For week 5’s ICM homework, I was so excited to be able to scrape data off Web pages that the page I chose to work with was the Rapture Index.

It’s always bugged me that the Rapture Index doesn’t have an RSS feed—it’s like the weather; we need to know it every day. Now, however, I can finally just roll my own feed.

The problem is that I can’t get my Rapture Scraper to show the correct description of the prophetic activity level (see under “why is this null?!?”). Just because the index has been stuck at “fasten your seatbelts” for as long as I’ve been watching it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know for sure. Like, what if the index suddenly climbs above the record high of 182? They’d have to make a new prophetic activity category, don’t you think?

So anyway, that’s the main thing I’d like to fix. I’m also unclear on why the text is so jagged. Smoothing is turned on in two places, and I’m using the font (Lucida Sans 20) only at the size at which it was bitmapped.

Another modification I’d like to make, oh, I dunno, when I have some of that “free time” I’m always hearing about, would be to maybe have the rapture balls bounce around at a speed that’s proportional to the index. The colors should probably also heat up. So when the world goes crazy, so will the application.

This is, believe it or not, the better of the two lame programs I wrote for this week’s homework. The other one is worse by virtue of its totally not working. I think I’ll just have to rebuild that one from scratch.

Crank your speakers and click to play

Sorry about the wobbles.

This is my video journal of the Servo lab for PhysComp, filmed for CommLab on a Sanyo Xacti 6MP digital movie camera.

I tried to edit this within the Xacti, but I ended up joining the clips together in the wrong order. It was way too much work to separate them again—it’s just a lousy way to edit—so then I dumped the mess into iMovie HD (an older version, recommended by Bre Pettis in his very fine Getting Started in Video series), recut and rearranged it, and added title frames from Photoshop (too bad they look like crap after compression) and CC-licensed music by the excellent Kristin Hersh. This was my first time using iMovie; I found it reasonably intuitive.

So, basically, it’s just the worst video for a Kristin Hersh song ever. Rock on.

I finally got around to installing some WordPress plug-ins. Here’s what I’m running at the moment:

Akismet 2.1.8

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

Category Selector Back to the Sidebar (MOD) 0.7

Puts the category selector section back to the sidebar of the Post page. Now you can write at a WordPress v2.5 blog without hating v2.5. By Baris Unver.

FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1

Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.

Fluency Admin 1.2.1

WordPress 2.5+ only. A rethink of the WordPress admin interface giving it a slightly more modern application-esque feel, inspired by Steve Smith’s Tiger Admin. Firefox, Safari and IE8 only. By Dean Robinson.

No Self Pings 0.2

Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site. By Michael D. Adams.

Wiki Dashboard 0.1

Mini-Wiki on the wordpress dashboard, for multiple autors [sic] collaboration. By Dzamir.

WordPress Admin Bar 3.0.2

Creates an admin bar inspired by the one at WordPress.com. Credits for the look of this plugin go to them. By Viper007Bond.

WordPress.com Stats 1.3.2

Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.

WP Ajax Edit Comments 2.1.2.0

Allows users and admin to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. By Ronald Huereca.

I’ve also edited the stylesheet so that the body text is sized in points rather than pixels, and I tweaked some colors and margins and such.

Photo: Oh. by Adam Smith; some rights reserved.

So, first, there was the obligatory soldering. It wasn’t quite so bad this time, I think, though I did manage to melt some of the plastic inside the jack.

Then I had a lot of puzzlement over the high voltage readings I was getting. And there was a burning smell, even though I’d turned off the soldering iron ten minutes before. Hmm. Could there be something wrong with the—

Handy Tip: Voltage regulators get really fucking hot. Don’t touch them.

Finally, I found the wire that was going into ground instead of power and got the desired voltage reading. Then, I added a switch and an LED.

And, again, wired the switch into ground instead of power. Got that sorted, and—

Ta da!

The next step, putting two LEDs in series, went fine (with voltage readings of 2.11 for the red LED and 2.88 for the green), but when the instructions said to add a third . . . well, I’m not sure how you add a third LED in series. Is it like this—

Probably not, since that wiring scheme works, while the instructions imply that adding a third LED makes them all go out. Comparing my voltage numbers here would probably tell me the answer to this question, but although I took lots of photos to record the multimeter readings, I can’t remember which reading was from which part of the circuit or taken at which step. Sigh. I should have just written them down.

Setting the LEDs in parallel was also pretty easy, but measuring the amperage across them was simply not happening. I tried it every which way, but I couldn’t get the circuit closed with the multimeter as part of it. After trying several interpretations of the written instructions and circuit diagram, I gave up and moved on to the pot part.

Again, no problem wiring it. The voltage readings were 1.78 at about halfway and 2.89 at full blast.

This lab took me about four hours, sadly.

