Mechanical musical marvels

Grok Headline matches for Mechanical musical marvels

Captured! By Robots - A
Musical/Mechanical Marvel?

Captured! By Robots - A
Musical/Mechanical Marvel? 11/10/2003 11:19 PM
Slashdot Nov 10 2003 0:01AM ET

The Marvels of 2004

The Marvels of 2004 01/26/2004 12:34 PM
Marvel has big plans in store for the upcoming year.

MEMS marvels

MEMS marvels 06/09/2004 11:59 AM
Researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne have created microscale models of the Tyne Bridge and the Angel of the North sculpture that are tinier than the period at the end of this sentence. The designs showcase MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) technology, tiny devices fabricated from silicon with techniques similar to those used in integrated circuit manufacturing. Of course, these microscopic architectural wonders were preceded by flw, a 1/1 millionth scale MEMS version of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater that Boing Boing pal Ken Goldberg and Karl Bohringer constructed way back in 1996. Link

Update: Starting on Monday 7/14, Goldberg and Bohringer's flw will be on display for a month at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.

The Trouble With Marvels: If It Sounds
That Good, Will the Skeptical Buy It?

The Trouble With Marvels: If It Sounds
That Good, Will the Skeptical Buy It? 12/22/2003 02:02 AM
New York Times Dec 22 2003 1:48AM ET

Mechanical Pong

Mechanical Pong 09/22/2004 12:47 AM

Mechanical Computing

Mechanical Computing 05/29/2004 01:44 PM

Mechanical ID - Password Generator

Mechanical ID - Password Generator 03/14/2003 12:56 PM
Mechanical ID - Java Version

Rescuing the mechanical foundations of
our democracy

Rescuing the mechanical foundations of
our democracy 04/09/2004 04:01 PM
Berkeley had its own problems with the Diebold machines last election, which the Berkeley Daily Planet has done a good job of covering so it was a very encouraging sign to read in an article in the BDP last night that people (many with Berkeley connections) from The Open Voting Consortium have volunteered their time and energy to trying to solve the problem of creating a better way to vote that is secure, fast and voter verifiable. They plan on demonstrating the system they have developed this Thursday in Santa Clara. My congratulations and thanks to them. Here is an excerpt from the article: Bay Area Programmers Develop Touchscreen Alternative By JAKOB SCHILLER (03-30-04) As touchscreen voting machines continue to draw heat from critics pointing to allegations of security vulnerabilities, one group of computer science experts proposes to have the solution. The Open Voting Consortium (OVC), a nonprofit group with several Bay Area members, recently announced the development of touchscreen voting machine software that uses open source and creates a voter verified paper trail. Recently completed, the software is set to be publicly tested this Thursday, April 1, at the Santa Clara County government offices in San Jose. ... Taking all the complaints and security vulnerabilities into question, the Open Voting Consortium developed a simple approach; maintain the advantages of a touchscreen system but include the security features that alleviate the current security concerns. OVC's system, currently in software form only, can be used on regular desktop PCs hooked up to a touchscreen monitor and a standard printer. Like the touchscreen machines now in use, the OVC unit records the vote electronically. But unlike Diebold's machines, the OVC system also automatically produce a paper receipt, which is intended to be the official tally. To ensure accuracy, the paper count is then reconciled against the electronic one stored on the machines. "Our idea is that the machines should have [a tally] that people can inspect," said Arthur Keller, a computer scientist who teaches part-time at UC Santa Cruz. "You trust the paper and can have much more faith in the process." The group has written open source software that can be checked by anyone for malicious code that might tamper with votes. Like Linux software for PCs, OVC's code isn't proprietary. ... The machines are still several steps away from making it onto the market. They need to be certified and...

Bar Attacked with Mechanical Digger
(Reuters)

Bar Attacked with Mechanical Digger
(Reuters) 09/03/2004 09:56 AM
Reuters - A mechanical digger was smashed into a Catholic bar in a flashpoint district of Belfast on Friday in an attack local politicians blamed on Protestants.

Millie the mechanical monster of
Michigan

Millie the mechanical monster of
Michigan 07/07/2004 12:48 PM
Mechanical designer Jim Peters, 54, was disappointed that a certain Scottish celebrity was missing from last year's Saline Celtic Festival in Michigan.

"I was down there at the festival. It was full of bagpipe music and Scottish sights and activities. Viewing the long body of water, one can't help think of the Loch Ness area in Scotland and its famous legend. I asked myself: "Where's the monster?"'

