Ohm sweet monome
I’ve had the extraordinary luck* to get my hands on a monome, the amazing USB controller that’ll do just about anything you want it to. The monome is an 8×8 grid of sturdy backlit buttons. And that’s really about it, functionally. It interfaces with a slew of music apps that turn it into a keyboard, a sequencer, a ribbon slide, or just about any tactile way you can imagine to control sound. And the design! If it weren’t so sturdy I’d call it cute. Form and function, as one.
I spent a great evening playing with the monome last night.
[*] Luck being a friend who has loaned it to me for the month while he gets married and honeymoons, presumably because he was forbidden from taking it with him. The first sign of doomed marriage, if you ask me.
Demolishin’
Almost exactly two years ago I had a true bonding experience with my son watching a garbage truck in front of our house dump its whole load on the street to try to figure out what piece of trash inside it was on fire. Garbage men, policemen, firefighters, and a bulldozer: does it get any better than that?
Well, apparently it does. I have just learned that the small town in northwestern Illinois where my parents have a home is host to — wait for it — a demolition derby using farm combines. Let me apply some formatting to that: a demolition derby using farm combines. And not just any combines but decrepit, rusty-blade-whirling junkers ready to be auctioned off as scrap. Forget summer in the city. I want to see this rural answer to robot wars. Can you imagine the carnage? How onlookers don’t get pierced with shrapnel I have no idea. I am willing to risk it.
Hack your children
Yesterday Parent Hacks featured my post on how to create a LEGO mosaic manually (or mostly manually). Asha Dornfest has created a really wondeful site applying the hacker mentality to parenting. The site has exploded in popularity, presumably because geeks can reproduce and even take an interest in what they spawn.
Parenting as a community of interest on the Internet has grown immensely in recent years (or maybe I am just paying better attention). Federated Media just created a metablog that combines parenting-related posts from many of their major properties.
In addition to straight tips and tricks, Baby Roadies and The Sneeze provide some hilarious dad perspectives on the parenting arts.
Birthin’, surfin’ … a perfect match. I mean, they’re both just a series of tubes.
World Community Grid takes on cancer, take two
Not sure what happened to this post. It literally just disappeared. (Has anyone ever experienced a spontaneous Movable Type database reversion?)
Anywhere, here it is again. I’ve typed extra hard to make sure it sticks.
The World Community Grid has just launched its third program to fight disease using the combined computing power of desktop machines across the world. Like prior programs (which continue to run!) Help Defeat Cancer stitches together idle processing cycles to crack the nut of cancer tissue microarray analysis, a step towards enhanced treatment.
Oh, WCG also has Linux and Mac clients now. (They ain’t pretty, but then neither is data-crunching, frankly.)
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
Explorations of place in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from my time on The Heavy Leather Horror Show 2023-2026.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
