The winner of a shiny new Summer Fieldbook is Eva! Who will be having a fun and busy summer, from the sounds of it.
If you didn’t win, or skipped the contest but still want a copy, Lulu has a free shipping offer through tomorrow, so get your order in now and save a few dollars. The discount code is FREESHIP.
Happy summer adventures!
When I ordered my proof of the Summer Fieldbook, I bought a second copy so I could compare shipping options (really, I was worried that the default shipping would be slow). Surprisingly, the “slower” media mail book arrived on Saturday, and the FedEx Home Delivery one only got here yesterday. So the faster shipping option wasn’t actually faster, at least in this case.
This means I have a spare copy of the Fieldbook to give away to you, my fabulous blog readers. All you need to do is leave a comment with something you’re looking forward to doing this summer. Like watching the World Cup, or eating ice cream. I’ll pick a winner at random on Monday, May 10th, so be sure to fill in an email address I can use to reach you.
Categories: projects
Tagged: book, fieldbook, giveaway, journal, summer
Since September I’ve been keeping a daily notebook. It’s just a little report on what I did: work, side-projects, events, going out to eat or have drinks somewhere.
I’ve been reading about other people using print-on-demand to make custom notebooks for a while, and seeing the results of the SXSW Fieldnotes books gave me an idea for a project to try of my own.
I designed a notebook to be used as a summer journal and memento. There are day pages to keep track of what you did, blank notebook pages, QR code bookmarks to things you might want to look up on the go, dinosaurs, and a full map of Forest Park, which you can use to plan a hike or keep track of where you’ve been.
If you’d like your own copy, it’s for sale on Lulu now. Since the books are printed as they’re ordered, I recommend getting your order in by May 14th to make sure that it’ll arrive before Memorial Day weekend (when the datebook starts) using the cheapest shipping option.
This is a book that’s meant to be scribbled in, have things taped to the pages, and need a rubberband to hold it shut. I’m excited to use it and look for ideas on how to make the next one even more fun.
Categories: projects
Tagged: dinosaurs, journal, notebook, planning, print on demand, summer
Re-entry from vacation is always a little tricky. There’s work to return to, at the same time you’re trying to sort out all of the photos and memories and ideas from the trip. After last week’s trip, I came back to a client project launch, Calagator’s birthday, rapid-fire CrisisCampPDX planning, new photo equipment to play with—just to start.
We had about fifteen people come out for Calagator‘s 2nd birthday party at Bailey’s on Friday night. Low-key, casual meetup, with brownies from Joe Cohen, lemon bars I made with the roadtrip lemons, plenty of beer, and food from the taqueria across the street. I’m sad that Igal, who has been instrumental in keeping Calagator going, was sick and couldn’t be there with us.
On Saturday, about 60 people met up at NedSpace for the first-ever CrisisCampPDX, a quickly-organized branch of a project that’s been bringing people together around the world to provide support for relief efforts in Haiti. This wasn’t just the regular Portland tech scene at work—we had a wide range of participants, from developers, to GIS specialists, to French and Creole speakers, to people who helped with data entry and sorting. I was really impressed with the energy and focus everyone brought to this work day. I helped with a hospital data project using Sahana, a disaster-management system. We hit a few bumps as people tried to get up to speed on different projects, but on the whole I was really impressed with how much we were able to do, for such a distributed set of projects.
And now for something completely different.
I have a small but growing collection of cameras, which has now expanded to include some Polaroid equipment. The middle of winter in the Pacific Northwest is not the best time to be running around shooting ISO 100 film, but I did manage to get a few shots off last week with my new SX-70 Sonar camera. (This is not the only new camera from the last couple of weeks, but you’ll have to wait to hear about the rest.)
You may be wondering, “didn’t Polaroid stop making instant film a while back? Why would you pick that up now?”. There’s a group known as The Impossible Project which has spent the last year and change developing new instant film for Polaroid camera formats, and they’re expected to release the results of that work next month. So I just have to pace myself with my existing film supply for a few weeks.
Last but not least, I updated the blog’s header with a new photo, from the road trip. Click through and have a look if you’re using an RSS reader to view this. I have a habit of leaving the header picture the same for long periods of time, but once in a while the blog design changes, and there’s often new links in the sidebar to check out, so it’s worth taking a peek.
Categories: events · photography · projects · weekly report
Tagged: calagator, camera, cchaiti, ccpdx, crisis camp, film, impossible project, open source, polaroid
I’ve been working on an iPhone app to allow Calagator users to find out what events are happening, get details, and map the event location so they can figure out how to get there. It’s been a little slow going, as this is my first real iPhone development project, but the code is now to the point that the basic feature set is roughly covered.
