We celebrated our five hundred and fiftieth Hacker Drinkup yesterday so i’m overdue to write a second post about my weekly event on this blog. Continue reading
Category Archives: Hacks
Andrew W.K. live and inverted
Sorry, your browser doesn’t support this Canvas demo.
Having just finished reading Michael Nelson’s investigation into who/what Andrew W.K. is, I went back to the beginning to see where the article began: his latest video for “You’re Not Alone” (top). The video has inverted colors so I played it back in VLC with the colors inverted because I was curious what the unmodified video looked like. I was surprised to find that the hue was also rotated 180 degrees… which is why we’re back here filtering video using the canvas. I suspect the hue is rotated to restore fleshy tones to the video instead of the green skin that would have shown otherwise. That’s why pizza guitar still looks like a pizza.
document.addEventListener(‘DOMContentLoaded’,function(){var v=document.getElementById(‘v’);var canvas=document.getElementById(‘c’);var context=canvas.getContext(‘2d’);cw=canvas.width;ch=canvas.height;v.addEventListener(‘play’,function(){draw(this,context,cw,ch)},false)},false);function draw(v,c,w,h){if(v.paused||v.ended)return false;c.drawImage(v,0,0,w,h);setTimeout(draw,20,v,c,w,h)}
Fun with thermal receipt printers
I gave a talk last week at Spec.la about playing with thermal receipt printers, which you can watch above. Here is some more information about the project: Continue reading
LED matrix hoodie update
I took my LED matrix hoodie back to XOXO last year and, as shown above, it totally worked this time! This time I used a PixelPusher as mentioned in the previous post so I could hand people my iPad mini to play with the display. I powered it using just USB batteries this time. The matrix has stood up well over the years. I’ve only had to replace the initial pigtail and I’ve used it with several different controllers. Although it might be time to retire it. Or attempt to wash it for the first time ever…
The Space Camp animated LED sign
Last summer my friend Laura planned an elaborate surprise birthday party for her boyfriend Eric. We took over a private high desert campsite, built a UFO DJ booth, dance floor, and other alien activity areas. One of the main attractions we built was the animated LED Space Camp sign. Continue reading
Nerf flywheel gun modding
I haven’t been paying attention to Nerf guns for many years. While they still use spring powered air pistons for many of their blasters (the official term) their product line now includes electromechanical guns. Essentially a pitching machine for foam darts. I decided to buy myself one for Christmas to do some hacking.
Christmas tree hexapod dancing alone to Ginuwine’s Pony
A couple weeks ago I had a strong desire to get a six legged robot, stick a tiny tree on it, and make it dance… so I did exactly that. The Hexy I started with came from my friend Arko and I took advantage of it being open source to print the new parts I needed. I set the whole thing to the tune of Ginuwine’s Pony since YouTube is chock full of sexy dancing to that song. You can find the video embedded below and my friend Taylor Hatmaker — who loves robots — was able to suss a few more details of the build out of me for her post. Continue reading
Bigger on the Inside
A couple months ago Pinguino let me know that she was going to be in a Doctor Who themed art show and really really wanted to build a Tardis (The main character’s time/space traveling phone booth) of her own. The Tardis is known for being larger on the inside so we thought about how to make that happen. I’ve wanted to do an infinity mirror project for a while and we decided that would be the best approach. Continue reading
Cross Campus
I’ve spent part of this summer working at Cross Campus in Santa Monica. It’s a workspace for individuals and small companies. You can read more about it in this recent Forbes post. I originally met the founders Ronen and Dan at a JS.LA meetup almost immediately after they signed the lease on the space. I liked their ideas for the space and tackled various projects for them as the built it out over the following months. I also built the Ninja Cola machine there. Here are a couple things I built for Cross Campus: Continue reading
Ninja Cola, a wirelessly accessible vending machine
A couple months ago Chris suggested we hack a vending machine so that you could use non-traditional input to make it serve beverages. I had some experience converting a machine to free mode during our Rainfall project so it didn’t seem too hard. Vending machines are readily available on Craiglist but I made sure to ask amongst friends to avoid the hassle. Craig offered the old vending machine that was sitting in his datacenter, “as long as it comes back eventually and more awesome”. Easy. Continue reading
