Month: July 2006

The device on the right is a Thingamagoop — a simple handmade electronic synthesizer made by Bleep Labs. Unlike the synths you see at music stores, it’s controlled not by a keyboard, but by a photocell. The more light the photocell receives, the higher the pitch of the sound it emits.

If the design of the Thingamagoop looks familiar, it’s because it’s done by the fine folks at Goopymart.

The knob acts as a frequency control. One of the switches determines whether the Thingamagoop emits high or low sounds, while the other determines whether the sound output is continuous or switching on and off.

That dangling thing with a light? That’s the LEDacle (Light-Emitting Diode tenACLE), which you can move to affect the sound produced by the Thingamagoop. Its blinking is affected by the controls, and you can point its light at the photocell to change the pitch.

Thingamagoops have built-in speakers and a 1/4″ jack so that you can route its output to an amplifier or through effects boxes.

My only complaint about these beauties: the price is a little steep — it sells for $100. Perhaps Make magazine will do a piece on building your own.

Chris “Turner” Turner, my fellow DJ at Clark Hall Pub back in my days at Crazy Go Nuts University, is currently touring the globe with his wife Ashley Bristowe and daughter Sloane, doing research on his next book, titled The Geography of Hope: A Guided Tour of the World We Need. The book, from what I recall of Chris’ description last summer, is a guided tour of things that people are doing to create healthy, sustainable places to live with a sense of community. Being a believer that progress and good planetary stewardship needn’t be diametrically-opposed mutual exclusives, a guy who likes to think about communities and being an optimist in general, I find the idea of Chris’ upcoming book fascinating. I look forward to getting a copy once it comes out next year.

In the meantime, Ashley’s been dutifully blogging their research trip, which has included:

• Berlin, where he caught up with Ian Conacher, whom I knew from the late Shift magazine, where he’s shooting a documentary about solving the plastic problem (made from oil, takes forever to break down, and yet we chuck it at an incredible rate).
• Staying in an Earthship in Taos. Earthships are houses that are designed to be as self-sustaining as possible while keeping environmental impact to a minimum.
• Restaurant recommendations, should your travels take you along paths near theirs.

In addition to the Geography of Hope blog and Ashley’s personal blog, they’ve also got a Flickr photoset that covers their travels.

Safe travels, Ash and Turner, and I’ll be reading!

Nobody believed Damian Penny when he insisted that there was a Ferris Bueller TV series, but I’d have backed him up. (I consider Ferris to be a personal hero — much to the chagrin of a playa hata friend of mine — and keep a repository of all sorts of information Buelleresque in my noggin.) Still, it’s nice to know that courtesy of YouTube, there’s more solid proof:

I saw a couple of episodes, and it was terrible, top to bottom. The sillier Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, a show that ripped off a good number of ideas from the Ferris Bueller movie, made for better viewing.

If you’re wondering if anyone from the show moved on to bigger and better things, here’s your answer:

In tribute to the Ferris in his true form — the movie — I give you the opening theme: Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Love Missile F1-11 [3.5 MB MP3].

[via Miss Fipi Lele] Here’s an odd bit of Star Wars-related promotion work: a circa 1979 anti-drunk driving public service announcement with music and visuals from the cantina at Mos Eisley:

(This article also appears on Tucows Farm.)

If you’re a techie in the Toronto area and are looking to have your brain stimulated tonight, I strongly recommend that you check a talk by one of the guys working on Perl 6, Damian Conway. Whether you’re someone just getting their feet wet with programming or an old warhorse who remembers what column FORTRAN lines containing statements start on, you’re going to find Damian’s presentation and his madcap presentation style very enlightening and entertaining. Here’s the abstract for his talk, Fun With Dead Languages:

Watch in mesmerized terror as Damian hacks code in five unrelated languages (none of them Perl). Along the way, you’ll also learn about modern archaeological techniques, bidirectional cross- dressing, Ancient Greeks hackers, improbable romances, the real Club Med, why programmers shouldn’t frequent casinos, the language of moisture vaporators, C++ mysticism, conversational Latin, state machines on steroids, feeding the dog the old-fashioned way, the shocking truth about anime, programming without variables or subroutines, the Four Voids of the Apocalypse, Microsoft’s new advertising campaign, what the Romans used instead of braces, drunken stonemasons, the ancient probabilistic wisdom of bodkins, how to kill a language with a single byte, and the price of fish.

Damian is a clever techie, a brilliant speaker and one helluva charming guy to boot. At last night’s DemoCamp presentation, where he gave us a whirlwind tour of some of the features in Perl 6, he did what no other human being has been able to do, ever: he made me give a crap about Perl. And all in the space of 15 minutes.

The presentation takes place tonight at 6:30 p.m at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology on the University of Toronto Campus. It’s at 40 St. George Street, a block north of College. I believe it’s in the big lecture hall at the back on the main floor, and I also believe that there’s no admission charge.

As I said to the audience at the end of DemoCamp last night: “Go catch Damian’s presentation. He will pull down the pants of your mind.”