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Aesthetics Art Art Computing Free Software Generative Art Projects

Streaming Aesthetics: Shape

Streaming Aesthetics: Shapes
Here’s the code for Streaming Aesthectics: Shape . You can compile and run it in Processing.

https://gitorious.org/robmyers/streaming-aesthetics

It follows Twitter to see when people tweet shape names and then draws those shapes, packing them inside each other.

There’s some unused code for more complex shapes, but “star” and “cross” appear in the Twitter firehose more often than geometric shape names.

Next is Streaming Aesthetics: Pattern .

Categories
Aesthetics Free Software Howto Projects

Forepaw

Forepaw Electronics

This is the electronics for the Forepaw, my North Paw clone. It consists of a compass module, an Arduino microcontroller, a shift register, and eight vibration motors (such as you would find in a mobile phone). And a battery connector, battery case, some veroboard, some ribbon cable and some bell wire. You may just be able to see that the fifth vibration motor from the end of the ribbon cable is vibrating.

Next I need to add a case for the circuit boards and add velcro and fabric to the ribbon cable.

You can find the source code and some construction notes on Gitorious . A big thank you to Eric Boyd from Sensebridge who gave me some insight into the construction of the original North Paw when we met at the Quantified Self conference.

Categories
Free Software Howto

irc

irc is an old text-based internet chat system that still gets used by many projects.

irssi is a good client for irc. You can find out how to set it up, including how to configure it to automatically connect to servers and channels here .

It’s best to run irssi in a GNU screen session on a remote server and then connect to that when you want to chat. This allows you to keep track of conversations in channels even when you are not online. Here’s a script to do this. Save it as irc somewhere on your PATH (e.g. in the bin directory in your HOME), chmod +x it, and then it’s easy.

#!/bin/bash
SSH_HOST=your.host.name.possibly.of.the.form.username@your.host.name
IRSSI_SESSION=irc
ssh -t ${SSH_HOST} "screen -dr ${IRSSI_SESSION} || \
screen -S ${IRSSI_SESSION} irssi"