* The reason for the latter, in my defense, is that the breadboard in my kit has ground on the outside rows, while the breadboard in all the photos within the instructions has power on the outside. I always forget to check the color of the row, matching only the position. And sometimes I’m just not paying attention.

Applications presentation slides

For context, here are the project descriptions, written by Jorge:

My Lung Buddy

My Lung Buddy is an empathic breathing guide that senses your breathing rate and matches it so that you’re both breathing together. Slowly, My Lung Buddy adjusts its rate to a predetermined pace in order to help you attain the sense of calm and well-being that comes with breathing deeply in a measured way. My Lung Buddy doesn’t force you to breathe with it. It simply reminds you that breathing is important. And that you don’t have to do it alone.

The ITPod

The ITPod is an on-floor oasis that offers students short escapes from the blinking, buzzing and beeping that fill a typical ITP day. It’s a simple structure, airy enough to ward off claustrophobia while still allowing for separation and privacy. A comfortable hanging chair dangles inside an enclosed cylinder of cloth, which glows with warm, diffused light. A floor compartment lets you tuck your stuff out of sight and browse picture books from a community library. Noise-canceling headphones offer four settings: (1) silence, aided by the headphones’ noise-canceling properties; (2) white noise to help drown out thoughts and distractions; (3) the sound of falling water or other natural sounds; and (4) a guided breathing session. Each program is twenty minutes long and fades in and out along with the light, giving the user enough time to recharge.

Lunch Date

Lunch Date is an opt-out service that helps ITP-ers meet and share meals with fellow students and faculty with whom they may not otherwise cross paths. An email directs students to a simple form that asks for two times when you’d generally be available for a 40-minute lunch, and the number, between zero and four, of Lunch Dates you’d like to have per month. The program compares everyone’s schedule, sorts people into anonymous pairs, and sends out text messages each morning: Reply yes if you’d like a lunch date today, and no if you’re too busy. A negative reply sends the computer back into the pool of candidates until a match is found, and another text message alerts each lunch date to meet at the elevators fifteen minutes before the time is set. By automating the social selection, Lunch Date eliminates the awkwardness and inertia which might keep students from getting to know someone they’ve never met. And because it’s an opt-out program, it nudges those who aren’t already ultra social to engage in an easy, commitment-free way. After all, it’s just 40 minutes. And then it’s back to class.

LeisurelyMail

LeisurelyMail is a simple plug-in designed to relieve the tense breathlessness with which we typically attack our in-boxes. When installed, it changes the visual effect of opening an email message. Instead of a sharp pop-up or a boring drop-down pane, the email window opens slowly, unfolding over a full second of time. Every few messages, an extra momentary pause is built in, as the window shows an image of nature, or a simple reminder to breathe, before revealing the contents of the email. Because sometimes you just want to say screw it and burn through your work, you can revert your email to its normal function by holding down the option key as you click.

Focus Pocus

Based on a theory of how we block out unnecessary inputs . . .

This week’s assignment:

• Install Wordpress on your ITP account or create a blog in ITP’s multiuser environment. Document this process in your blog.
• Transfer first week’s assignment to your blog
• Find three blogs you like and create links to them in your sidebar
• Document your process as an entry in your blog.

As I mentioned last week, I’d already tried ITP’s built-in multiuser blog and found it frustrating. So it was with great joy that I set up a standalone version in my Web space.

I’ve installed WordPress once before, for my mom’s website. Setting up that just the way I wanted it took me several days, interleaved with real work tasks. So this install was quick and painless, though I’m still sorting out some permissions things and trying to decide which plugins I want. And it took hours to find a template that did roughly what I want; I’ll tweak it from here.

Photo: Oblivious by Vicki’s Pics / Vicki Ashton; some rights reserved.

I managed to strip three wires in less than five minutes—a huge improvement over last week—but I still suck at soldering:

My hands shake a lot, I’ve learned. Also, I can’t see. I had to bring in the nasty fluorescent work light that I use when I’m doing proofreading, and even then I had to get my eyes down so close to what I was soldering that I almost soldered my face. Another thing I’ve learned thus far is that you basically get one chance at making each join. If you mess up on the first try, any attempts to fix it just seem to make matters worse. And smoky.

The first part of this assignment went smoothly. I had no problem matching my setup to the photo in the instructions, and turning the knob actually did what it was supposed to do. Yay!

Bright vs. Dim

(I know it doesn’t look very dim, but trust me.)

Swapping in other kinds of variable resistors required my actually thinking, however, and that part didn’t go so well.

I had wanted to get a flex sensor, but the computer store suddenly changed its hours—I guess because we’re three weeks into the semester?—and was closed five minutes before I arrived. So no Hug-O-Meter for me. Instead, I rewired the board with a photocell, a thermistor, and two LEDs, per the other photo, and then changed the code accordingly. Only one of the LEDs was responding, though, and it was the wrong one. Covering the photocell made the green LED dim instead of the red one. So I fiddled with the code a bit, checking the Serial.print output to see if the thermistor was doing anything at all, and eventually I turned around the red LED.