So this year, Peters built a 24-foot-long wood-and-steel mechanical Loch Ness Monster. "Millie" was named for Mill Pond Park, the location of the festival. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any photos of Millie online. Link< /a> (Thanks, Carlo!)

Photos: "The New Mechanical Sexual
Revolution"

Photos: "The New Mechanical Sexual
Revolution" 08/29/2004 09:18 PM
Xeni Jardin: Photographer Timothy Archibold's portraits of garage-geek inventors -- and users -- of large-scale sex machines. The aesthetic of the images is not prurient; it's clinical, clean, and removed. That distance lends the images a compelling twist, given the topic at hand. I hatehatehate the site's 1.5MB gorilla Flash interface, which prevents my pasting some of the project notes for you to read here. But the images and the subject matter they detail (online communities that connect people who imagine, build, and use these machines) are fascinating. At left: "Scott at his kitchen table, Sex Machines Unlimited," which made me laugh out loud. Link (NSFW). (Thanks, alfie)

Dirty Mechanical Paper Dolls

Dirty Mechanical Paper Dolls 04/22/2004 02:38 PM
Paper pervert and Boingboing reader Sandrine Sheon points us to a gallery of adult-oriented "naughty automata":

These are modern, gender-bending versions of old-fashioned wind-up toys, but all made of paper and very funny. They include a spanking duo, fucking skeletons, miss and mister masturbation, and a live paper sex act. You can also see animations of the toys in action.

Link

Autopen: mechanical signature storage
and reproduction

Autopen: mechanical signature storage
and reproduction 06/08/2004 12:31 PM
The Autopen is a wicked vintage gadget that lets you store your signature as a series of mechanical cues for a multifariously branched mechanical armature. Gizmodo has a killer post on it, with old pop-sci articles on the forthcoming age of the autopen. Lots of online info revolves around how to tell if your collectable souvenir signature came off an autopen or an original signature.

The most useful one, though, is the Autopen, made by International Autopen Co. of Sterling, VA., a popular device that is apparently still in use (the Republic National Committee bought one just this year). The Autopen is loaded with special metal 'matrix' -- basically a traced pattern of the signature -- that can be used again and again, even if the signer isn't there. Even better, owners of Autopens can purchase signature matrices through the mail from third parties, duplicating any autograph at will. Current models of the Autopen weigh around 100lbs, run off regular power, and can use real pens and pencils (although they work better with Sharpies, due to the fixed width of the pen looking less off when done with marker).

Link

"Pongmechanik, outstanding mechanical
tabletop version of Pong"

"Pongmechanik, outstanding mechanical
tabletop version of Pong" 09/22/2004 08:35 PM

Mechanical Force Amplifier Leverages
Pounds Into Tons

Mechanical Force Amplifier Leverages
Pounds Into Tons 03/14/2005 04:13 PM
LatchTool Group announced today the release of its PowerCylinder™ the first commercial product that mechanically amplifies a linear force multiple times using encapsulated hydraulic circuitry. [PRWEB Feb 24, 2005]

QuickCam Orbit webcam offers mechanical
pan and tilt

QuickCam Orbit webcam offers mechanical
pan and tilt 10/29/2003 03:50 PM
Logitech Inc. announced on Wednesday the Mac OS X compatible QuickCam Orbit. Built for video instant messaging, it boasts a mechanical pan and tilt feature and moves to keep a person's face automatically centered in the field of view.

The Last Starfighter--The Musical!

The Last Starfighter--The Musical! 09/22/2004 10:58 PM

Musical Baton

Musical Baton 06/05/2005 11:19 PM
Total volume of music files on my computer Yahoo! Music Engine says ?132 Songs, 9 hrs, 25 min, 03 sec, 553MB?. The last CD I bought was That's quite a while ago, I don't remember which one was last exactly. Let's say Kid A - Radiohead. Song playing right now Well, I was watching TV, but if I want to hear music I usually listen to my LAUNCHcast radio station, so I started that. ?

Musical interlude

Musical interlude 12/11/2003 10:56 AM

This morning I'm listening to Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones. What an excellent song. Man. It's so weird that Microsoft chose this as the theme song for Windows 95. Wow. I think they chose it because they wanted us to think about the Start Menu. But ohhh you make a grown man cry. If you rough it up startitup startitup don't make a grown man cry. She's my fave-fave-favorite shape. Never never never stop. I take you places you never never seen. Never never never stop. Start me up never stop. Start me up never stop. You make a grown man cry. You make a dead man come.

