Posted on

Acrylic and Aluminum Laser Cuts & Drift V2 ready for review, plus notes on AJAX problems + solutions

One of the best things ever is receiving a bunch of laser cut material in the mail. That means, today wound down with one of these best things. We’ve ordered through Ponoko in the past and we’re continually surprised with how an Illustrator drawing can turn into a physical object so easily. Yes, above that is laser cut aluminum.

Sharp edges! Remember these mock-ups we did a few weeks ago? Well, these are a lot bigger! The aluminum is also really scratched. Hadn’t realized it would be like that, but also not a big deal for our purposes. I guess there wasn’t any kind of protective sheeting like the acrylic, I’m sure that has something to do with it.

And we also cut mirrored acrylic — so mirrory under that protective sheet! Really excited to peel the entire thing.

The acrylic was also etched from behind.

I can’t give away the entire thing in full scale just yet … but soon. And of course, this all comes just in time for a cold snap here in Windsor.

Also, I’ve been putting in some time to try and get Drift v2 up and running. See that new icon…?

And now, a new loading screen too. But, of course, that’s not all. This update fixes some major stability issues and adds sharing functions for Twitter (so you can tweet each step in your Drift) and email export (so you can get your Drift ready to repost on your blog of choice!). These extra functions are made possible through the fantastic set of plugins for Phonegap / Cordova.

Here’s something worth noting, in case someone as confused as I was stumbles across this page as they’re struggling to make their Phonegap / Cordova + Javascript + HTML app work. I’m not sure why this broke, or if in fact it was a combination of other webkit changes in iOS 6, but something was definitely causing Drift to cache queries and returned data. This created a mess for trying to do just about anything in the app.

While I was working to try to get the Twitter and Email composer plugins working, I realized this caching issue may have been happening on a far more frequent basis than I had imagined. So, after some digging (and unfortunately I’ve lost track of exactly where I found it), but it seemed like the jQuery ajax function was caching the ajax call. So, below, please note the cache : false settings. As per the jQuery manual, this forces requested pages not to be cached by the browser. Setting cache to false also appends a query string parameter, “_=[TIMESTAMP]”, to the URL.

And, just for the record, I updated all ajax calls in Drift (which is basically the entire core functionality, with these ajax calls connecting with a bunch of php scripts and classes), as below:

$.ajax({
type: 'GET',
url: '',
cache : false,
data: data,
beforeSend:function(){
},

The good news is that after four days of trying to pick up where I left off with Drift earlier in the summer and another update to iOS and Xcode, here’s the payoff…

Screen Shot 2012-12-11 at 8.22.14 PM

I also had to revoke certificates, as the updates to Xcode and my own screw-ups along the way of starting a new Xcode project and initially renaming the app (adding a -v2 to the end of the bundle name), but finally, it comes together.

Screen Shot 2012-12-11 at 8.22.31 PM

Drift being uploaded for review…

Screen Shot 2012-12-11 at 8.24.38 PM

And now, we wait!

Also, I’m very excited to get back to CIVIC SPACE, it’s been a busy five days. Monday night we wrapped up with the last All Tomorrow’s Problems for the year … and here’s the gist of what we came up with:

IMG_3165

Anyone check out Skills for Good(s) with Arturo tonight?!

Posted on

Steve Lambert on Utopia

Steve Lambert "I WILL TALK WITH ANYONE…", courtesy of visitsteve.com

This is part of an ongoing set of one-question emails sent to people we know, or would like to get to know, about things that interest us and inform our collective practice. They’ll be featured on the site weekly, usually on Fridays. These questions are more about unfolding ideas than about the people we’re asking, but we do ask those kinds of questions too.

We’re pleased to continue this project with a question for one of our most favourite artists, Steve Lambert.

How might you write an if-then-else statement to describe the notion of utopia in your practice?

IF the world is not what we desire

THEN deal with reality as it has been constructed for us

ELSE make it ourselves

Steve Lambert’s father, a former Franciscan monk, and mother, an ex-Dominican nun, imbued the values of dedication, study, poverty, and service to others – qualities which prepared him for life as an artist.

Lambert made international news after the 2008 US election with The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the “paper of record” announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He has collaborated with groups from the Yes Men to theGraffiti Research Lab and Greenpeace. He is also the founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and SelfControl (which blocks grownups from distracting websites so they can get work done).

Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Prix Ars Electronica, Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at galleries, art spaces, and museums nationally and internationally, appeared in over fourteen books, four documentary films, and in the collections of The Sheldon Museum, the Progressive Insurance Company, and The United States Library of Congress. Lambert has discussed his work live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on internationally in outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, Good, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet, and Newsweek.

He was a Senior Fellow at New York’s Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology from 2006-2010, developed and leads workshops for Creative Capital Foundation, and is faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Steve is a perpetual autodidact with (if it matters) advanced degrees from an reputable art school and respected state university. He dropped out of high school in 1993.

Posted on

Research Update (some things I’ve been working on the last couple of days)

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts — a kind of summary of some of the things I’ve been working on. It seemed about time. I like posting as a sort of summary for myself, but maybe it’s interesting for my dearest BCL colleagues to see what I’ve been up to as well.

One of the things that has been taking up a lot of brain space has been a project I began over a year ago developing some Windsor / city-exploration specific iPhone apps. After wrestling with Objective C for way too long, I’ve moved over to HTML5 and in particular using Sencha Touch as a base. My progress has increased a lot.

I’m comfortable with HTML, CSS, PHP, but I’ve somehow avoided picking up a firm grasp of javascript. Sencha Touch is a set of js libraries, or more specifically, from their website, “Sencha Touch is a mobile JavaScript framework for developing HTML5 web apps that look and feel native.” I’m just following tutorials right now, but things are sinking in.