Aaah. I really need to learn which leg of an LED goes where.

So then both LEDs were lit, and the red one was responding to the photocell, but the green one wasn’t doing squat. I fiddled with the code some more, changing analogWrite(ledB, potValueB/4); to analogWrite(ledB, potValueB*4);, but that didn’t do anything. So I took out the resistor (a 220) that was adjacent to the thermistor, and the Serial.print numbers shot up and the LED got a lot brighter. So then I swapped in different resistors: 10 was no good, 100 was no good, but 1,000 did the trick: finally, the changes in brightness were visible.

Both LEDs off:

Both LEDs on:

Covering the photocell—red LED dims:

Nice nail polish, huh.

Holding the thermistor—green LED dims:

Do I understand why this worked? Absolutely not. But it worked! Woot!

On Sunday, Diego, Juri, David, and I slogged around Park Slope in the heat, snapping photos of strangers and writing notes about them, à la Harriet the Spy. The assignment was to

take a one-hour hour walk or ride around the city. Try to travel as far as you can from your start and get back in an hour, this will give more variety. Take note of every time you see a person using a digital device. This could be anything from buying and using a Metrocard on the subway to playing video games in an arcade to making cell phone calls to using an ATM to swiping an ID at the gym. With each action you note, take note of:

* location and time of day
* apparent intent of the actor
* time taken for the action
* number of people involved
* motor skills needed (hands, legs, seeing, hearing, etc)

Collect your notes on your blog. Do this in pairs, with one person observing and the other keeping notes. Alternate roles as well.

My data

Because there were four of us, the taking turns part was a bit chaotic. Most of the time, whenever anyone spotted a new subject, they’d call it out and we’d all start scribbling or photographing (I didn’t bring a camera, because mine is big and obvious), though there was one point when Diego told me he’d take notes for a while, as he’d mostly been photographing people. We spent almost the entire hour walking, so it was hard to get a sense of the time taken for most of the actions we observed, especially as most of those were cell phone calls or iPod usage that started and ended outside our view. There was one guy whom we walked behind for several minutes, and while everyone else went into a shop to poke around, I waited on the sidewalk and saw a couple of people who had ongoing calls.

The lack of variety was kind of surprising, but it had a lot to do with where we were. There was no subway along our route, and no buses arrived while we stood near any bus stops, so we didn’t see any Metrocard use. And in some spots where there was a lot going on, we’d focus on different people, so, for example, David and Juri observed some people using ATMs, while Diego and I were facing the other way. We had to go out of our way to see a coffee shop with people working on laptops, and though we saw several people carrying cameras, I spotted only one person using one (besides us, of course). I was also surprised to see only one person apparently using his cell phone as a timepiece, especially since I was pulling mine out every two minutes for that purpose.

Nearly everyone we observed was solo. Nineteen out of the thirty-six people whose actions I recorded were using cell phones, apparently to communicate with someone else (though you never know, with all the stuff you can do through your phone now). Fourteen of those were walking or bike riding while doing so. All but one person held his or her phone in hand; of the two people I saw using hands-free phone mics (one of whom is not on the list, because it was after we’d officially stopped stalking people), one still had to use his hand to hold the mic close enough to his mouth that he could be heard. Most people who didn’t have iPhones had flip phones, which require a fair amount of dexterity to use.

One thing we didn’t make note of was people using digital tools within cars. For one thing, it’s hard to see into a car. For another, it’s safe to assume that any car made in the last fifteen years has something digital in it, so probably every car we saw was eligible. I would have liked to see a driver using that system that helps you back up without hitting anything—a gadget I became aware of for the first time in July, when I rode in my brother’s ginormous SUV—but there are very few parking spot in Park Slope, so finding anyone trying to parallel park would have required much more time walking around in the blazing heat.

My impression was that not only were most of the people we saw using technology walking while doing so, but also that most of the people we saw walking were using technology while doing so. It might have been useful to count the number of people not using digital devices, for comparison. Then again, we were having enough trouble keeping up, as it was.

I-Spy photo: I-SPY books by Leo Reynolds / LeoL30; some rights reserved. All other photos by Juri Imamura.

Part two of this week’s ICM homework: “Make a painting program or a kaleidoscope that uses mouse interaction.”

Neither Ruthie nor I could envision out how even an analog kaleidoscope might work, so we took the drawing program option. Again, we relied heavily on examples from the book (Drawing a Continuous Line and mousePressed and keyPressed), but instead of making a program that just draws a single, continuous black line, we added a mousePressed thing so that it draws a black box and changes the line color every time you click.