It is a pleasure to see an experiment like moovl from soda growing and becoming such a cool tool to teach to children physic stuff.

I was lately thinking much about sketckbooks and different forms of sketchbooks. I am somehow addicted to the idea of sketchbooks, having 3 or 4 real sketchbooks made of paper. Each dealing with different topics. Then i have some .txt-Files on my desktop to fast fix up thoughts or to follow and develop thoughts. Then i have a wiki on my local computer that is dealing with all of it: almost every topic i’m interesteded in can be found there. That wiki is very messy! This Weblog here is also a sketchbook for me. Then there is the processing-sketchbook, where i design diffrent reactive forms and grafics (and polish my programming skills). My digital cam is also a sketchbook, that i sort regularly in diffrent directories on my computer (topic based). Uh, i almost forgot various Illustrator files where i explore huge formats and an old version of Fruity Loops where i sketch ideas of beats. So there’s lots of shit everywhere: in every media, for every media. Since i’m distibuting myself everywhere i recently got some insight about the philosophy of sketckbooking.

The most important thing about a sketchbook is the topic and secondly you have to keep in mind about the goals. Every sketchbook should explore a single topic or a complex of aspects. It can be good to point this up at the beginning. At this stage it can be very helpful to think about the goals to archive. What do you want to know? Is this a private research on something or do you need footage for a special project? Is this for fun or for money? Do i need it analog(ability) or digital(footage)? Very important questions. Having lots of sketchbooks can mean having lots of fun. I like the meditating factor of sketching something and the interconnection between each one. Example: i choosed this weblog because of following reasons: A) to force myself to make effort on the topic of my diploma thesis, B) to get in contact and dialog with real people out there (you!), C) to spread thoughs and influence (by thinking out loud). Point B and C would be very difficult to do only on paper. And now i’m feeling very relaxed after sketching this thought down. And somehow i look after streetart when going outside with my cam.

I was lately thinking much about sketckbooks and different forms of sketchbooks. I am somehow addicted to the idea of sketchbooks, having 3 or 4 real sketchbooks made of paper. Each dealing with different topics. Then I have some .txt-Files on my desktop to fast fix up thoughts or to follow and develop thoughts. Then I have a wiki on my local computer that is dealing with all of it: almost every topic I’m interesteded in can be found there. That wiki is very messy! This Weblog here is also a sketchbook for me. Then there is the processing-sketchbook, where I design different reactive forms and grafics (and polish my programming skills). My digital cam is also a sketchbook, that i sort regularly in diffrent directories on my computer (topic based). Uh, I almost forgot various Illustrator files where I explore colorful things and an old version of Fruity Loops where I sketch down ideas of beats from time to time. So there’s lots of shit everywhere: in every media, for every media. Since I’m distibuting myself everywhere I recently got some insight about the philosophy of sketckbooking.

The most important thing about a sketchbook is the topic and secondly you have to keep in mind about the goals. Every sketchbook should explore a single topic or a complex of aspects. It can be good to point this up at the beginning. At this stage it can be very helpful to think about the goals to archive. What do you want to know? Is this a private research on something or do you need footage for a special project? Is this for fun or for money? Do I need it analog(ability) or digital(footage)? Very important questions. Having lots of sketchbooks can mean having lots of fun. I like the meditating factor of sketching something and the interconnection between each one. Example: I choosed this weblog because of following reasons: A) to force myself to make effort on the topic of my diploma thesis, B) to get in contact and dialog with real people out there (you!), C) to spread thoughs and influence (by thinking out loud). Point B and C would be very difficult to do only on paper. And now i’m feeling very relaxed after sketching this thought down. And somehow I look after streetart when going outside with my cam.

TRIGLAV

Triglav is one of the greatest ajax app I’ve ever seen. It a diablo like isometric action RPG. Can you beleave that it is built with javascript!! So cool.

See amazing screencaptures (1),(2).

picture taken from you-are-beautiful

Alright, i discussed this point a lot in the last few weeks with friends. I made a clear pladoyer for graffiti and street art as a part of urban culture. Therefore this kind of art has to be treated like any art that is. But the answers i got was mostly very narrow minded, only focusing on right of property (not on common property!). The most answer i got were like: “…but think of the owners property. Imagine someone would spray something on your building.” I thought they didn’t got the point. I were pretty sure that they didn’t got then point when they added: “YOU like graffiti, but this is just YOUR taste, it is your narrow minded thought, that you want everybody to like graffiti.” Aha, alright. That’s not what i intent. I don’t want everybody to go out and love or make graffiti. No, that’s not what i want. It would be utopian.

