  Vacation rocks.)  Also, the irony is not lost on me that I’m sick and sneezing goo the whole time I’m playing.  It’s like my own little world of goo to go with the virtual one in the game.  As a bonus, some of the goo in the game is also green.

Anyways, World of Goo falls into the physics/construction game genre, but it’s such a beautifully executed game.  Each level looks different from the previous level, and each level is really interesting.  The music is epic.  The plot is fun and mysterious.  Everything about the game is great.  I haven’t finished it yet, but I assume the ending is cool.

I’m not sure what made my husband spontaneously buy it for me (I could probably ask since he’s sitting just a few feet away.  Nah.  Please post it in the comments, honey.) but it made a really great gift.  Looks like it’s available for Mac, Windows, and Wii.  (It’s available for instant download gratification!  I’m playing it on the Mac, which is single player.  Apparently the Wii version supports up to 4 players.)

Come on and let the Goo times roll!

Incase you didn’t already know, I am turning the BIG THREE-OH in a few weeks.  But I already got an early birthday present from my husband!  It’s the melinthropy.org domain!  Yay!

I think all of my friends have already turned 30, so I probably won’t get any sympathy.  And anyways, I’m sure 30 is the new 25, so what am I worried about!

I ran across this video on youtube.  Check it out!  She types in a melody, and these machines that shoot balls into the air landing on a marimba, along with some wine glasses and percussion, improvise on it!

The really cool thing is you can actually go to the website here and interact with the machines playing the music!  You type in your melody (which I did horribly, because I thought I was in “practice” mode, but apparently I wasn’t — I guess you only get a second to “practice”), then you see the thing playing your melody (and its own variations) live, and then they send you a video of it.  How cool is that!

I just wanted to post this little  video I put together on Easter (filmed on The Flip!) that shows Bunny Cakes being assembled. But of course, I had to be difficult, and embed the video rather than posting a link (since I want to start using more video in general). My version of Wordpress was too old to use the plugin I wanted, so I decided to upgrade to the one that was released just this afternoon. Bleeding edge, baby. So, of course I had to import my tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior, and then of course, I had to pick a new theme (since it should *look* different if I bothered to go to this trouble), then I had to add random junk into the theme… And then something about the Apache configuration wasn’t allowing my plugin to work, which we spent hours looking at (literally).  And now my plugin breaks some of the new WordPress version… It always amazes me how much time you can sink into this kind of stuff.

Wordpress 2.5 seems very nice, by the way. I just noticed it is auto-saving this post as I write it. Also, I was having some problems with the visual editor stripping out all my line breaks (maybe because I’m using Safari), and that seems to be resolved. The interface in general looks very nice as well. And thanks to the SVN option, future upgrades will be very easy!

So anyways, here is the video (be sure to watch all the way to the end to see the special cameo from the Easter Bunny himself!) Click on the picture to watch it.  It’s only about a minute long.  If you click on it and you don’t see video starting up, please download the latest version of Quicktime.

So, after I read a review of it by David Pogue, I went out and bought… The Flip!  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a video camera that’s smaller than my cell phone, runs on AA batteries, and has a little USB plug built right into it.  It was so easy — I opened the package in the car, put in the batteries, and started taking videos before we even made it home!  (And we only live 5 minutes away from BestBuy!) Then I got home, took a couple more videos, and plugged the Flip into my MacBook.  It opened up a little window where I double-clicked on the Mac software, and I could immediately see the videos I had taken, and could easily save them to disk (or even trim them down first).  Then I opened up iMovie on my Mac, which I’ve never used before (I don’t have iLife ‘08 yet — I have the old version.) and put together a little movie. The sound track doesn’t go with it at all — it’s just the first thing I could find that I had recorded in Garage Band (it’s me on the vocals).  So about 20 minutes of editing, adding in the music, and exporting to a web-friendly size, I had this little video! It was fun.  The Flip is so small, it will fit in my pocket or pocketbook, so I can take random video of things I find interesting.  (Yes, this was an uncharacteristic random purchase, wasn’t it!)

Measurably
Excellent
Literature
In
New
Technology
Having
Relatively
Odd
Ponderings
Yeah! 
Well, actually, it doesn’t really stand for anything.  That was an example of a backronym.  I recommend following that link to the wikipedia article because for some reason, I found the article highly amusing.