Musical Snares

Musical Snares 10/28/2003 11:06 PM
I should have known better, because now I'm sitting exactly where Microsoft wants me, facing a significant "switching cost" if I want to adopt iTunes as my music-management software of choice. Sometime soon, I will start the laborious process of re-ripping all my CDs into MP3 files so they will play nice with iTunes. But the more I think about it, the more antsy I get about my decision to back the iTunes camp. By Andrew Leonard (Salon via MyAppleMenu)

The New Musical Functionality...

The New Musical Functionality... 07/17/2004 08:20 AM

Over the last few months webloggia has been full of discussions about the new musical functionality that's starting to emerge around the web. I wasn't immune from this trend - I wrote about MediaUnbound (On MediaUnbound and Recommendations Engines) and linked to the (currently pretty awful) Music Recommendation System for iTunes. Dan Hill has also been talking around the subject, talking about first So cialising mp3-based music listening and then about whether wh ether recommendations scale. And those minxes over at 2lmc linked and commented upon the views of people who are suggesting better ways that iTunes could handle transitions between songs. And of course the new version of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store also now has the user-generated iMix feature - standard web-native functionality which allows people (and now people in the UK, France and Germany rather than just the US) to put mix tapes on the web where other people can rate and/or buy them. And that's just the tip of the iceberg...

Then of course there are the staples of this new musical functionality - from the rapidly-becoming-indispensible audioscrobbler (which uses the flexibility and granularity of net-enabled MP3 playing devices to create charts, lists and recommendations) through to the self-generating radio stations like last.fm and launchcast. And then there's all the little hook-in tools like iChatStatus (publish current listening to iChat's presence display) and Kung-Tunes (publish current listening to the web) that have slowly becoming integrated into my life without my really noticing how they all hook together, communicate, branch off and build upon each other.

All this new funtionality is emerging at the same time (or at least starting to be adopted at the same time) because we're beginning to see a world in which a decent number of early adopters are now starting to do a substantial portion of their listening on digital devices. Obviously the iPod has been the major success story here - the definitive product that has been encouraging people to do the necessary work to transfer their music into more easily manipulatable digital files. But the increasing prevelance of broadband and wireless connectivity is helping too - becauase it's the connection of these appliances to the internet that has created the explosion in interoperable, interconnected devices, applications and people. Clearly, the number of people listening to music through these channels is still tiny compared to the entire music-consuming public. There may be many people using iPods, but there's still an adoption path for moving all your listening into digital jukeboxes and being perpetually connected to the internet (ubiquitous, always-on, non-computer-centric internet in the home is a bit of an obsession of mine at the moment).

But this small proportion looks like it is set to grow. One of the first questions you have to ask yourself in any organic R&D role (which is I think how I'd characterise what I do) is am I a freak or am I an early adopter? You have to have some sense of how much your instincts and excitements are in tune with real people in the world because otherwise you cannot possibly evaluate how those people might respond to the products, concepts or propositions that you think are exciting. In this case, it's becoming fairly clear that people who are listening to digital music and in connected ways are very definitely more like early adopters than they are freaks. They're pointing in roughly the right direction. And there are now enough of them that it's becoming more and more worth people's time ot build little tools or widgets or applications or paradigms or appliances or business models around them. Which in turn appears to be making the whole area still more attractive, creating a feedback loop that is pulling more and more people towards new ways of listening. I don't want to sound too cheesy but I'm afraid I can't help myself - it's pretty clear that we've reached a critical mass and that new musical functionality is about to explode. The only question now is what will be there when the smoke clears?

Over the next few days I'm going to write about some of the core trends that I'm seeing in people's use of digital music, attempting to extrapolate from some current behaviours that we're all observing around us - concentrating on how people wish to interact and use their music. I'm not going to spend too much time on the way some people may wish to legislate against these desires or build around them - because I believe for the most part that any attempt to do so will inevitably fail. Competing models that more adequately fulfil those needs will rise to take over in their place. The model that meets the most needs (while having the least obvious incumberences) will probably win in the really long-term, even if the market, commercial advantages or monopolist practices deform it in the short to medium term.

