funk~station

Instead of blog-blabbering some bullshit about the great new iTunes feature — Oh yes, I do love podcasting! — I uploaded a remix of Richard's Experiement of Programming by Accident aka Richard's Chaos. I added some color to it, captured ever frame on my harddrive (using saveFrame()) and save it as a video.

A couple of days ago I got a hold of sas21's DV-Cam and used it with my little capture program

The upper half of the images shows a shapshot of the scene which is the source for the image in the lower part.
At the moment I am working on transforming the images it creates into sound. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I had a close look on Processing. The language is as simple as powerful. If you know Java, you can program sophisticated interactive visuals in almost no time. Here's my first try. It's a chaotic structure that spreads like a virus within a given image. As time passes it grows faster and wilder, after one or two minutes a chaotic pattern sort of stabilizes. It's well-known that humans are trained to discover patterns everywhere. So digital nomads out there, can you see this pattern? To be honest I programmed it by accident

The libraries that come with Processing are clearly structured and well documented. There is also a library for including the google API. It takes 2 minutes to include goggle queries in your animation. The video library that comes with processing is even better. I wrote a function that constantly calculates the difference between two following images of a video. This could be used to detect movement in front of a camera. Unfortunately I currently don't have a webcam, I first have to buy one.

So I continued writing filters. Based on a black/white 2×2 low pass filter for images, I programmed a color blur filter for videos that can also be applied on only a part of the screen. If you attach to filter to your mouse, you can e.g. blur a bad actor to prevent viewers from seeing his face. You probably won't belief it, but it's much fun to use a real-time blur filter on movies! However my notebook is slightly too slow for this.

The bad thing is that the video library doesn't work on the web. Furthermore you can only export applets with Processing. The function 'export to application' is not yet implemented in the software! So the question remains, what I should do with the this library, if I can play the videos only within the processing software??? Have I overlooked something? Any hints? Read the rest of this entry »

Our trend scout Julie (now located in Dublin) made these cute maps for Frankfurt. But don't tell anyone, these are secret places.

according to PDA Live

1. Dropped on the ground
2. Squeezed into tight jeans
3. Used handset in the rain
4. Thrown to the ground in rage
5. Destroyed by dog or child
6. Dropped into toilet
7. Dropped into the sea
8. Left on roof of car
9. Damaged from sweat
10. Dropped in the snow

My friends managed to damage their mobiles in most of these cases, well except 2,9 and 10. I remember scenario 6 happened to Birgit. She used a hair dryer to dry her mobile and it worked out well.

My algorithm was messed up a little. Now I fixed it.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of days ago I disovered Processing. Tonight I had some time to play a little with this program. Here are my first results:

I used the stream of my webcam and processed a single column of the frames over the period of 320 frames (which equals the width of the pictures). Since it was dark already, the images don't contain a lot of color.
I'll keep on working on it until the images are a little bit more blury. And I'd like to make way bigger ones. These are just small ones to ensure a rapid develpment.

TP: Black Day

This is the best joke ever: Um die Skype-Software voll ausnutzen zu können, sollten Sie die folgenden Schritte ausführen.” Window is just great!

curious? read here ’til the end - nk1 knew that all along - didnt she?

B

Meetro (Beta) a new location-aware Instant Messenger is out! It's like a normal IM, but you can see where your friends are located and how far away they are from you. The good things is, that you can easily integrate your current IM like ICQ or AIM. I just talked to Paul, one of the founders, and he told me more IM-Plugins are about to come.

Their approach is similar to Plazes, especially when it comes to the technical side. They use the same method to locate their users. However Meetro (currently) doesn't give users the chance to tag a Place, instead they cooperate with hotspot providers, which provide them with location data. So their data is very accurate, but we know how much fun it is to actually tag a plaze by yourself (I tagged Bastians former home before he did it . Unfortunately, Meetro does not have cooperations with hotspot provides in Europe so far.

Another difference to Plazes is, that Meetro strongly focuses on IM and on integrating existing IM-Clients. This is a good idea, since users can keep their IM buddy-lists. Furthermore it's likely that this will let them grow fast.

Instead Plazes has a more innovative concept. They succeed to interlink people and places in a new exiting way. You can discover new places and customize them. Each place can be tagged with pictures and includes a forum. People can be present at a place and leave traces. Every site has an RSS-feed and Flickr-Plugins are on the way. Felix told me that they will soon come out with a RDF-API. This is something I lock forward to.

Currently both services are beta and both seem to be promising. I’m curious what’s going to happen in the future.