If you’d like to try it out or contribute, I’ve pushed the code to GitHub, and you can check it out here.
Last week I ran into an issue where I wanted an easy way to strip HTML from a block of text, which is super-simple in Rails, and something I could code up pretty quickly in plain Ruby if needed. Figuring out how to do it in Objective-C was a bit more work, though. Learning a new language, there’s often a tension between how you’re used to approaching a problem, and the tools and preferences of this other language. I did finally come up with something that works and doesn’t feel excessively messy. I started with a snippet from another blog post, but it was crashing when I moved it into my Event model. Below is my solution.
- (NSString *) cleanDescription {
NSScanner *scanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:self.description];
NSString *tag = @"";
NSString *cleaned = self.description;
while ([scanner isAtEnd] == NO) {
[scanner scanUpToString:@"<" intoString:NULL];
[scanner scanUpToString:@">" intoString:&tag];
cleaned = [cleaned stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@>", tag] withString:@""];
}
return cleaned;
}
Categories: programming · projects
Tagged: calagator, code, development, iphone
Over the weekend, Lucas and I watched both Solaris and From Beyond, a combination that’s possibly as high/low style as one can get with SF. I love the interior of the Solaris station, the round walls, electrical panels, and piles of books shoved onto shelves. With From Beyond, I started wondering how to rewrite the whole thing as a police procedural—the original story is short enough you could do all sorts of things with it.
One of the enjoyable things about Solaris is that it combines a universe with space travel and alien intelligence with one that has paper books, tea, and long walks around the pond. It’s unevenly technological, past and present intermingling. Which is a good way to describe my music experiments the last week as well.
First, I should note that I’m using an iPhone app to tune my ukulele. It’s called Cleartune, and it’s a full chromatic tuner that can be used with any instrument. The graphics are beautifully designed, and downloading it was cheaper and more immediate than purchasing a hardware tuner.
I recorded myself playing Amazing Grace using AudioBoo, a handy little iPhone app and website for doing up to 5-minute recordings that other people can subscribe to in iTunes or a RSS reader. One of the interesting things about practicing ukulele is that since I like to sing as well, finding songs to practice is a balance between what has manageable chords, and what has a melody I already know (hopefully it fits my vocal range as well). This arrangement of Amazing Grace definitely hits that spot for me.
Then, on Thursday, I brought the UCreate mixer to the weekly hackathon at Lucky Lab. I still had one of the ukulele samples on there from earlier experiments, and Reid whipped up a little drum loop using TweakyBeat (yet another iPhone app, hmm?). Below is the result.
Reid had suggested that the 30 Hour Day recordings (from an awesome no-sleep fundraiser held in December) might produce some interesting clips for remixing, so I took the highlight video, split off some promising bits of music and conversation, and came up with something that makes me laugh (though I can’t speak for anyone else, and it probably helps if you know Rick and Cami, the hosts, personally).
So that’s what my week sounded like. And the future thing: I would’ve killed to be able to do this as a kid, you know? From as early as I knew I could use computers to make things, I wanted to be able to carry the pieces in my backpack, plug the parts together, and have it all just work. These kind of music experiments really highlight for me how we’re there, finally. I sat around at a pub on Thursday and plugged my friend’s phone into a toy mixer so we could manipulate the sound, and it was about as simple as it gets. That’s pretty neat.
Categories: art · projects · weekly report
Tagged: 30hourday, apps, iphone, movies, music, recordings, science fiction, sf, the future, ucreate, ukulele
As planned, we spent Christmas day on Mt. Hood.
There was snowshoeing, though not as much as expected due to poor route choice. But at least the mountain was pretty, and did not attempt to eat us alive.
Thanks to everyone who took my to do in 2010 survey last week.
I’ll leave the link active a little while longer if anyone else wants to chime in. It’s been interesting to see the responses so far.
I feel like I’m often struggling to balance tech projects with crafts/art/music ones, so I know that’s going to continue to be a challenge this next year. My goal is to make more art, and do a better job of getting the things I make out of my home (or computer) and out into the world, whether that’s by selling more work on Etsy, posting photos and videos online, or some other project. I’m considering reorganizing all of the “things for sale” into one consolidated shop on my site, if anyone has suggestions or ideas.
One push in the music direction comes via the shiny new ukulele Lucas got me for Christmas. I’ve already learned a few chords. It’s really a friendly instrument to work with.
Speaking of music, 2009 has been a good year for me discovering new artists and albums, so I made a little compilation of my favorites. Not all were released this year, but were new to me, and at least from this past decade. Have a listen.