What i want is, that this kind of ART and CULTURE would be percieved like ART and CULTURE. In fact i think, that threre are many boring and ugly opera at the opera-house or bad tv- and radio-programme. And they are paid from my tax-money. But this is okay, because it is a kind of culture, that has a tradition and sometimes developes over time. And there are people enjoying it.

picture taken from wooster collective

Streetart should be seen as an integral part of the urban. Me really don’t like that the discussion (in Germany) is ONLY focussing on the vandalism aspect (when there are at the same time evidence for urban sites / underground sites, that were enhanced by colurful sprayings on the wall). Writing, Pieces, Graffiti and Streetart has meanwile a 30+ year tradition and is constantly evolving. (and can’t be stopped). And there are lot of people enjoing it.

PS: Why should i accept ugly and wrong advertisment? Only because someone paid for it? What about freedom of speech?

picture taken from you-are-beautiful

Alright, i discussed this point a lot in the last few weeks with friends. I made a clear pladoyer for graffiti and street art as a part of urban culture. Therefore this kind of art has to be treated like any art that is. But the answers i got was mostly very narrow minded, only focusing on right of property (not on common property!). The most answer i got were like: “…but think of the owners property. Imagine someone would spray something on your building.” I thought they didn’t got the point. I were pretty sure that they didn’t got then point when they added: “YOU like graffiti, but this is just YOUR taste, it is your narrow minded thought, that you want everybody to like graffiti.” Aha, alright. That’s not what i intent. I don’t want everybody to go out and love or make graffiti. No, that’s not what i want. It would be utopian.

What i want is, that this kind of ART and CULTURE would be percieved like ART and CULTURE. In fact i think, that threre are many boring and ugly opera at the opera-house or bad tv- and radio-programme. And they are paid from my tax-money. But this is okay, because it is a kind of culture, that has a tradition and sometimes developes over time. And there are people enjoying it.

picture taken from wooster collective

Streetart should be seen as an integral part of the urban. Me really don’t like that the discussion (in Germany) is ONLY focussing on the vandalism aspect (when there are at the same time evidence for urban sites / underground sites, that were enhanced by colurful sprayings on the wall). Writing, Pieces, Graffiti and Streetart has meanwile a 30+ year tradition and is constantly evolving. (and can’t be stopped). And there are lot of people enjoing it.

PS: Why should i accept ugly and wrong advertisment? Only because someone paid for it? What about freedom of speech?

Shadow Story allows children to physically play with sketches that they created. Shadow Story is a projection-based interactive installation. Children cast shadows on the wall using their bodies to interact with the elements in the visual projection. Ther…

Shadow Story allows children to physically play with sketches that they created. Shadow Story is a projection-based interactive installation. Children cast shadows on the wall using their bodies to interact with the elements in the visual projection. Ther…

This library is aimed at doing computer vision by finding ‘blobs’ on an image , that is to say areas whose brightness is above or below a particular value. It allows to compute blobs’edges as well as blobs’bounding box. However, this library does not perform blob tracking, it only tries to find all blobs each frame it was fed with. It was primarly developped for Processing (Beta) but can be used in any java programs.
Download here.

Code for Processing (Alpha) is still available there though the interface and conventions changed a little bit when updating for Beta release. Nevertheless, st33d ported the code so it can be used with Beta version as internal applet classes. Useful if you want to tweak around and see how the algorithm works. Anyway, I recommend using the library which is more stable and robust.

It was very inspiring to see this creative usage of RFID to replace such a old device like the mouse. Actually I think that the usage should be something very different to a cd playbacking but the access, and why not the control, to the digital reference of something phisical through an RFID sticker on it is very interesting.

Thanks to my collegue Karsten (aka toxi) I found this interesting application. The cool aspect is of course not the possibility to keep our bookmarks but the crosslinking that is created comparing ours to the others. Not so much privacy for some aspects but very powerful semantic search engine.

Alexis Isaac has released the beta of a very interesting project called FlashMidi: it’s an API that allows you to send MIDI events from Flash to any of the 16 MIDI ports in your system. This means for example that you can play all the instuments that are built into your soundcard. In order for this to work you have to install a tiny .exe plugin he has written - so currently it runs on Windwows only. The API is very well documented and there are also some examples available.

As future additions he plans to implement MIDI-input - which I think is very interesting as you could use this also for all kinds of experimental interfaces, which do not necessarily have to be music-related.