Just in time for the holidays. Processing Monsters!. You can find my monster on that site or here. The mouth and eyes are hanging on invisible springs, there is a magnetic attraction making the eyes freak out when the mouth comes near. It was fun to play with the physics engine again and processing is really rad. I’ve been playing with it quite a bit recently.

Try your hand at a processing monster.

I’m still sitting in Jamison Park. I don’t always have time during the week to post, so I’ve decided to queue up another bit while I do have a little while. Jamison Park is almost as cool as Tanner SPRINGS Park, it’s about 3 blocks south and is also one city block. It is a basin split in half but a brick wall. Half the basin is filled from a waterfall rolling off of the wall. The basin slowly fills and then empties out like a tide pool. Earlier in the year when it was still summer all these young parents would take their toddlers to wade and splash, it was always a riot to see them milling about amazed when the water drained away then overjoyed as it filled back up. Now in the fall the other half of the basin that is filled with sand is dominated by dog walkers and public art.
I don’t have a segue so I’ll just jump into the follow on to the next topic I wanted to share. Last time I posted about the apartment setup I talked about music. Today is TV.
I have a TiVo HD, which I love. It has downsides, JAMIE AND I tend to have our TV spoon fed to us we know we’ll like it but I rarely stumble upon new shows.
In the office is a little box running Ubuntu hooked up to a 1TB Dlink DNS-321 NAS with a ton of TV. The mac with Popcorn 3 harvests my shows and saves it on the NAS. Then the little Ubuntu box checks for new content from time to time. Breaks the DRM (shh don’t tell the MPAA) and then serves it back up through pyTivo. Then the shows I really like (Lately House, Mad Men, and selected episodes of Good Eats) are served up for later consumption.
PyTivo is a cool piece of software, as the name indicates it’s a little python program that masquerades as another TiVo on the network. From the now playing list you can browse to the ubuntu box and transfer any show. In and of itself this is cool, however pyTivo has another trick up its sleeve. It converts programs on the fly from whatever format they are to the TiVo format through ffmpeg. This saves me from messing with the native formats or locking myself into the TiVO forever. Snazzy stuff.

It’s almost 9 and I’m stuck. I live between the willamette river and the railroad tracks. Wrong side of th etracks? Today, probably. 3 or 4 times a day the train goes by and If you don’t climb the massive set of stairs next to my apartmene is a gorgeous powder blue porshe) waiting for the train to clear the road.
The train appears to be w bad but there is that god awful beEEL LIKE I’m a part of the west coast in a small way. Although the graffiti and oil cars mixed in with the lumber cars reminds me it is a new age.
The train has passed and a cup of coffee and donut later I’m on a wooden bench in Jamison Square park. A week later and a couple hours later there are a lot more folks out and about so the Genius playlist is built off of The Avette Brothers – Go to sleep.
I’ve been in Portland for a little more than 3 months and our apartment is getting to be more like home than it used to be. We got the main things squared away quickly, couch, tv, bed and office. As time goes on though I’ve been filling in the gaps. This weeks project was the stereo.
A month after moving I made the switch to a mac. I’ll talk about that more some other time but it’s part of the story today so I mention it. I’ve drank the koolaid and so now in my apartment is the macbook, my iphone, and an airport express. This let me get a pretty awesome music setup going. ]
With 250 GB of disk in the laptop my whole music collection actually lives on the macbook and iTunes lets me organize the whole thing, but I’ve been listening to it through the tiny laptop speakers, which are decent but not the same as a real stero.
Jamie and I cook a lot, she’s a chef so making a big dinner turns into an activity that I look forward to. In the past we’ve had a laptop playing some tunes or the TV singing away across the room but like I said it’s not the same, but I cloudn’t think of a convienent way to get the tunes to the stero. Enter 2 things. The remote application for the iPhone and the airport express.
The remote application connects to iTunes and gives you the iPod touch interface to the computer’s iTunes library. The Airport Express exetends the wireless network and has 2 outputs one to hook up a wireless printer (which I don’t use, thanks CUPS) and the other streams music over wireless from iTunes. With the two combined Jamie or I can cue up anything we want to hear while we cook. I love it when a plan comes together.

1. Fire up your iPod.

2. Set it to play your entire music collection.

3. Hit the “shuffle” command.

4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.

5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

1. Aspect of an Old Maid, 30 Year Low - The Mendoza Line

2. The Latest Toughs, Black Sheep Boy - Okkervill River

3. The Ruby Ring Man, …and the Family Telephone - Page France

4. Charlemagne In Sweatpants, Seperation Sunday - The Hold Steady

5. The News from Your Bed, The Broken String - Bishop Allen

6. Gardenia, Real Emotional Trash - Stephen Malkmus

7. Vampires in Blue Dresses, The Dust of Retreat - Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s

8. I Should Have Known Better - Volume One, She & Him

9. Lost To The Lonesome, Anytown Graffiti - Pela

10. Crying, Dear Science - TV on the Radio

Planet COSI and the handful of people that read this, you’re up.

