Adachi Tomomi,
Alex Baker,
Ian Baxter,
Ithai Benjamin,
Lesley Flanigan,
Lorin Edwin Parker,
Peter Blasser,
Phil Archer,
Todd Bailey,
Tommy Stephenson & Patrick McCarthy,
Tuomao Tammenpaa, and
Vasco Alvo are all featured in Nicolas Collins' extraordinarily good book
Handmade Electronic Music.
posted by mhjb
on Jan 21, 2011 -
14 comments
Kyle Wiens of iFixit talks to ArsTechnica about iFixit's history ("my iBook G3...It seemed crazy that I couldn't find any information online on how to get the thing back together"), his goals ("we realized that the world needed free, open source service manuals, and the manufacturers weren't stepping up"), planned obsolescence, the dirty tricks manufacturers pull to make it harder to repair your own stuff ("Torx has a patent...They're using lawyers to prevent people from making their computers last longer than 3-400 battery cycles"), who are the design kings of repair and servicing, who the villains are, and why recycling electronics isn't all you'd probably like it to be.
posted by rodgerd
on Sep 11, 2010 -
43 comments
HELLO WORLD (SLYT) "Lego felt tip 110" printer connected to an Apple Mac. This is not a kit you can buy and does not use mindstorms. I designed/built/coded it all from scratch including analog motor electronics, sensors and printer driver, the USB interface uses a "wiring" board.
posted by grumblebee
on Jun 2, 2010 -
42 comments
"We’re living in a disposable world. It’s just not worth it to repair things; it’s not worth it to build things from scratch. The magic of that seems to have passed.” The
death of Radio Shack.
[more inside]
posted by woodjockey
on May 10, 2010 -
123 comments
Audiophoolery: Pseudoscience in Consumer Audio.
You might think that a science-based field like audio engineering would be immune to the kind of magical thinking we see in other fields. Unfortunately, you would be wrong [...] As a consumerist, it galls me to see people pay thousands of dollars for fancy-looking wire that’s no better than the heavy lamp cord they can buy at any hardware store. Or magic isolation pads and little discs made from exotic hardwood that purport to “improve clarity and reduce listening fatigue,” among other surprising claims. The number of scams based on ignorance of basic audio science grows every day. Via.
posted by amyms
on Jan 11, 2010 -
209 comments
Computer music is relatively old, going back
to the very early 1950s. In the following decades, people have been creative with programmable technology, leading to
"She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" being played on an IBM
chain printer back in 1966, and in more recent years,
HP ScanJet 5100c included an Easter Egg. The
HP ScanJet 4c's SCL (Scanner Control Language) unofficial PLAY TUNE command lead to
these fine little ditties. Now over a decade ago, the duo known as
[The User] enlisted
three specialists to operate a computer program via a server that synchronized the dot-matrix printers and read complex ASCII text files in order to create musical compositions. The result was a techno-sounding piece that was performed by the administrators of the system, rather than one that was simply being played. Like
a symphony of car horns, the coordination of these printers became
Symphony #1 and
#2 for Dot Matrix Printers (
samples of Symphony #2,
Symphony #2 Slashdot thread). [More computer music exploration inside]
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 26, 2009 -
27 comments
Inspiration to do something with your holiday weekend: Steven K. Roberts is an interesting guy with a bit of a hobby problem. In 1983 his
recumbent bike sported "only" a security system, lights, a CB radio and a state-of-the-art
TRS80/100 laptop.
Winnebikeo would eventually evolve into
BEHEMOTH, the "Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine... Only Too Heavy". BEHEMOTH incorporated (amongst other things) HUD, cooling system,
small Sun SPARCstation, HAM Radio, credit card verifier, bubblejet printer, hydraulic disk brakes...
[more inside]
posted by Ogre Lawless
on May 21, 2009 -
28 comments
Friday Flash Fun*:
Конструктор: Engineer of the People, in which you are an engineer working in a top-secret semiconductor facility called H3, designing top-secret integrated circuits based on specifications provided to you.
*For certain values of 'fun'
posted by daniel_charms
on Mar 27, 2009 -
36 comments
The coming memristor revolution in electronics and how it works. The newly created memristor, only the fourth fundamental fundamental type of passive circuit element, has the promise of computing advances both prosaic (faster, cheaper and "bigger" flash drives) and momentous (relatively effortless mimicry of brain cells and their activity). This is the story of the memristor's genesis, told by R. Stanley Williams, the leader of the team that created the device.
[more inside]
posted by NortonDC
on Dec 7, 2008 -
43 comments
You may have never heard of Kane Kramer, but it's likely you use the product and online store he patented.
In 1979.
posted by mattholomew
on Sep 9, 2008 -
47 comments
In a single 1931
document, electrical engineer
Alan Blumlein patented stereo records, stereo movie sountracks and surround sound. His equipment was used to make some of the
first stereo recordings at EMI's Abbey Road studios - several decades before the technology came into popular use. Blumlein went on to pioneer
405 line TV (the first wholly electronic format which won out over John Logie Baird's rival system) and to produce the equipment that made the
first outside TV broadcast possible. At the outbreak of World War 2 he was a key architect of the secret
H2S radar project. Unfortunately he was killed in a plane crash while testing the technology and the whole incident was kept secret. Hence he remains an obscure figure despite his achievements. A
recent BBC Radio 4 program contains a lot of the archive stereo footage and tells his story.
posted by rongorongo
on Aug 7, 2008 -
5 comments
Metal Storm Limited specializes in weapon systems featuring rapid fire electronically fired bullets, up to 1 million a minute. The weapons platform can be used to make the worlds strongest
handgun as well as be used to equip unmanned drones with firepower. The most frightening of which is perhaps the
"dragonfly" micro copter. Their site has a number of
videos showcasing some of the various weapons applications.
Metal Storm has been around for a while, without getting a product to market, but with a recent
influx of funding it doesn't look like they are going to go out of business any time soon.
posted by reverendX
on Jul 10, 2006 -
50 comments
Have you ever seen a synth and said "Man, what this needs is cartoon eyes?" A bit similar to the
Buchla Box or
theremin in that they don't have a keyboard to control the sounds -- it's probably closest to the Booper, invented by
The Weatherman from
Negativland (or, well,
Circuit Bending), the
Thingamagoop is a photosynthesizer... which means it basically uses light sensors to generate sounds. The signal's run through a couple oscillators and, well, it comes out as somethin' that's
pretty dang awesome. I'm on the fence on pickin' this one up. On one hand, it's a really neat toy that makes noise... on the other hand, um.... um.... I dunno. It's not made of candy?
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me
on Jul 8, 2006 -
18 comments
The Wire This award winning CBC radio series incorporates interviews, music and sound to explore the impact of electricity on music, from Edison to Caruso to Les Paul to Bjork. Exhaustively researched and beautifully produced, it's somewhere between a documentary, a remix and a music show. The home site has excerpts, playlists, and the remix from each show, but you can
listen to all eight episodes in their entirely at PRX (you'll need to
login first).
posted by Turtles all the way down
on Oct 21, 2005 -
16 comments
