Jim's Findings

A place to keep the cool stuff I find along the way.

Custom Watch

This week I made my own watch.
 
 
I found a very small clock insert at Klockit.com. Once I got it, I thought it would be neat to mount it in a slice of black walnut shell. That was the easy part. I then wanted to make my own band. I first tried a piece of gold ribbon, but that looked too feminine. So, I decided to do a macramé watchband. But first, I had to learn how to do macramé. I used square knots and made three bands of four threads each and then sewed them together. I used a gold buckle from a cheap old watch. The hardest part was finishing off the end. I ended up gluing the threads to the back of the band.
 
It was a fun project. I like the simplicity of the design and I enjoy wearing a one of a kind watch.
 
Jim

On the Effectiveness of Tin Foil Hats

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets:

An Empirical Study

Ali Rahimi1, Ben Recht 2, Jason Taylor 2, Noah Vawter 2 17 Feb 2005

1: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, MIT. 
2: Media Laboratory, MIT.

Abstract

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

Jim

Sent from my iPad

Coach's Eye

TechSmith announced a new video annotation tool. You can shoot a video on your iPad or iPhone and then add markup over the video and voice annotation. This works with any video in your camera roll. You can upload to YouTube or TechSmith's storage servers. It can be private or public. It's designed for coaches but it could be used with any video for teaching anything that requires motion. Would be great for music, dance, film studies.

Jim 

Check out this application on the App Store:

Cover Art

Coach's Eye

TechSmith Corporation

Category: Sports

Updated: Oct 31, 2011

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 30 Ratings

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Copyright © 2011 Apple Inc. All rights reserved


Jim

Sent from my iPad

Flickr Slideshow

You can share a Flickr Slideshow. This is cool because you can see slideshows of your Flickr Sets and even Search results. I searched my own Flickr Stream for "landscapes" and "painting" to create this slideshow.

It's a nice player. You can enlarge it to full screen (click the button in the lower right corner). You can also see info about each image.

Jim

ThumbJam

Today I'm experimenting with another music app on the iPad. This time it's ThumbJam.

Thumbjam-screenshot

 

ThumbJam is a solo instrument app. It comes with 40 built-in high quality instrument sound samples and you can download additional ones if you want. The program makes use of tilt and shake to add vibrato, tremolo, note bends, and volume swells . It supports up to five simultaneous touches and up to 16 voice polyphony. It also has delay and stereo reverb add depth to the sound. You can choose from a wide variety of both Western and Eastern scales. Only the notes of the scale are displayed. So, you can't hit a wrong note. You can record loops and layer the different instruments to sound like a group of musicians. Loops can be exported which is what I did for this sample with harp, violin, and flute:

(download)

 

I used Wi-Fi to transfer the loop files archive to my MacBook. Each instrument is a separate stereo WAVE file. I imported all three files into an Audacity project as separate stereo tracks and then did a mix down to a stereo AIFF file. I then used iTunes to convert the file to MP3.

Jim

Mixtikl

Playing today with Mixtikl for iPad.

Mixtikl_screenshot

Mixtikl is a generative music program. It uses loops to generate sounds and each time the sound plays it does something different. So, you get an endless variation on a theme. It's very simple to set up sounds, but it's hard to get something that sounds like what you want. It has lots of serendipity. Here's a sample I call Alien landscape:

(download)

Jim

SoundPrism for iPhone and iPad

Some days you get sidetracked. I noticed that there was an update for SoundPrism this morning and that it came with 4 new sounds. So, naturally I had to check it out. If you're not familiar with SoundPrism, it's a free music program that generates musical sounds with touch.

Interface

It works on both the iPhone and the iPad. They also have a Pro version for $16 that can be used as a MIDI controller. It's super simple to play and you can get some very nice ambient, electronic sounds out of it. You can record your masterpiece and email it to yourself. It arrives as a .m4r file which is an Apple ringtone file. You can change the extension to .m4a (an AAC file) which is what I did to upload it to Posterous. The file specs are definitely low quality at 64 kbps at 22 Khz stereo. Here's a sample using one of the new sounds:

(download)

Listen with headphones to get the full effect.

Jim