A project building off of something Josh started a little while back. Basically a set of questions for a list of people. I’m hoping to post the responses on here — I’ve asked for a photo and text as answers to the questions — and maybe turn it into some kind of short run publication.

Awaiting my perusal, the latest copy of Fuse!!!

And, a trusty guide already, the HTML5 cookbook.

Also, as you may have noticed, I’ve been playing around with other webfonts. We’re currently deploying Adobe Typekit, using Adelle and Museo-Slab.

And, in preparation for some work we’ll be doing for a project in Hamilton, I’m working with Gravity Forms and a tutorial for creating mad-lib style forms. Gravity Forms seems flexible, but there’s some basic stuff that I haven’t been able to get an answer for on the forums, specifically, an issue with the Reply To part of a contact form.

Basically, I’m try to get this effect. I’m thinking there’s too many blanks above, but you get the idea.

A final shot of some mad code. I type things out from tutorials by hand then try to catch my own mistakes. It’s kind of like a game, but then it’s not actually fun when you can’t find your own error.

Tomorrow, mid-week BCL work time! We’ve been meeting Fridays, taking minutes, prepping for a potentially incredibly busy year, etc., just in case there was any thought that we’d been taking it easy.

Posted on

Arduino, PHP, LCDs, XBees: Tactical Texting in Public Spaces

While the adventure in working on this project began months ago, I’ve finally sorted through the mess of files I made and put it all together in a nice handy zip folder. Using Arduinos, XBees, LCDs, and PHP, this project was challenging from a technical stand-point, but I think the project is now at a place where it can act as a foundation for a number of other projects I’m hoping to take on.

While the most-recent installation of this project was on view as part of SRSI, I’m already looking at the Arduino-TVOut library dreaming of what to do next.

Certainly, it’s no surprise that I really, really like working with text. I think there’s something about text that allows an accessibility to the work that isn’t always possible with an exclusively image-based presentation. So, while I had some loftier ambitious at the start of this project, it was actually the process of running into those walls that helped me to move this project into something that is more flexible and expansive (in the long-run).

I think there’s a lot of strong potential for this project — it’s possible for these to be battery-operated (though in my tests, you won’t get a hugely long run out of them), and even if you are tethered to a wall-based power source, you can still install these in a variety of situations. Being able to dynamically insert messages into public space is very fun and as this project continues to develop, it could provide the groundwork for a lot of new tactical activities.

Should you like to take on a similar project, I’ll detail the hardware/software requirements, code, and some general details below…

Continue reading “Arduino, PHP, LCDs, XBees: Tactical Texting in Public Spaces”

Posted on

Ok, I finally get #000000book

It took a while. A little over a week I guess. However, it finally clicked — FAT Labs’ latest project #000000book is starting to make sense to me in terms of how big it could be.

Part of the problem may have been just the early overview of the project that circulated the blogs: #000000book is an open repository for sharing and archiving motion captured graffiti tags. Tags are saved as digital text files known as GML (Graffiti Markup Language), which can be captured through freely available software such as Graffiti Analyisis (marker), DustTag (iPhone), EyeWriter (eye movement) and Laser Tag (laser). Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data.

Robotagger: GML + ABB4400 from Golan Levin on Vimeo.

It just seemed to me, initially, that there would be this collection of tags that had been sort of digitized through an open platform, but I kind of thought, so what? But, I knew that it had to be kind of groundbreaking. Most of the projects that involve this mix of technology and graffiti that I’ve seen come out of GRL or FAT have been very, very cool, in the way that they think about mixing tactics and tools.

#000000book is no exception, as you can see above, Golan Levin hooked up a robotic arm to read from the GML database to reproduce a tag. We are in the future.

[via today and tomorrow]

Posted on

Nerd Alert: Bildr.org

Bildr.org could be amazing. The idea is to create a visual Web-based library of componentized instruction sets, “building blocks,” for doing various hardware and software constructions. Put a bunch of these components together, and you have all of the instructions you need to execute a multi-part project.

So, that crazy project you’ve always wanted to do but were never sure how to even start it might finally be able to be realized, if Bildr can come together. The thing is, it will require a lot of input from a ton of knowledgeable people. I can’t count the number of times I’ve spent hours on Google trying to find the exact right answer to a problem I’d been having, whether in PHP, Perl, or Max, but it wasn’t always just finding the right answer, it was trying to figure out how to ask the right question.

Something like Bildr could fix that… by allowing you to assemble your own set of instructions from those little modules of instructions, things could be a lot easier. However, in some ways, it still requires you to know exactly what it takes to do what you want to do, and for me this has always been the gap. How do you know what needs to be asked to solve a specific problem?

Bildr is just starting up and looking for expertise, so you if you know how to do some little bit of programming or building or if you have a very specific knowledge subset of LEDs, for example, contact them.

[via Make]

Posted on

How to Make a Randomly Assembled Text

php script from the Algorithmic Walk by Broken City Lab

Back at the end of March, we went on an Algorithmic Walk with some brave folks (who not only trusted in our custom software generated algorithm, but also ignored the weather). I had previously posted a link to where you could find a custom-assembled algorithm, should you be curious to try it on your own, but I also wanted to post the code, in case anyone has any need for generating  a randomly assembled text.

So, after the jump, there’s the PHP code for those interested. I’ve tried to make helpful comments throughout, and the text is sized to fit on an 8.5 x 11″ page if you want to print it out.

Continue reading “How to Make a Randomly Assembled Text”