also note the search window! pd is getting a bunch of useful functionality built in!

Here is a helpful video on using crimping beads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Hy5KjSPLw

they are conductive, now that I can make pretty necklaces, maybe I can start using electrical components in them.

However, what electrical component has the mystical powers of a lost tibetan bead?

The Incident is a fun 8-bit style iphone game where you play Frank, an ordinary seeming guy in a suit who begins to have a very bad day when every object in the world mysteriously starts falling out of the sky:

So, without further ado, here it is, The Incident: Sweded

The Incident: Sweded from Greg Borenstein on Vimeo.

There is quite a bit of post production work to do now and that it going to round out my 4×4 week.

I spent quite a few hours Wednesday night/Thursday morning struggling to get Cineform’s video codec to render alpha channels – it doesn’t for the $100 neoscene pack.  Anyone want to help a brutha out with Neo4k or Neo3D? In the frustration I did learn a cool feature of the Adobe Creative Suite CS5 called Adobe Dynamic Link.  Remember how you have to render out all those After Effects comps to get them into timeline software, in this case Premiere, well  if you have a kick ass computer, I do, you can use Premiere and simply import an AE sequence and bam.  AE is open at the same time so changes you make in AE effect Premiere in real time.  Hella cool and saves a lot of time especially when mocking this up quickly.

<3 rader

Leaf Bot Video Here

Just broccoli, cauliflower for outside and another tomato plant for the WindowFarm for now…

Cut an extension cord and split it to two bulb sockets with 100 watt 5500k CFLs.

https://github.com/organizations/pd-starterkit/

and the first commit of a somewhat fleshed out menutree is there too.

access useful objects through a right click menu!

tomorrow tutorials!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tylerdurden3181/sets/72157625862952834/

some highlights:

UPDATE: Upon further consideration…there’s nothing wrong with Cinder. It’s just not telling me what exactly is the problem with my code.

here…have some errors:

Build FFT of project FFT with configuration Debug

/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1/stdexcept:47: error: expected declaration before end of line

If anyone has ideas, lemme know. I’m pretty much at a complete impasse.

Getting started was a bit slow. It wasn’t the easiest interface to get used to. The first tutorial involved making a temple…sort of Jefferson Memorial-ish.

This took me about an hour to run through. Getting used to moving objects in 3D took a little time. Aligning the columns at first was awkward, but I got the hang of it eventually.

After the temple, the second tutorial involves making a Halo-ish type of helmet. I never thought to create a 3D model based off a sketch, most likely because I never think about making 3D models. Makes a lot of sense though.

This tutorial took about 2 hours. I would say the one thing I learned was when the Maya tutorial says to do something and you don’t see it easily, hold the space bar and it’ll probably be right there. After a while, following the directions was quick and easy. I found that the workflow was pretty decent, but I would’ve liked to know some keyboard shortcuts, if there are any.

Next step is to make something from scratch.

After a trip to the toy store, and a good amount of time looking at linkage games online, I decided to make my own linkage prototype system. It consists of a medium gage wire, machine screws, and screw caps. I bend each wire segment at the ends as close to a circle as I can. Then fit the machine screw under each of the wire ends and cap it to make a linkage. Pretty easy.

As the first test of a piece I’m making for tomorrow, I made two of Theo Jansen’s mechanisms outlined on this great site. http://www.mechanisms101.com/theo_jansen.html

One of the fails of this system is that the screw caps will be wound or unwound by normal twisting and turning of the linkages.  To solve this, you can hot glue the caps into place.
O

Video of the piece being uploaded now.  Will update when finished

Rooftop gardening brings with it many untraditional variables.  Temperatures are much higher on shiny rooftops which leads to high evaporation rates and even leaf scorching.  The other destructive problem is wind.  50-75mph gusts during summer storms are not uncommon and can be disastrous.  During the Brooklyn tornadoes last summer the winds were so strong that most of our epic tomato plants branches were snapped like twigs even after being heavily secured.  Regardless of the challenges it was still fun and seemed to light a fire under me fueled by nostalgia and a green thumb.

This winter, while waiting for the spring to come, we set up a hydroponic WindowFarm.   We are using complete artificial light with a 4ft T8 fluorescent strip light with 6500k bulbs.