I'll be talking about four major areas that seem to me to be indicative of the unevenly-distributed musical functionality of the future - (1) portability and access, (2) navigation, (3) self-presentation and social uses of music and (4) data use and privacy. These trends within these areas are - I believe - representative of much larger trends across the consumption of all text-based, audio-based and video-based media and so it might be possible to draw conclusions beyond the consumption of music. I am however not planning to do so. And I make no claims that these areas of enquiry are absolute or canonical, or that there are no other areas that I should also be investigating. All I'll argue is that these four areas are core to the movements that we're currently seeing and that they are each likely to play themselves out in the product designs, interface designs and business models of the near future.

Of course what comes after that remains to be seen...

Tomorrow: The New Musical Functionality, Portability and access...

Read the comments

IT's Musical Habits

IT's Musical Habits 07/20/2004 09:22 AM

Musical chairs

Musical chairs 04/15/2004 04:58 PM
As online audio hits a commercial crescendo, key companies are jockeying for position. But both RealNetworks and Apple may be left to go it alone as the sound of Microsoft's footsteps grows louder.

Things musical

Things musical 08/02/2004 02:37 AM

http://www.musicmobs.com/ - social network for musical tastes

musicplasma.com - visualization of musicial influences

original music from me and Stuart Sharpe - circa 1982:

Funky Quest - by Me

W hat am I gonna do for fun - by Stuart Sharpe

Motorola goes musical

Motorola goes musical 08/04/2004 10:28 PM
The Tribune Aug 5 2004 1:41AM GMT

Big River, the musical

Big River, the musical 03/23/2005 05:34 PM
Jen took me to see the musical "Big River" last night. It was incredible! Totally awesome! First of all Huck...

Mac Vs. Microsoft: The Musical

Mac Vs. Microsoft: The Musical 01/22/2004 02:09 AM
Will other PC manufacturers follow in HP's footsteps? Only time will tell. By Jefferson Graham (USA Today via MyAppleMenu)

Musical Shares

Musical Shares 09/13/2004 10:44 AM
Apple's supremacy in the digital music market will be challenged by a joint launch this month by Microsoft and Napster. By Guy Clapperton, The Guardian (via MyAppleMenu)

Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.9

Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.9 07/05/2004 03:59 PM
A MIDI track accompaniment generator.

Musical Porch Swing

Musical Porch Swing 06/17/2005 06:11 PM

The Musical Porch Swing is now available from Musical Furnishings, a company that specializes in making everyday furniture that doubles as giant xylophones. The furniture is made from western red cedar and operates in the same manner as a normal xylophone. Each slat is a different note.

The swings begin at $1000 and include the mallets.

Musical Porch Swing [i4u]

Best Musical Score (By a Laptop)

Best Musical Score (By a Laptop) 06/26/2004 01:06 AM
New York Times Jun 26 2004 5:16AM GMT

Evil Dead: The Musical

Evil Dead: The Musical 06/12/2004 08:35 PM
Evil Dead: The Musical
In making your list of should-be musical theater productions, you've likely considered the Evil Dead series, right? Fortunately for you, Montreal's Just for Laughs comedy festival has put together just that, believe it or not, for this year's festival.
A special run will happen in Toronto on the week of June 22nd before moving to Montreal for a full run.

[ Evil Dead: The Musical ]

[ Evil Dead: The Musical ] 06/13/2004 07:32 AM
It's ba-a-ack! .. just that .. musical

evildeadthemusical.com
track this site | 3 links

Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.8

Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.8 06/24/2004 10:46 PM
A MIDI track accompaniment generator.

MusicBrainz: metainformación musical

MusicBrainz: metainformación musical 05/27/2004 07:37 AM

Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.7

Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.7 04/20/2004 08:43 PM
A MIDI track accompaniment generator.

was done of IT professionals and their
musical tastes

was done of IT professionals and their
musical tastes 07/21/2004 11:14 AM
Developers play air guitar to Megadeth The Register .. Musical preferences of computer geeks .. Nerds Musical Preference Survey

theregister.co.uk/2004/07/20/musical_preference_survey
track this site | 4 links

iTunes and musical taste

iTunes and musical taste 11/12/2003 01:02 PM
Wired is running a tongue-in-cheek article about the ability of iTunes users to share their playlists. "Thanks to the ability of Apple's iTunes to share music collections over local networks, it is now possible to judge someone's taste in music -- or lack of it -- in a way that previously required a certain level of intimacy," the article states. It further notes that iTunes users are starting to realize that their playlists can affect the social image they project, and...

Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.5

Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.5 12/26/2003 06:46 PM
A MIDI track accompaniment generator.
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Mechanical musical marvels

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