Interactive music with arduino and sheevaplug, part 1

Recently someone from the hacklab put up a note saying that he had a SheevaPlug to give to a good home. I jumped on the offer. Thanks again, Brian! I’m going to be blogging a little bit about what I’m doing to show that I do have a good home for it.

Image via Wikipedia

The first thing that I’m going to use it for is an interactive music player or generator for a friend’s art piece. It’s going to change what’s played based on how many people are in what parts of the room. I’m going to do this by counting the number of people who enter the room using infrared LED sensors, and then setting up sonar threshholds for people to be counted as they cross. To implement this I’ll use the sheevaplug, two arduinos, a bunch of range finders, and either a long cable connecting the two duinos or a couple of xbees.

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Greasemonkey script for Torontonian Goodread users

This target market is pretty specific, I know, but I wrote a script to make searching for books at available at my local library more easy while browsing Goodreads. I’m starting to use Goodreads to track what I’m reading and also find suggestions from friends.

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CrisisCampTO

Yesterday was the first CrisisCamp in Toronto. I heard about it from Jacqui Maher‘s presentation at CUSEC, and I decided to attend not really knowing what to expect. It turned out that there were six projects to tackle, and I tried to help with the machine translation project.

The idea was to provide an easily accessible translator for people on the ground. At the time the project started there was no Google Translate project that worked back and forth between for English and Haitian Creole. I think it was Chris that got a translator working based on moses after it’d been fed a corpus of every piece of Creole that he could get his hands on. The CCTO team’s job was to put together a web front end, and an API.

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Liveblogging for #CUSEC 2010

I’m still at CUSEC 2010 in Montreal. My plan was to take notes and quickly publish here, but then at the last minute I decided to liveblog for CUSEC instead. It’s at http://live.cusec.net/. So far my favourite talk was from Matt Knox, talking about ethics and how the human brain has a remote root: we bend to authority and do wrong too easily. The Milgram experiment as well as the more recent pranknet arrests illustrated this.

You can see the notes by visting the site and clicking on the archives. Unfortunately I can’t do permalinks very readily, so I might export and clean it up later.

The last reason I didn’t post my notes here is due to my blog being in need of spring cleaning. I need to switch to a cleaner, less busy theme, so might pick one up from WooThemes. I’ll be taking another look at that later tonight, as well as merging my categories. [...]

Links about the Haiti earthquake disaster

By now everyone has heard of the earthquake that hit Haiti.  There isn’t much of a food reserve, there isn’t a great deal of domestic rescue equipment or personnel, and there isn’t an abundance of shelter. I recently read a report saying that none of the hospitals in Port-au-Prince were operational.

Since most of my readers are American, I’ll start off by linking to the MSNBC list of suggested aid organizations. Many groups in the list have Canadian counterparts too.

I tried to decide between Doctors Without Borders or Red Cross. It seems that they’re neck and neck in terms of their administrative cost, so I went with the Red Cross due to their shelter programs. I donated using their online donation box.

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The EC-GC spoof is toast, whodunnit?

(Screenshot snagged from straight.com.)

I remember when Telus shut down thousands of websites to take down their union’s website. Serverloft might have just done the same. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article on the takedown of the Yes Men site. I did find an article from straight.com which claims to have the original complaint. The IP address in the complaint there is the same one that ec-gc.ca is currently hosted on. Ole Tange is the contact for PiWeb listed in the IP address for that whois.

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