with a few hours and a few bucks... the poor man's multitouch

This past holiday weekend I was encouraged to take a break from sitting in front of my computer. A solid piece of advice for anyone who spends as much time in front of “the glow” as I do. I decided to take that advice… and go and make something that I can use with my computer.

Thanks to an inspiring clip from Seth Sandler (seen below), I rummaged through the stacks of Rubbermaid Totes in the basement and my five toolboxes to come up with most of the materials needed to put together a very simple multitouch.

With a materials list consisting of:

• a cardboard box
• a piece of clear flat sturdy material (ie. glass, acrylic, plexiglass)
• a piece of standard printer paper
• a webcam
• a computer

it was hard to say I didn’t have the time to do this. Total time of construction was about an hour.

I haven’t had much of a chance to play around with the applications themselves (as I had to make a correction to my original assumptions and cut the height of the box used for the multitouch) but messing around with the calibration suite itself was enough to jazz me up for a little while. Sent me whirling back in a cloud of memories to the days of helping Chris Teso of The Good mastermind the SNOW project for the city of Portland.

The multitouch itself interfaces with CCV (Community Core Vision), an open source, cross-platform solution for computer vision and machine sensing. CCV has what seems to be a sturdy and helpful community built around it. Should be interesting to see what kind of mischief I can stir up with their help.

Some images from my project:

And the video that inspired the whole thing:

Next up is building a rear-projection multitouch television for under a grand.

Come on paycheck…

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When I walked into Pearl Street, I had no idea I would soon encounter Mick Jagger’s incarnated self in The Booze’s lead singer Chaz Tolliver; watch a musical giant (quite literally) in Earl Greyhound’s Matt Whyte; or get blasted in the face by OK Go’s confetti canons.

When I walked out of Pearl Street, I had a new expectation for how head-shakingly fantastic every other Tuesday night show should be.

If you get a chance to see any of these bands, I highly recommend it. I can assure you, hearing a recording does not do any of them justice.

Read the entire review here…

And special thanks to @nagelface for the pass hook up and for taking this shot:

myself with drummers extraordinaire PJ Curtis of The Booze + Big Ricc Sheridan of Earl Greyhound

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that is all… carry on.

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image via http://www.justgetthere.us/blog

If you’ve read my thoughts on ubiquitous music or have been paying any attention to my twitter feed it’s pretty easy to understand why this article by Babak A. Parviz gets my geek up.

Let me visualize, without aid of a mobile device, meta data on things around me and embed a music player in my ear so I can have a constant soundtrack and I would be one happy camper. Really happy. You could cancel my birthday and Christmas for the rest of my life and I’d consider that a fine trade.

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Bonus features of the night included talking shop with Ryan’s Smashing Life and Music Savage and meeting videographer Steve Legare.

Read the entire review here…

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This morning my buddy Steve shared this @wired video on how they plan on answering everyone’s questions about magazines moving forward in a (hopefully) profitable way in the ever changing face of today’s technology and in the wake of the green movement. Check out the video, more after the jump…

Now what Wired is showing here is by no means shocking to most who might read this, but they are at least at the head of their industry and thinking about not only the content they produce but the medium for which they’re producing it. They talk about controlling the UI with gestures (on devices developed for those types of interaction), contextual linking and interactive, immersive advertising. All great stuff!

But please Wired, don’t stop there. Partner up.

Take a look around at existing services and companies and incorporate them into your product. Take @Jkretch out to lunch and talk about incorporating LiveFyre as a way to implement immediate live conversation about an article or other piece of content, keeping users involved with your brand longer. Grab a drink with the fine folks from Nikon and their social media goldmine Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk ) and discuss using their Virtual Touch software to bring functionality you have available on a few devices (ipad, iphone, etc.) to even more devices, the laptop / home computer / television. Increase your penetration.

One hurdle for these kind of partnerships is the attitude that you need to do everything “in house.” I can’t believe this train of thought will persist too much longer. Given the rate at which technology moves forward (props to Chris Teso of TheGood for hammering Moore’s Law home many, many moons ago) it’s going to be, or is already, a nearly impossible task for a company to remain at the forefront of every technology that it needs to understand and incorporate to truly be a leader in their industry.

There are good reasons why the opensource community is so popular. People share their work, ideas and philosophies so others don’t have to start from scratch or at least to give others an idea of where to start. Why re-invent the wheel when the guy down the street is already riding an Indian motorcycle? The world gets more and more impatient, deadlines get shorter and shorter and projects need to be more and more advanced. Finding qualified partners is the smart thing to do.

The other huge strategic upside to these partnerships is an immediate increase in qualified and interested audience. Instead of using only the Wired portals to start conversations about your new product, now you’ve got a chance to hit Ashton’s 4.5 million (!) followers with a push to go check out what you’re offering.

It just makes sense. And it makes sense for more than just the magazine industry. But perhaps that’s another post.

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This slide show is from The Builders and The Butchers record release at the wonder ballroom in PDX with Loch Lomond & Ah Holly Fam’ly.

Check out the entire review right here…

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We were lucky enough to get a Kodak Zi6 HD Pocket Cam from my parents for the occasion of Luke’s birth. We didn’t receive it in time for his actual birth, so I wanted to make the first proper video taken to be of him just to kind of christen the camera.

The cam was set in macro mode, which accounts for the natural lens blur. The shaking was added in naturally by lack of sleep + caffeine.

Soundtrack: goodmorning | william fitzsimmons

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5:17 pm | 02/01/10

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We’ll soon be in hour 10 of Luke’s birth. So far there has been a
computer malfunction, a 47 minute epidural application, an error in
epidural application (chances of this ~1%) and 1 change of nurse shift.

Angie finally appears to be somewhat comfortable as she just drifted
off to sleep.

During all of the above, I’ve been able to offer nothing more than
moral support and a head rub. All of this serves to emphasize how
helpless a guy can feel during this entire experience.

Especially a guy who thrives on fixing things. I was about 3 seconds
from pulling the IT girl off the ladder and fixing the computer
myself. At least then I could have felt slightly less useless.

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