Categories: life · me · projects · weekly report
Tagged: christmas, holidays, new year's, year in review
Last week I finished up the content for the “Life of Audrey 2009 Retrospective” magazine and uploaded it to MagCloud.
You’ll be able to buy it here after I receive the proof and approve it, probably later this week. I’ll post on Twitter when it’s ready. [Update: It's available now.]
The third annual Winter Coders’ Social was last Tuesday night. This has become a really cool year-end tradition for the local tech scene. People from a bunch of different user groups get together for a holiday potluck and board games.
My current reading interest is noir crime novels. While I love a lot of the later derivatives of these, I’d never picked up a Hammett or Chandler book until a couple of weeks ago. So far I’ve read The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. I love the writing style and rhythm. It feels like they were meant to be read out loud, like radio plays. So I recorded a bit from Maltese Falcon on AudioBoo. It’s the section where we first encounter “the fat man”, and the adjectives he uses just crack me up.
I also just finished From Hell, the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell graphic novel. It’s a huge book, which I didn’t realize when I ordered it, but dense and engaging. They do some really interesting things with time, consciousness, and different characters’ perspectives throughout, like a section when we’re fully inside Gull’s head and everything around him seems to glow. Highly recommended.
On Saturday we had a Calagator code sprint, the first one in quite a while. Only 5 attendees, in part due to the weather (we were promised freezing rain, which turned out to be cold and damp but only a little icy). But we got through several tickets, and added a couple of small features which should improve usability. You should be on our mailing list and following Calagator on Twitter if you want to find out when the next sprint will be.
Categories: events · portland · projects · technology · weekly report
Tagged: books, calagator, code sprint, crime novels, end of the year, geeks, magazine, magcloud, noir, reading, retrospective, review, winter, winter coders social
The current outside temperature is 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Twenty six. What city is this again?
I actually spent most of last week in Long Beach, where it was 70ish and sunny. Not that I got outside much during the day, or even saw a proper beach, because I was busy cramming my head full of iPhone knowledge at a Pragmatic Studio class. I love that kind of intensive workshop format. What better way to learn something than to work on it for enough hours a day that it infects your dreams? (I don’t really know if dreaming about table views means I understand them better, but it was interesting…)
I started working on a Calagator app to show the current day’s events. It currently looks like this:
Pretty slick, huh? (Kidding, just kidding. It will have real data soon.)
I’m also working on a Life of Audrey 2009 retrospective magazine I’m going to publish through MagCloud. I’ve done a fair amount of writing and photography this year, so I thought it would be fun to compile the highlights into a print object. I’m trying to decide whether to include an excerpt from my NaNoWriMo project. It might be hard to find a section that makes sense on its own and doesn’t need massive amounts of rewriting. But maybe someone will find it entertaining anyhow? Hard to know.
Stay as warm as you can.
Categories: projects · technology · travel · weekly report
Tagged: iphone, programming, work
First item of news: I finished NaNoWriMo last night. Seriously. All done. As mentioned on Twitter, I expect this thing will need extensive rewriting before it’s even close to publicly readable, but I don’t have to think about that for weeks or months. Yay.
It’s the tenth anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle, which I’ve written about before. I’m still grateful there’s only been one week in my life where I’ve sat around watching the news to figure out if I could walk around my neighborhood without encountering pepper spray, tear gas, and police lines.
When I’m at the end of a project with a imminent deadline, I discover an amazing tendency to suddenly get excited about some other creative project (one that does not have to be finished anytime soon). This past week it’s been electronic music. I picked up a UCreate Music toy a few weeks ago, but didn’t spend much time playing with it after I unwrapped it. Until this past weekend, of course. Click the audio link above to see what it sounds like.
The device is set up to play 12 installed loops plus 2 you can record yourself. You can plug it into a computer via USB to download your song, or update the samples from various other sets it downloads from the UCreate site. Right now the options are a little limited; just five sample packs. There’s a link for a store, but if you click it, it says “Coming Soon”. (Which is really weird, IMO. Why show the link if you don’t have a store set up and there’s nothing to tell people when it might become available?) It will let you drag and drop the different sample pack sounds to any button you want, but your own recorded loops can’t be moved from the bottom row. So I’d like to figure out how to install custom sounds. I found one other blog post asking about this, but no one who’s made it work yet.
Even without that, it’s still a fun toy. I like how the effects controller pad works. Perhaps I’ll have a video to demonstrate, next week.
The other music toy I’m playing with is the Korg DS-10. No finished sound clips to show off yet, but if you pick this up for yourself, I recommend checking out howto videos on YouTube.
Categories: me · projects · weekly report
Tagged: nanowrimo, writing
