Playful or Cool – Page 14

iKaraoke from Griffin

In the category of cool technology for your iPod has to be the Griffin Technology: iKaraoke. This microphone and iPod connector can be used to sing along to your favorite tunes. It apparantly “isolates the lead vocal track, then fades it, giving your voice room to make that favorite tune yours.”

Even better, they have software, the TunePrompter, that you can download and use to create a video with the lyrics syncronized to the tune. The free (and beta) software then creates a video for uploading to the iPod to work with the iKaraoke.

Very neat, even if I hate karaoke.

BookMooch: exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter

BookMooch Logo BookMooch is another of those brilliant ideas you want to cheer on. The idea is to join a community that trades books. You post the books you have that you will send to others and then you can get books from others. A point system keeps it fair. What will this do to the library?

David McCallum: Warbike

Artist David McCallum has a cool project that was featured on the CBC radio show Spark. The Warbike Project is a bicycle with a device that creates a sonnification of wireless network activity it encounters as you bike around. Bells play as the device encounters a new wifi network and so on. You can sign out the bike now at Interaccess in Toronto.

The Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. Who knew that so much was going on?

Locative Art

Following the last post I thought I would blog some locative text and art projects.

Hello, world! is a work mowed into a field that encodes in Semacode the universal programmers greeting, “Hello, world!”

Eternal Sunset shows you webcam images of the sunset wherever it is happening at the time you visit. (This one is from Norway.)

Grafedia is a site where people can send emails with a word they have seen written in blue and underlined on the street. They then get back images associated with those words.

Logo About Google Maps hacks for Sonar is just one post from a group blog with a lot of posts on the category locative.

Screen Image Gutenkarte is built on MetaCarta and lets you see a map with the locations important to a text as Google Books does. They process the text, identify locations in the text and then map them. It would be neater if they let users run a text through.

John Cleese Advertising Compaq Computers

I came across a collection of Compaq ads with John Cleese) of Monty Python) uploaded by YouTube by user CompaqVet. These ads were apparently shown in the UK only.

I love how he keeps on harping on how Compaq’s are made with “386 chips and 32 bits of a bus”.

Adobe Labs – Apollo

Adobe has developed Adobe Integrated Runtime (or AIR) as a web applications development platform. AIR was previously called Apollo and reminds me Konfabulator and OS X Dashboard applications. With it you can adapt web applications into desktop applications. AIR lets you take an application written in HTML, Flash, AJAX, and JavaScript and create a runtime desktop application.

So, why do the Dashboard widgets only run when you turn the Dashboard on? Why not let them run like other applications? Konfabulator did. And … regarding Konfabulator, they seem to have been bought out by Yahoo are now supporting Yahoo! Widgets.

Is there a name for these small, easy-to-program, networked applications? Niall Kennedy and others call these tiny tools “at-a-glance” applications. Kennedy has an Engadget story that talks about Dashboard and its history.

I’m thinking this would be a good way to teach interface design to students comfortable with web design. I also think we could do some neat stuff with web services like those from TAPoR.

Text in the Machine – Flckr Set

I recently was playing around with the pages of old books as matter and uploaded a photo essay to my Flickr account, see Text in the Machine. This started as a project for a JestShrift for a friend, but I thought I would document it after hearing Peter Stoicheff talk about Otto Ege’s “scattered leaves”.

The reactions I get to these images, especially Cutting Pages and Sawing off the spine, is a mixture of horror and nervous laughter. We feel books are sacred and should be cared for, not cut and ripped by saws. The image of sawing off the spine with a power tool teases this unexamined academic taboo.

Cheddarvision.tv

Watch cheddar age at Cheddarvision.tv. You may not think this would be exciting, but apparently 1,391,872 people have viewed this page (as of today). The success of this webcam focused on a West Country cheddar that is being aged is partly due to stories like this one that appeared in today’s Globe and Mail, Cheesy programming? You bet (Philip Jackman, June 1, 2007). You can also see a time-lapse of the first three months of the aging on YouTube – Cheddarvision.tv. What an interesting example of viral marketing with humour.

Thanks to Alex for this.

bastwood.com: Aphex Face and transcoding

bastwood.com has a good page on images found in sound starting with the demon face in Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker”. It turns out the demon is really an inverted version of the Twin himself. The site goes on to discuss how to find such images and how to create sound from images using common software.

There are some uses for image/video sonnification tools other than putting surprises in tunes. See the The vOICE synthetic vision software site which sells systems for the visually impaired.

Thanks to Alex for the link.

Hairy Messaging

Hairy Mail is a the most unusual messaging environment I’ve encountered. Your write a message and it spreads Sodium Hydroxide (found in hair removal and cigarettes) over a hairy back in the shape of your message. If you press OK it removes the hair from the back.

So, what’s the point? Well it’s part of a site thetruth.com which promotes an anti-smoking message. The point is that Sodium Hydroxide is found in cigarettes, which can’t be good. The Hairy-Mail Flash toy sends your message as an e-mail.