it’s cool you can now do easy links to the iOS App Store via appstore.com. instead of funky random itunes ids you now just use the name of the app – pretty minor but nice and convenient too. by the way here are a few really important ones! :P
http://AppStore.com/SketchClub
http://AppStore.com/FireSkull
http://AppStore.com/PlasmaEffect
haha this keeps happening to me so posting here so i can find the solution easier when i need it ^_^
System Management Controller (SMC), responsible forcontrolling the fans, has become confused
on left hand side of the keyboard press Control-Shift-Option and on the top right of the keyboard, the power key at the same time. press power to turn laptop back on
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3856779?start=0&tstart=0
it’s been a month now since Sketch Club hit the app store! it’s been so much fun seeing what people create and upload to the gallery! i’m really inspired and awed by what people are able to pull from their minds and share. i’ve hoped to spend a lot more time sketching myself but when i do i just find more things to do or fix in the app or on the site and wind up coding haha. 
along with the online gallery i’ve made somewhat of an offline gallery for Sketch Club as well. on the wall behind my desk at work i’ve been putting up 4×6″ prints of some of the best sketches. it’s quickly grown from just a shmattering to nearly the whole wall! i’ve had to move my big NIN poster out of the way and soon my generative art and tech prints will have to find new homes as well. here you can see a bit of the progression… 
yay apple approved my new app Sketch Club and it’s now in the app store!! (here’s a direct link to it in the store)
what is Sketch Club??? it’s a super rad drawing / sketching / painting app for ipads, pods, and phones. it’s got sweet procedural brushes like sketchy and fur (based on trace aka mr. doob‘s epic html5 sketching experiment harmony and zefrank’s scribbler). it’s also got smooth (which is my own take on the connect to nearest points action) and side lines (umm great for fuzzy caterpillars?!). along with that procedural madness there are regular brushes like you’d find in photoshop but pared down to the most useful functionality and a vector brush for simplified smooth or polygonal drawing. also there are foreground and background layers to draw in, a photo layer for background or tracing, and canvas color.
that’s all pretty sweet, but wait there’s more! sketch club provides not just the means of creating cool images but also the motivation! integrated with the app is an online gallery where you can upload what you make and enter it into fun competitions! the online bit is very much inspired by the wonderful demoscene portal pouet.net. you can view all the sketches people upload and rate them (rules, piggy, sucks) and as you do you earn glops and after accumulating enough glops you get hearts. it takes a lot to earn hearts so you give them to only your most favorite sketches. one departure from pouet is that while you can give sketches piggy and sucks votes (and they do factor into rankings) they are never displayed to anyone else. this way you don’t have to worry about hurting someone’s feelings and people won’t get discouraged.
you’ll notice there’s already some pretty amazing sketches in the gallery! while i was working on the app and it was still littered with horrible bugs and missing features some very brave friends tested it out and helped drive its features. omg i lurve you guys, thank you!!!!! there are still of course some smaller bugs and tooons of features i didn’t get to yet so expect plenty of updates!
okay so even if you don’t have an ipod or ipad you can still participate by going to sketchclub.com and logging in with your facebook account. you’ll be a guest so you can rate and comment but won’t be able to earn hearts or upload sketches. if you do get a device later you can go in the app and link to your facebook account and that will upgrade you to a full member!
so yeah get sketch club and try it out, it’s pretty sweet!
a new guild wars 2 video is up and explains and shows why it’s going to be really goooood! people will get to try it out for themselves for the first time next week at Gamescom! now back to fixing bugs…
with @party this weekend came the first releases of a new demo group vrtx (pronounced “vertex”). we did two entries for the freestyle graphics compo and got 2nd and 6th place. kirill did this sweet spider web scene and guybrush, kirill, and i did the mazelized text. watch out for more cool graphics and demos coming from vrtx in the future!
so 16 years ago i started keeping a journal, 14 years ago i started saving all my source code, 10 years ago i started saving regular screenshots of my projects and since then have been accelerating the rate at which i store off snapshots from originally around one every month to by the end of 2009 one image a day and one video a week. this is quite a lot of data but the rate of technological advance in storage has far exceeded the increasing rate of data i store. right now you can buy 1.5TB of storage for $100. this is insane and it makes my data set look pretty tiny and pathetic!
so to get started on the next decade i’ve upped the ante and created some software to help. inspired by gordon bell’s research and latest book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything my app grabs a screenshot of my multi-monitor desktop every 15 seconds and stores it off with lots of metadata. this was actually a bit too much data for my tastes since each compressed snapshot comes out to many megabytes. so i added an additional layer of inter-frame compression similar to what is done with video and this gets me down to well under 100 kilobytes for most snapshots and it’s currently trending around 100 megabytes per day. this still sounds like a lot but that 1.5TB drive is actually large enough to store that rate of data for me for the next 40 years! ridiculous right?
of course you’re probably wondering what the point is… well, there are lots! for one, just like the journal it is fun and rewarding to go back in time and see what my life was like in the past and recall the things i was thinking about and doing. it helps to gain perspective on things. with this automated capture now so many more possibilities unfold. my simple playback app at the moment can already give me fast replays of the past as well as statistics on my activity (how much time spent coding, web browsing, chatting, etc). in the future i’ll be able to run OCR on the data to recognize any text on screen and then be able to search effectively and quickly extract text from my computer at any moment in the past. further in the future i’ll be able to feed all this into generic AI software to train it to respond, work, and think like me so i can have great digital assistants and even further in the future provide a much more accurate history and memory to my simulated consciousness after all of our brains have been scanned and moved to processors in space!
