Haven’t posted in awhile, but I’ve been really busy as usual. I’ve been living and working out of Buffao, New York since August and as always I’m working on a few projects, Tempus (can’t talk about that one yet), Black Box (my home automation platform) and back in November I started working for Gap Technologies, a Buffalo based online college course evaluating company.
Next week my roomates and myself are moving into a new full house near University of Buffalo’s south campus, so after I get all settled in there I’ll post more about my recent projects and post some more for people interested in the Black Box home server platform.
I recently started building my first at-home server from scratch running CentOS, a branch off of Fedora. So far everything’s been running exceptionally well. The server’s purpose, rather than just serving web pages is to give control of my house and computers both inside and outside of the house all through a browser, with a mobile friendly layout. I’ve decided to call the project “Black Box”, hopefully I’m not infringing on anyone’s rights..
At this point in the project I have the servers up time, available disk space, running applications, access to media and a user log. Next to be added is support for the Arduino micro controller reading of the servers temperature, ambient temperature and humidity, as well as control of house lighting, and dehumidifier (the server’s running in a fairly moist basement currently).
I’ll be posting all my Black Box scripts up here for anyone interested in implementing something similar for their own house. I’ll be publishing the Server Up Time script (pictured below) later this week.
I was looking through my Vimeo account today and found a video I forgot about. This is a Disco Boxing pre-beta that I showed at the National Electronics Museum in April 2009 at their annual Robot Fest. We used a Wii Fit bored as the interaction point for this prototype.
I, as I’m sure lots of people, am big fan of Ted. I heard through the grape vine that there was going to be a Tedx MidAtlantic conference near Baltimore. Tedx being an independently organized Ted event, as clearly stated in the image… Anyways I somehow missed it, but Tedx MidAtlantic is free.. sort of, and hosted in the Brown Center at MICA. A building I’m in just about every day. As if all that weren’t enough, the event is going to be on November 5th, the same day as the Sight Sound Interaction exhibition opening. So I’m pretty excited, hopefully that’ll help pull in a good crowed for the show! Make sure to be there, Tuesday November 5th.
Two years ago I was doing a lot of work with Joomla, most of the website Chris Robak and I developed under Web Butter were almost all Joomla backed, and we were pretty happy with that. So when I started working on Radar Redux I installed a copy of Joomla to run behind the scenes. For the most part it ran fine, but the non-programmers contributing there were lots of problems and fussy little features that hardly seemed worth the result.
Now it’s a year later and WordPress has definitely sped off into some great directions, I’m using wordpress for this site and a few others and it’s fantastic, and light weight. Far superior to Joomla now, for both small and larger sites. It has a great community developing addons and backing the software, and tons of great helpful documentation, where as for Joomla resources are few and far between.
While searching I came across a decent resource for pushing Joomla articles over to WordPress. You need to have a basic understanding of PHP and how your MySQL database is set up, ie access to usernames and passwords, i just made a new user for both the joomla and wordpress db with full privileges, and then give this a try. Keep in mind though, you are likely to loose all locally hosted image links as well as read more breaks, as this is a regular expression tactic, which joomla and wordpress handle differently.
As he has done for the past 4 years, Jason Sloan will be curating the Sight Sound Interaction show this year at MICA, and this year much to our pleasure Mick, Clark and my self will be showing Disco Boxing again! We’ve got a slue of improvements which I’ll be rolling out later this week which we’re going to be adding for exhibit opening November 5th in the Rosenberg Gallery in the MICA Brown Center. If you’re in the area definitely come check it out. Also check out the Exhibition website, and see the rest of the artists showing.
This is really cool, I’ve always been really interested in giant squid. This elbow squid isn’t quite as big but this is one of the only videos of this thing alive though.
Last week the Baltimore City Paper compiled there list of the Best of the best in Baltimore and on page 26 of the 2009 issue, Best Festival went to Artscape Midway. It was the first time in the past three years that Artscape as a general festival did not win, and only Midway’s second year as a festival. The first mention in the City Paper article was of Disco Boxing. Midway came out on top even with festivals like Wartscape, Starscape, Station North Arts Festival, and many others so we’re all pretty proud!
Now that Artscape is over and Disco Boxing has been disassembled it’s about time get some in depth documentation out. So I’m putting aside today to gather all that and maybe fix some major bugs with this blog. I’ll post it all here, so stay tuned. Also if anyone has any photos from Disco Boxing let me know, I’d love to post them on the Flickr account!
Saturday we made an order for 250 triacs, 250 opto-isolators and 1,000 15k resistors. They should be coming in some time next week and that’s when our progress will really take off. With this shipment we’ll be able to make each light bulb have independent control with an Arduino Mega, the newest Arduino micro-controller, which we’ll be able to control 2, 8 ft by 8ft panels holding 64 lights.
We’ve also launched our new website for the project, right now located at http://discobox.politeauthority.com/ Hopefully once we get the order in things will start moving faster so we’ll be ready in time for Artscape, but we’ll see!
I, as I’m sure lots of people, am big fan of 
Two years ago I was doing a lot of work with Joomla, most of the website Chris Robak and I developed under Web Butter were almost all Joomla backed, and we were pretty happy with that. So when I started working on 
As he has done for the past 4 years, 
Last week the Baltimore City Paper compiled there list of the Best of the best in Baltimore and on page 26 of the 2009 issue, Best Festival went to Artscape Midway. It was the first time in the past three years that Artscape as a general festival did not win, and only Midway’s second year as a festival. The first mention in the City Paper article was of Disco Boxing. Midway came out on top even with festivals like Wartscape, Starscape, Station North Arts Festival, and many others so we’re all pretty proud!
Saturday we made an order for 250 triacs, 250 opto-isolators and 1,000 15k resistors. They should be coming in some time next week and that’s when our progress will really take off. With this shipment we’ll be able to make each light bulb have independent control with an Arduino Mega, the newest Arduino micro-controller, which we’ll be able to control 2, 8 ft by 8ft panels holding 64 lights.
