Fire speaking to you: “Firebirds is based on a scientific experiment from the Victorian area, in which Chichester Bell discovered that a membrane stretched over a gas flame produces audible vibrations in the flame, resulting in a kind of ‘flame loudspeaker.’ Gas flames, suitably modulated by electrical fields can be made to act as omnidirectional loudspeakers of surprising clarity and amplitude.”

An installation by Paul DeMarinis.

(Via we make money not art.)

Old now but good:

A Wooster Exclusive: Banksy's Travel Photos

(Via Wooster Collective / A Celebration of Street Art.)

I have made the move to Wordpress. It was pretty painless really; I had to write a script to pull my blojsom data into wp and another to forward visitors to the old location to the new one, trying to ensure they end up where they are supposed to.

So all good. It also means that I can switch off the java application server, which has got to lighten the load.

I have also moved 5 other blogs to their new homes.

I'll clean up my blojsom to wordpress importer code and post here in the next few days.

Ooh and how do you like the new theme? I have adapted Vanilla Mist's excellent Connections. I'll probably do my own down the line as I get to know wp a bit better.

SteamSHIFT out.

Assuming you are using the most up to date version of Quicksilver, make sure you have installed the Image Manipulation Actions plug-in…

Actions to scale and change format of images

use the “scale image” action and give it text in the form:

"SCALE_INFO [as FORMAT_INFO]"

SCALE_INFO: "[fit] WIDTH [x HEIGHT]"

FORMAT_INFO: "JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF [low/med/hi] [prog(ressive)] [inter(laced)]"

Examples:

“fit 640x480 as jpg high progressive” - creates an image that will fit within a 640x480 rectangle

“50% as interlaced png” - creates a png with dimensions half of the original"

“x72 as gif” - makes a gif 72 pixels tall, with width to maintain the proportions

So for instance, you click on an image in the Finder, hit command-escape to bring it up in QS, then tab, type ‘scale’ to bring up the ‘scale image’ action, then tab and type 450 and hit return. A new image 450 pixels wide (by whatever high according to aspect ratio) is created in the same place as the old one, named the same but with ‘ 1’ immediately preceding the file extension.

Like so many things in Quicksilver, it sounds a little complicated but you soon develop muscle memory for it. Also if you need to resize images in the same way often, (like I do for posting here) you could create a trigger for it.

I'm currently evaluating using a Wordpress install instead of the current Blojsom that I am using - it has some big advantages for me:

1. I am a PHP developer by day, so I can figure out how to hack it pretty easily.

1. I can install it nicely at the URL of my choice - in this case, it will be - much nicer than all the blojsom/blog/default/ business - ick!

1. Templates look to be a piece of cake.

1. Instant fix / alterations - Blojsom seems to need the appserver restarting in order to get template changes to show up.

Any folk out there got any reasons for / against a move from Blojsom to WordPress?

I think I am decided. Wordpress is a nice system with tons of support, plug-ins and being PHP/MySQL is easy for me to maintain, adapt and hack. I am now in the process of writing a php script to pull my data in from blojsom (I'll post it for anyone who might need it). It should be done in the next day or so; blojsom is pretty cool because it uses simple flat html files - easy to grab.

Anyway, I‘ll keep posting here until I am happy with the new blog look and feel. I think I’ll also give it a little style revamp while I'm at it. Nothing major just a refresh (maybe based on a new template).

SteamSHIFT out.

On Monday just gone (27th Feb 2006), I did a gig with Gojira using quartz composer. Various things conspired to ensure that I had not had a chance to test out how the triggers on our drummer's kit would fit into what I was doing. So I plugged everything in, made sure I was receiving the signal from the kit and got ready for the gig. This now comes back to the discussion from a few weeks ago about being able to alter compositions on the fly:- as we were playing I was able to add (or copy) new midi notes nodes and connect them into existing triggers, all in real time taking effect instantly; awesome! Which kind of brings me to a conclusion … for me, the editor interface is not something I want to lose when using quartz composer, and therefore, rather than re-inventing the wheel by adding similar functionality into my own app, here is what I'd like to see …

1. Multiple windows in quartz composer in a single composition, with a simple drop down in the nodes to choose which one it displays on, and with the option to simply mirror the windows (which I‘m guessing would be less processor intensive). This has got to be my top feature request, because it allows me to have a live view of what’s happening on the projection. You would need to be able to independently assign full screen mode to each window.

1. Interface Elements:- the main reason people seem to want to develop stuff in cocoa for quartz composer seems to be to create interfaces for their compositions; why not take all the pain out of it by creating interface elements in quartz composer that can be manipulated with the mouse. Then you could add them into a composition like any other node. Combine this with point 1, and you could be creating interfaces incredibly easily. I‘m making a guess that these wouldn’t be impossible to make currently, but if there were a pre-built library (perhaps essentially just macros that you could edit), that'd be incredibly helpful for newbies (and fast prototyping for that matter). Obviously without point 1, these are kind of redundant.

1. Compile to application:- I think this is the way forward; It just uses a really simple quartz composer player and builds the bindings automatically. This way, if you want to stay within the editing environment you can, but if you‘ve created a great app using 1 and 2, you can just hit a button and bingo, you’ve created an easily distributable package.

Ooooohh just a thought, if you had a midi out node, and used a little midi patch bay application, could you feed midi out of one QC composition into another? That way, you wouldn't need to do anything to get point 1 working, just some midi routing (although a mirroring window would still be really useful) and qc developers could create their own libraries of interface elements or whole interfaces. Hmm, may have to investigate further!

Maybe what I'm seeing is that qc just needs a few more input / output methods?

SteamSHIFT Out.

Technorati Tags:

VJ, quartz composer, midi, theory

Strainings: "Strainings is a tactile, sound and light installation contained in a silo. The many interpretations of the word ‘strain’ embrace all of this: to sift and to sort, as well as to stretch and pull a string. In Strainings the audience decides what should be heard and seen.

By pulling strings, they change the mesh of the strainer/ the large web. Light, sounds and images are strained and created.

By Anders-Petter Andersson, Birgitta Cappelen and Fredrik Olofsson at MusicalFieldsForever."

(Via we make money not art.)

There seems to be a lot of complaining about the new mac minis, and their graphics card (or lack thereof). However, maybe there are a couple of things to consider:- 1. they are said not to be hugely fast, but certainly faster than the current cards, 2. you can put 2Gb of RAM in one of these new machines. The latter has got to make a difference? I for one always try to max out the RAM in any machine I have - this is obviously even more critical when your graphics card shares the RAM.

We‘ll just have to wait for some benchmarks on these. It’d be very interesting to see how they compare to my older (1.5Ghz) Powerbook (and how well they run quartz composer).

SteamSHIFT out.

Now there's a dumb name for what is now a pretty powerful application! Back when OS X came out, and even as recently as Panther (10.3), Preview was pretty much as it sounds, an application for looking at images and pdfs. As of 10.4 (Tiger), the name really no longer fits…

For example, you can now resize, crop and color correct images (and save them out any number of different formats). You can annotate pdf documents and fill in pdf forms.

Check it out. It might just do what you need! If there were one thing Apple could do to make it invaluable it'd be to add the ability to edit pdfs, including add / delete pages (yes, I know the latter can be done in other apps); maybe under Leopard?