Eleksen‘s newest “Common Interface” technology doesn’t do you much good without modules to interact with it, so the company has introduced a bevy of accessories that play nice with the next-generation embeddable ElekTex sensor. Up first is an FM radio add-on, which offers consumers access to FM broadcasts either from a commercial radio station or FM transmitter, and is fully controlled by an ElekTex fabric sensor integrated into any garment or knapsack. Next up, we’ve got “updated electronics modules for iPod and iPod+Bluetooth devices,” and while details are certainly slimmer on this one, we do know that the sensor is “programmable and compatible with a range of electronics including iPods, smartphones and other personal digital devices.” Now, let’s see some end products with this stuff in it, capiche?
Read – Eleksen’s FM Radio module Read – Eleksen’s iPod, Bluetooth modules
A spokesman from France Telecom, parent company of Orange, acknowledged what he called “forces majeurs,” which he said account for periodic broadband disruptions throughout the country. He listed typical causes such as power failures, floods and other “acts of God.”
Man, Moleskine notebooks sure are dashing. Even more so when you can encase 160GB of pure MP3 and xVid goodness. Who needs to sit around a jot down poetry in a cafe when you’ve got all that highly-compressed goodness at your disposal?
Zonageek understood this well and went ahead and devised a Moleskine hard drive enclosure. The lovely details are here.
I have always had a fascination with Voronoi cells. I never quite understood the math behind it (and still dont). Generally speaking, Voronoi cells represent an enclosure where all the points within that enclosure are closer to the seed than any other seeds. Weird and confusing, right?
In the above image, I have created 3000 seeds. The boundaries are the Voronoi cells. All the pixels within a specific cell are closer to the parent seed than any other seeds in the image. Okay, so I just said the exact same thing twice. Im sorry.
Lucky for me, Paul Chew has posted some nice Java source code which shows how to do Delaunay triangulations which end up forming the Voronoi cells. Check out his applet here. I think this was originally posted in 1997. Fantastic.
The first thing I wanted to try is to combine Voronoi with the magnetism studies i have been doing of late. This might be the very first instance of Voronoi being used as an Audio Visualizer (probably not though).
I just bought a new toy for live performance: The Doepfer Drehbank MIDI controller. Sporting 64 rotary knobs, it should satisfy all my needs for live control of obscure parameters. In fact, I doubt I’ll ever come up with that many parameters, but having the option is nice.
Compared to the FaderFox LV-1 which I’ve been using so far, the tradeoff is control vs. portability. The Drehbank is fairly hefty, weighing at least 2 kg and measuring maybe 40 x 12 x 6 cm. If I already had a lot of performance gear that would probably be too much, but since I mostly only use one laptop and a controller it’s not too bad.
Plugging the controller into Processing was painless. The knobs are solid, with good resistance so that you can get a smooth turning motion. There’s even just enough room between the dials to allow a small white space for labelling. My only concern is about the power plug, which sticks out a bit far and would seem prone to coming unplugged if the unit is moved. But seeing as the unit is so heavy I won’t be moving it much anyway.
The Drehbank is going out of production, and Doepfer is selling off its remaining stock at the relatively low price of €299. Their site say that it’s sold out, but when I sent them an email to check they still had some left. There is also the smaller Pocket Control with 16 dials.
I hold my hands up and admit it! I’m a complete fan-boy for Martí Guixé. There’s so much good work that I could talk about, but his “Food Design” is so clever and humorous that it deserves to be highlighted.
Guixé as a Food Designer builds edible products that are ergonomic, functional, communicative, interactive, visionary but radically contemporary and timeless.
Cookies with decoration that indicates how to eat them, hands-free lollipops, pie-graph cakes that indicates the ingredients of the cake in percentages, it’s all genius. The man takes the term “designer” onto a whole other level.
Since 2004, R-Echos is an experimental
online magazine
dedicated to republication; topics vary from
biology to graphic design,
from ecology to business.
It agglomerates anything which is about art,
computing, science.
His form is made out of collages of texts, links, images, references, videos and sounds -
choosen with care to take part to this very personnal publication.
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