It’s only January but it’s about time to start seedlings for spring and to think about garden plans for this year.  We’ve decided that we are going to try out SIP (sub-irrigated platers) gardening.  Essentially what you are doing it creating a container garden from rubbermaid totes.  There is a reservoir of water in the bottom of the tote that you fill by a pipe that sticks above the soil line.  Water is drawn up from the reservoir by a wicking capillary action.  The advantages of SIP gardening are water conservation through less evaporation – perfect for rooftop gardening.  Brooklyn’s own Bob Hyland has been an inspiration for this project along with GlobalBuckets.  For this project I am following the instructions put together by EarthTainer.  They have an awesome tutorial on how to build your own that is infinitely more detailed than what I’m going to show you below.  Here are a few pics of my process:

Purchased:

Two 30 gallon totes, 1.5″ PVC pipe, Smaller tupperware container, various screws.

First I measured and cut off the top of one tote per EarthTainer instructions with my handy dandy dremel.

I cut up the top of the tote I just decapitated to make a base for support.  This will make sense once we drill holes on the interior tote and secure in inside the other.

This is a wicking basket that I made from a plastic tupperware container.  The wicking basket is going to connect the water reservoir to the rest of the dirt in the SIP.  Through capillary action the dirt in the wicking basket wicks up water.  I drilled it with a bunch of holes to let water in to the potting mix.

This is essentially the finished EarthTainer complete with filling water pipe.  The initial tote we cut up goes inside of the other tote and sits on the base we made.  The wicking basket is tied with zip ties to the bottom of the interior tote and a bunch of holes are drilled for aeration.  All that is needed is potting mix in the spring and plants.  <3

Construction of your SIP isn’t an exact science and there is no “official way”.  If you want a commercial product, check out EarthBoxes. Going forward I think that I’m going to try converting last year’s 4×4′ raised bed’s with corrugated pipe into SIP plots.  People get real creative using all kinds of materials and create SIP’s out of everything from buckets and recycled milk bottles to actual cloth tote bags.  If you like gardening, you don’t have to give it up just because you live in a city.   Please do a little googling if you are interested in EarthTainers.  Other people have put together much better guides than I could.  :)

<3 rader

The initial plan was just to get something up and running and start implementing and thinking up new things to add as the day went on. I’ve been looking at this as a project that will be bigger than a day’s work but figured a strong start will make me more likely to get it done. He’s where I’ve got so far …

I setup phpFlickr to make the use of the Flickr API a little easier. I then started pulling in images and formatting them into a grid. Next was implementing Lightbox for viewing the larger images. From there I brought in a nav and created some other example API calls to pull images in a few different ways. Here is what it looks like now …

( click the image to take you to the site )

As far as next steps go, I’ve still got plenty of work ahead of me. Need to get my Flickr account up to date with the backlog of photos I’ve been meaning to edit. I’ve been working on that over the past week though, so I’ll be getting them uploaded over the next few days. Once I’ve got that done I need to do some reorganizing and restructure the nav to make some calls that make a bit more sense for a photography portfolio. I also want to integrate some more interesting calls in there too. I’d like to tap into other APIs so that I can do things like pull images that have tags or geolocation data associated with my Foursquare or Twitter updates. Again, I like the idea of finding ways to add a twist that I don’t have to actively be logging in to update. So I’ll be exploring those ideas more. First off though, I’ll likely try to get some smaller more practical things out of the way. Things like adding a Flickr icon in the Lightbox descriptions that will allow users to click through the image’s Flickr page, adding pages to navigate to additional images in the grid, integrating AJAX so the pages don’t have to reload and adding a search field to the nav. But before any of that … on to day two!

Measured the initial hand drawn mockup that was cut from foamcore:

Mocked up the final designed cutout in Photoshop and then printed it out and taped together a stencil (Xanadu the Cat teleported in from Mister Jenning’s closet):

Final cutout armor prop cut from 1/2? foamcore to be used at the shoot on Wednesday:

I really wish the client would have signed off on making the cutout in 3D.  In the past we have made this in 3D like the Andross mask below…

…using our very basic modelling skills in Blender and using Pepakura Designer to unwrap the 3D object into 2D so it could be printed out, traced onto matboard, and folded back into a real life 3D shape.  Ah wells…

<3 r a d e r