A fellow Site 3 member brought some beautiful old floorboards into the shop recently. The wood is wonderful – really dense, hard, and pretty. I took a couple of offcuts destined for the wood stove, cleaned them up and made a nice new cutting board for my kitchen at home:
Patching things up…
Those slices give it character, right?
Cutting board in its natural habitat:
Chop, chop, yay.
Hobgob Stereo Tube Amp Kit purchaser and enterprising maker Karim recently sent me some pictures of his completed amp. They are great! It’s really exciting to see someone build something that you helped put together.
I like his idea of using alligator clips to connect the speaker terminals to the output transformers. That way you can swap in speakers of different impedances on the fly! No desoldering necessary.
Ooooooh, glow-y.
Hooray! Isn’t it pretty? Don’t you want to buy one now? You do.
Jameson Young recently built himself a rad pair of BeatSneaks using my designs. He plans to make a system of pads that will go all over the body: “Think step dancing meets beatboxing. Amplified.” How exciting! I like them. Check it out:
Jameson’s build reminded me of this project by Jason Hockman at McGill. It’s a system that uses a pair of shoes to synchronize the tempo of music with the walking speed of the person wearing them. Here’s the video.
Ooh ahh.
This convenient suitcase-based drumset reminds me of my slightly less convenient portable junk guitar. Neato.
via make
This past summer I added an RFID access control system to one of the labs of a certain professor. I designed a PCB to control up to six electric strikes with an Arduino. It’s a straightforward circuit that switches 12V onto half a dozen transistors. It’s meant to work with iClass R15 RFID readers from HID, but could potentially work with any reader system that uses the Wiegand protocol.
Check it out!
Whoa! It’s a blurb about the BeatSneaks entitled “Dance to Your Own Melody” in the back in the Yellow Pages section. So famous right now. You should read it, it’s a very nice magazine full of colourful pictures.
It’s true! This Saturday, October 16th, at 7:00PM, I will be one of the featured speakers at Site 3′s first Lightning Talks event. A lineup of speakers will each give quick, pithy, five-minute talks on topics of their choosing. Look out for:
Seth Hardy on Flame Effects
Jonathan Guberman on his magical typewriter
Tom Hobson on Tube Amps <– that’s me! Ha!
Amanda Stock on starting the Toronto Steampunk Society
Mark Rabo on on bridging communities with Gamer Camp
Nola McConnan on how to draw a straight line without a ruler
Alex Leitch on logo design and theory
Kate Hartman on hugging glaciers and other wearables
…and MORE.
I am going to talk about vacuum tube amplifiers. It is going to be VERY interesting. It will be just like this:
So please RSVP on the Facebook event page so that I can be even more nervous about it!
Last night Site 3 brought Flux and Fire, an interactive flame-effect installation to the streets of Toronto as a part of Nuit Blanche. Following the success of The Heart Machine – another, larger, and more elaborate fire sculpture – at this year’s Burning Man, the installation consists of a proximity sensor-laden platform surrounded by a circle of sixteen flamethrowers. Wave your hands, legs, hats, or what have you over the sensors and the corresponding flamethrowers emit ten foot jets of flame. It’s great.
As a Site 3 member, I was volunteering for a chunk of the night and, in between replacing burnt out cans of Sterno, got to see some pretty creative fire controlling techniques (a couple making out in a ring of fire, anyone?).
Check it out!
Kids, shockingly, love playing with fire. They really liked turning on one or two flamethrowers continuously, which was nice for those of us shivering around perimeter. There were frequent shouts of “Over here, we’re freezing!”
Christine, the project leader, talks to someone from television.
Christine controls fire with someone from television!
