Not knowing a heck of a lot about solenoids in practice — I know what they do, and, as an example of the sometimes impracticality of higher-ed, am fairly fluent in the E&M principles at work here. But, when it comes to the practical matter of finding one with the necessary “umph” to articulate a simple controller’s…

Crossing into a new practice idiom, especially if it offers the chance to feel the process of learning, is a crucial path toward undisciplinarity. The chance to become part of a practice — with all of its history, ideology, languages, norms and values, personalities, conferences — is an invigorating process. Embodyi…

Aram Bartholl’s project “WoW” suddenly popped into my head as I was discussing the good old Mobile Social Software knee-jerk project — proximity-based friend finders. (Here is a decent video of Bartholl’s project in action.)

Bizarre interface syntax here. On the bottom left it’s Large, Small, Medium. That’s sort of peculiar — I’m never entirely sure what button to press. The Small and Medium seem almost identical when you’re feeling in need of a cup of coffee. Once, I pressed Large and it overflowed the cup. What are the contexts here f…

High Chair is a tall chair placed on or near the sidewalk allowing sitters a chance to see the city from nearly above. It’s a middle vantage point, above the street, below the skyscraper, with a full view that balconies seldom offer, and still amongst the pedestrian fray. The chair is evocative of that used by a lin…

404 resonances. Cars and pages, not found. Not quite plate-of-shrimp; a different category of meaning-making. The above graph is from Golan Levin’s curious “The Secret Lives of Numbers” project, the image below a nicely composed hood shot of a Peugeot 404, the other 404 resonance object, captured by Adam Greenfield…

Privacy, modesty or cocooning?

Picked a couple of these “Ecowatt” devices up while in Tokyo, from Bic Camera. They monitor power consumption of whatever you’ve plugged into it. Here I had my MacBook Pro plugged in and running (no sleep) for about 24 hours. The device simply runs through four measurements — two I have no idea about because the sym…

I’ve been doing a bit of business trying to clean up my sometimes wonky skills with I2C communication. It took a bit to figure it out, but I managed to get a few different kinds of devices to the Atmel microcontrollers I usually use — things like a real-time clock, an LIS3LV02DQ accelerometer, these EEPROM devices.…