Here are some wide shots I took of Site 3, the new collaborative workshop that I’m a part of. The space is pretty cool, as you can see.

Site 3 Banner

Site 3 Upstairs

Site 3 Exterior

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site3movein

Site 3 is a new communal workspace opening up in Toronto. As it happens, I’m a member. We moved a whole bunch of furniture and tools into our new space today, and things are looking pretty great. The space is wonderful, as evidenced by these pictures on the official site. We’ve got a solid handful of tools to start us off, a pair of super welding tables, and more storage than we know what to do with.

Door

site3interior1

If you’re interested in checking us out, we will be holding an opening party in late July at which we’ll show off the space, our projects, and just generally have a good time. You should come. There will be more specific information available at some point in the near future, I’m sure, so check back at the official site in a little while.

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A while ago, I started selling some hand drawn t-shirts. Then, I got lazy and stopped. Now I’m bringing them back! Check them out.

medium_hobgob_tee

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Of all the many, many LED projects out there, this is one of the more interesting/impressive ones that I’ve seen. Maybe it’s the video with its dramatic music, but regardless, it seems like a well-executed, elegant installation. Certainly the scale is much larger than your typical hobbyist project. It consists of several 81 cm cubes of LEDs, controlled by a computer through six XMOS ethernet boards talking to the various LED modules. It lights up and is pretty, and despite the glut of blinky matrices of lights to be found on the internet, is a genuinely compelling piece.

It was put together by rAndom International , with a chunk of the software work done by Frank Petrini.

via hackaday.

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Look at this lovely old book that I bought! It’s an old tube radio manual, and it’s full of great stuff. The illustrations are perfectly old-fashioned and painstakingly hand-drawn. I like it. It bears a lot of similarity to the Radio Handbook that I also own. In fact, I bought both of them from Eliot’s Bookshop here in Toronto. There always seems to be a bounty of interesting old engineering books on their shelves (well, one of their shelves).

It’s a shame that vacuum tubes barely get mentioned in the modern electrical engineering curriculum. An understanding of their operation provides insight into how transistors work, not to mention an intuitive grasp of amplification and certain electromagnetic principles. Also, they’re just cool. They look fascinating and weird. They draw people in. It seems to me that they’re an obvious tool for getting students excited about electronics and electromagnetism.

Anyways, check it out:

Great, right?

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It makes me feel important.

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Check out Rob Seward’s latest work, a book entitled Death Death Death. It’s an algorithmically generated book wherein association trees are used to link sequences of words the root word, death. The associations get pretty weird and interesting after a while, as you can see in the video. It’s been nominated for the FILE Prix Lux. You should vote for it (it’s on the second page).

I actually worked a bit alongside Rob last summer on one of his other awesome projects, Four Letter Words.

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Possibly the most common complaint that one hears about classical music is that it’s boring. To many people, classical music is something that they hear occasionally in the dentist’s office or in the soundtrack to a dusty period film with a lot of corsets and talking. Flipping through radio stations, they hastily pass by the classical frequencies and move on to supposedly more exciting fare. Certain enthusiasts of classical music are likely to lament this behaviour with withering proclamations of society’s decline, but they are perhaps overreacting. The sneering youth have a point, classical music can be boring. If you’re listening to it wrong. Which is to say quietly.

Listening to Beethoven at half-volume on a pair of laptop speakers (as I am now, but I already like Beethoven, so my hypocrisy is acceptable, right?) betrays the intended presentation of the music, and undermines the experience of hearing it. The man liked his music loud, after all. It seems like a bit of an obvious point, but turning up the volume really does make such a difference. It’s easy to dismiss classical music as background filler and senior citizen fodder when you can barely hear it, but when it’s shaking your fillings out you might just see it in a new light.

Of course, generally speaking, all music sounds better louder. I think we can all agree that Led Zeppelin is a lot more fun to listen to when it’s coming out of wall of Marshalls instead of your roommate’s iPod speakers. But classical music seems to be especially prone to crippling via attenuation. For some reason, the experience relies more heavily on the presence and immediacy of the music, or at least that would seem to be the case for many people.

To those that say classical is boring, I say turn it up. Grab a pair of headphones, clamp them to your skull, and max out the volume on your stereo. Never mind the hearing damage. A cello concerto is usually a safe bet for some quality bone-rattling. I’d recommend Philip Glass’ Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, especially the third movement. It’s totally melodramatic and terrifying.

The youtube clip with the good quality sound seems to have embedding disabled. Check that one out here. The video below doesn’t have great sound, but there’s an interesting little interview piece at the beginning.

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Like I said, GIMME.

via hackaday

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For those of you that play guitar or are into the manic shredding stylings of Steve Vai, you might be familiar with this guitar:Steve Vai JEM

The hole in the body there is a handle. A while ago I got my hands on an old beat-up classical guitar and messed around with it a bit, namely adding a handle of my own. Think of it as an acoustic take on the JEM up there. Sort of a traveling hobo thing.

There’s the handle.

…and there are some slightly silly things I drew on the front with permanent marker.

It’s a cute idea, but not without its disadvantages. Some might point out that it’s more likely to get damaged, but I’d be more concerned with the idiot-with-a-guitar-in-public effect. One must strike a fine balance when carting this instrument around. Quads of any sort must be avoided, aviator sunglasses shunned. Anything by Oasis is strictly off-limits (as if it ever wouldn’t be).

Still, maybe I’ll venture outside with it at some point.

It’s a surprisingly nice-sounding guitar, considering I think I paid less than fifty dollars for it and broke the neck shortly thereafter. The sound is deep and sonorous, if a bit dull. The action of the strings is incredibly high, making it somewhat difficult to play, but it adds to its crappy charm.

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