Digital Artifacts

I've discovered Processing (www.processing.org) a few months back and it's been my new favorite toy.

"Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production."

I've been working on a few projects involving image processing, real-time video distortion, fluid dynamics and a whole lot of basic vector math.

Here's a small screen capture of the latest thing I've been working on:

Hey ho ho.

I just made a website for the helmet! I decided to go with www.ledhelmet.com. The proto is almost 100% done now. I added a way to save patterns, and two autopilot modes. The first one cycles through saved patterns. The second generates random patterns. The speed knob controls how fast it cycles through patterns.

I submitted the link to Make Magazine. I should get a post on their blogs in the next few weeks. Hopefully. I'm hoping to get enough interest to stimulate me to make a small batch (50 - 100). I'd make a little manufacturing plant the RV I just bought and go live like gypsies with Shannon. From then on, the thing might get in range of sight of the few people who might want to buy one.

I'm also thinking that I'll have a fair amount of people asking about it at Burning Man, to whom I'll reply "www.ledhelmet.com". It should be easy enough for people to remember. Even though altered consciousness and a general sense overload might bury this memory. Handing out cards is a bit too businessy for BM... Maybe I'll carry pen and paper and write the name down to people that show enough interest.

Well well. That's it. Get one while they're hot.

Here's a video featuring the flashing helmet I made. This helmet has been designed to scare crackheads but it turned out that it actually attracts them.

I remember back in high school (cerca 92) my friend Jfred, Nic Jolin and I were all into BBSes, hacking/phreaking and that whole promising world of telecoms.

We were some of the 12-14 years old rocking the 2400 to 14400 bauds modem transition era, trying to decrypt informative text hacking/phreaking/carding/bombing/trashing files mostly written in English (except for that NPC |Northern Phun Co.| fanzine). Checking out pirate and white hat BBSes, scanning for PBXs using toneloc, playing SRE and BRE were daily activities back then. That along with playing the SimCities, Civilization, Stunt Driver, the Sierra and LucasArts quests and much more.

I remember that JFred attended meetings about creating the first Quebec city ISP along with Blitzkrieg, Skyzophrene, Testament Collector and some other dude who I forgot his real name but remember referring to as Gino19. Few highlights include crappy homemade bombs, trashing in Bell Canada's parking lot, back-dialing to Montreal using a local ULAVAL Unix mainframe, tripping out using JFred's mind machine, restoring the WHOLE school's system networked system at home, hacking into mailbox systems and PBXs, using a redbox (using payphone for free), Jfred setting up a black box (receiving LDs for free), JFred setting up a pirate BBS (shit I forgot the name of it...), getting a new 40MB hard drive for my 386SX16, drilling holes in SD 3 1/4 disks to make them HD (720 to 1.44MB), installing 16 disks games with a failure in the rar file, and much more.

Looking back, the virtual world was so different back then, manymanymany bytes have circulated in transistors since those days.

Well anyways, where I'm going with this, and how this whole era was brought back to my attention is because I've been contemplating building a Mind Machine this weekend. Should be fairly easy, and I've got all the electrical knowledge and components necessary to do that. Should take only a few hours to assemble and write basic code for it. Might even throw sound in there. I found this cool resource here:

http://www.hackcanada.com/homegrown/wetware/brainwave/index.html

To give me an idea on how fast should stuff flash. I might have to break into old electronics to get a headphone jack and get a pair of cheapass sunglasses somewhere, but apart from that, I've got it all.