It’s 7:00 in the morning and I’m sitting in Tanners Spring park in Portland. I like this park a lot. It’s just a single city block, left in it’s ‘natural state’ it’s a marsh that’s you’re not allowed to walk on, that would jack it up. It’s on a slant and there are two little rivulets running through it. It gives a nice sound of running water which empties and a little Koi pond with a boardwalk. There are a handful of metal benches but they’re covered with water this early in the morning and I don’t fancy a wet ass. Luckily there is tiered turf around the edge so I have a place to sit with my Americano while I write.

November is NANoWriMo; National Novel Writing Month. I wanted to participate but failing sucks too, so instead I’ve just decided to write more.

I have a pretty basic problem when I write though, I have the attention span of a puppy with ADD. If I’m sitting in front of my computer I don’t stay with AbiWord long enough to finish more than a few paragraphs. This tends to kill my blog posts as well as any real attempt at writing.

When I was looking at the NaNoWriMo site toying with the idea of participating I found a link to their flickr stream. Budding authors posting pictures of their writing areas. Laptops in coffee shops, old pc’s stuck in the corner of the family room, stuff like that. What surprised me was the number of typewriters.

The typewriters caught my eye. Apparently in the growing hipster cities typewriter repair shops are showing up. Sometimes in the back of stationary stores (seriously they have fancy paper stores). Sometimes on their own. But the idea fascinates me. In a culture where we throw everything out, where the new hotness trumps reliability thrift and the old way of doing things people are fixing typewriters.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure if they were still being made a lot people would go for the new ones. However, I can see the appeal of the mechanical writing machine. It feels like you’re really doing something rather than just pushing bits. There’s the feel of quality paper, and that awesome noise when you push the arm back for a new line (my vocabulary failed on the typewriter terminology…). Anyway, I can see the appeal. On the flip side, horribly expensive, finicky, and really when your done writing don’t you just have to type it up again?

Not for me, but I can see the appeal. After flicking through a few dozen photos something else caught my eye though. The AlphaSmartPro.

So I’ll cut to the chase, I’m writing on one now. While the keyboard could be better it’s awesome and it solves the attention problem.

The AlphaSmartPro is this weird little word processor. I remember one of the first computers I ever saw besides my families Apple //c was my aunt and uncles word processor. It was very new and awesome at the time. Giant, very beige, and almost worthless to my 7 year old eyes. It had a built in printer if and a big plastic dust cover. (Who came up with those? The idea that a computer would be something that sits in the corner of the room and needs to be protected from dust between uses seems so odd today). Anyway it was interesting in that it hadn’t occurred to me that a digital writing machine would be such a useful uni-tasker but it didn’t play games and that was silly.

Now I’ve come full circle. Something that just lets me type IS useful and for $15 on Ebay it may be one of my better drunk auction bids…

The device in and of itself is fascinating too because it made me start thinking about legacy technology and compatibility.  After I bought it I realized I didn’t have a computer with a PS/2 port or any idea what kind of software would let me get the words out of it. This could have been a device that needed a dust shield in my apartment.

Of course I couldn’t wait to see the word processor and figure out the problem so I started googling. (Verbing weirds language.) It’s mac and pc compatible, there are two ports on the side labeled ‘PC’ with a ps/2 port and ‘Mac/IIGS’ with an ADP port. Even though I have a macbook I figured APD was a no go and sure enough an ADP to USB adapter is like $50 bucks. Ps/2 was a bit of a boondoggle as well, if you don’t have a usb compatible keyboard (and judging by its age I didn’t) it won’t work. What you need is an active ps/2 to usb adapter. That will actually do a conversion and send the proper key codes. Add a male to male 3’ ps/2 cable and I had a $12 solution. What about the software though?

This is where the simplicity of the technology shined though. It’s really just a keyboard with a 4 line 40 character LCD with a massive buffer. Hook it up and hit the ‘send’ key in the corner and it type into the computer. Just fire up AbiWord or office or whatever any you have a phantom typist replaying your keystrokes into your editor in a matter of seconds.

So there we go a little rambly but that sums up an hour of my Saturday morning thinking about how awesome old technology can be and getting me writing without any more distraction that a genius playlist built off of M. Ward for a cloudy weekend morning in the park.

The other day I was making a mix cd for jamie, putting the cd together wasn’t a problem but I never know what to put on the top. Typically I take a sharpie and try to cram the playlist onto the top of the cd. So that is what I did, but I was trying to think of a better solution. I was thinking that if I could parse the playlist and get the artist info out of the track names I could use the flickr api to find interesting photos with that artists name as a tag. Then I could make a block out of the interesting images and print it on the top of a mix cd. It mostly worked…
It turned out I couldn’t find any decent piece of code to parse the playlists so I kinda hacked around that problem. I think if you don’t keep your mp3’s in an Artists/Album/Tracks hierarchy it  will fail miserably. The other issue is tag overlap. For example: There is a panda bear named Bright Eyes, there is also an Artist named Bright Eyes, if you look here you will see some musicians and a bunch of pandas.

I’ll follow up with more details. Ideally my next step is to export this to a template I can print, rather than a screenshot. Mike suggested I may be able to integrate this into serpentine, it would be much nicer to work in python rather than php. *shudder*