#digital
// 17 posts tagged
Feb 23 5:57 PM #51 2 min Eleven Minutes Before the Chaff Caught Fire
Roasting Profile Curve EngravingThe popcorn popper caught fire at minute seven. I still engraved the mug.
Feb 15 10:01 AM #43 3 min The Moon Learned to Glow Through Two Millimetres of PLA
Lithophane Lunar Phase CalendarsNASA publishes the moon's exact wobble hourly as JSON. I'm turning a year of it into glowing plastic.
Feb 12 10:35 AM #3 3 min The Patch Kept Running After I Forgot to Listen
Generative Soundscape CompositionThe Pi in my basement ran for 37 days without supervision. When I finally listened, I didn't recognize my own patch.
Feb 7 7:32 PM #3 2 min Two States Between Static and a Forest
Generative Soundscape CompositionSix days of overengineering. The fix was two states and thirty percent. I'm almost embarrassed.
Jan 30 6:47 PM #29 3 min The Disc That Knew a Star but Forgot How to Sing
Stellar Spectrum Music Box DiscsThe disc contains Sirius. The pins are 0.3 mm too short. The music box plays exactly nothing.
Jan 29 6:44 PM #28 3 min Asking Polaris for a Second Opinion on North
Star-Drift Compass Calibration CardsPolaris is 0.7 degrees off true north. My compass is worse. Tonight we're going to have a conversation.
Jan 24 5:31 PM #22 3 min The Baton That Learned to Hear Us Drift
Pitch-Tracking Conductor BatonThe sopranos drifted flat and my face was three beats too late. Now my baton does the yelling—in LED.
Jan 20 8:39 PM #17 2 min A Knight's Walk Across a Programmable Night
Knight’s Tour Starfield MosaicSixty-four tiles, one knight's tour, and a sky that cooperated like it had read the algorithm.
Jan 19 8:40 PM #16 2 min The Chord I Could Finally Hold
Chord Spectrogram Relief TilesTwo out of three chord guesses right—by touch alone. My fingers apparently know things my ears don't.
Jan 18 7:22 PM #3 3 min The Hiss That Refused to Become a Room
Generative Soundscape CompositionFive things blew up in the first hour. The ambient masterpiece that emerged was my laptop's fan noise with reverb.
Jan 17 8:58 PM #3 3 min The Patch Keeps Running After I Leave the Room
Generative Soundscape CompositionBack at this. Third time this week. The 7 MHz band sounded strange and I couldn't not record it.
Jan 15 7:18 PM #14 2 min Printing the Sky My Radio Forgot to Keep
APRS Skytrace SculpturesThe tracker gossips to digipeaters I've never met, and somewhere a map in Japan shows a foam aircraft drawing loops over frozen Alberta.
Jan 12 7:12 PM #11 4 min The Ribbon That Refused to Touch Its Own Terrain
VFR Track Relief PrintingMy flight path floated a storey above its own mountain. GPS and terrain data have different opinions about ground.
Jan 7 7:27 PM #6 3 min Teaching a Foam Wing to Draw the Ground
Foam-Wing Orthomosaic MappingTeaching a computer to recognize a park from 200 slightly different angles—like raising a very slow bird.
Jan 5 7:40 PM #3 3 min The Feedback Loop Only Sounded Beautiful Once
Generative Soundscape CompositionEight seconds of cascading self-referential harmony. Then the audio interface died and stayed dead for an hour.
Jan 4 7:38 PM #3 3 min The Ionosphere Wrote the Harmony While I Wasn't Listening
Generative Soundscape CompositionSet grain duration to 8 milliseconds, got a refrigerator compressor. The 20ms boundary between texture and pitch is real.
Jan 2 7:47 PM #3 2 min Teaching My Computer to Dream in Sound
Generative Soundscape CompositionThe first sound my algorithm generates is indistinguishable from a fax machine drowning. This is, apparently, progress.