anyway this work is the reason i didn’t make as much progress as i wanted on other projects this holiday.
last night i had a great time with kirill, guybrush, and matt at microsoft testing out and playing with live music visualization stuff. guybrush and i will be doing the visuals for the portland, oregon and seattle, washington stops of the data beez tour! it’s been a really fun experience for me so far as i’ve been introduced to some great musicians (whose tunes are drilled quite deep into my brain now as they’ve been looping for so many days XD), have picked up the programming environment processing, and given lots of thought to whole new aspects of sync and synesthesia outside of what i’ve previously toyed with in doing demoscene productions.
departing from what i think is the normal vj style and inspired by guybrush, paris and other visual artists on the tour, i’ve focused on creating a sort of visual instrument controlled by a laptop keyboard and a korg midi controller. it has five independently controlled layers: feedback, background, midground, foreground, and post process. each layer maps to a row on the laptop keyboard for switching between effects and a block of controls on the korg for controlling speed/amount, beat/kick, and either audio reactivity or transparency. it makes for an incredibly fun toy but i have to avoid some combinations that produce immediate eye cancer! 
this weekend i’m hoping to finish the bulk of the code, effects and visual content and also get in practice time ‘playing’ it as a complement to music. hopefully things turn out well and the musicians and audiences next week enjoy the results.
this weekend i upgraded my desktop machine to the intel i7 920 cpu. it’s a hyper-threaded quad core chip and completely smokes the dual core it replaced. i got it so i could do some computation heavy processing but haven’t finished that project and so can’t show the results yet. however while coding i did keep the cpu busy doing more fun renders of my maze! check out the images below and you can also view the full maze set on flickr
time for another random updates post! i’ve been having lots of fun with web stuff like facebook, twitter, vimeo, and youtube. now anytime i want i can have the internet eat up hours of my life while i accomplish absolutely nothing! wow it’s just like an mmo. (speaking of which i’m level 65 now in progress quest and getting more uber every day)
another recent time sink for me is sins of a solar empire. oh yes another sci-fi rts game whetting my appetite for starcraft 2!
this weekend i got a pet hamster for my cat scratchy! he’s a super fat black and white dwarf hamster who loves exploring and eating pie. i haven’t given him a name yet so you should help me by leaving a comment with your suggestion. some names i’m considering are: domino, doob, itchy, lump, modo, tweak, twitchy, and wiki.
i recently spent a week in the mecca of online gaming – seoul, south korea. it was awesome! i toured the NCsoft mothership, attended G* 2007, attended a televised starcraft tournament, visited the demilitarized zone between north and south korea, and ate lots of CRAZY food. it was a really great trip and i hope to visit korea again sometime. i finally got a camera so i took some pictures…
seoul
g* 2007
starcraft
crazy food
while exploring some random number sets i discovered a universe of spiders perpetually battling each other. their brutality is rather shocking and while i don’t know how long they’ve been at it i do hope that someday they can resolve their differences peacefully. in the meantime you can watch their battle unfold live at the epic spider brawl.
ack i’m finally feeling better after getting sick my last day in Finland and spending the last two weeks with mucus and blood pouring out of my major orifices and my brain acting like meat sauce all while trying to catch up on everything from work! ohhhh it’s been miserable. those Finns sure have some crazy powerful viruses.
anyways… day 4 of assembly was quite cool since with the demo submitted we finally had a chance to explore Helsinki and more of the party place. it was especially cool talking to preacher about his demos and coding tricks. then came the compos. the browser demos were quite amazing. i never expected flash to be capable of what everyone is doing with it these days. if adobe can keep optimizing the runtime i look forward to saying good bye to Win32 forever. the short film compo was also very nice and i especially liked Realtime Demo Wannabe. the 64k compo was a bit disappointing since there were only three entries this year.
finally the demo compo. and this deserves it’s own paragraph. this year’s demos at assembly were EPIC! there really should have been 3 or 4 1st places awarded because there were a lot of deserving prods. the best of course was ASD’s Life Force. this is one for the history books. i look forward to telling my grandchildren that i was at assembly the year this monster was released. for me it’s up there with second reality, heaven seven, and the product as something everyone will look back on as a defining production of the demoscene. yeah nice work ASD! my other favorite of the compo was Conspiracy’s f07 which has so much great energy to it. there was also the demo trace, neurokin, and i threw together sokuseki which didn’t hold up at all on the big screen and sandwiched between high energy behemoth productions haha. it was still cool to see it on the big screen in front of so many people though.
after the party i caught up on some much needed sleep only to wake up crazy sick and suffer through the long flight home. doh!! at least when i got back i found out Scratchy also had a great vacation. apparently he found a girlfriend at the boarding place and played with her every day while i was gone. usually it takes him a couple days to get back to his normal insane self but this time he was immediately bouncing off the walls when we got home.
Life Force |
F07 |
Sokuseki |
Sokuseki |
Sokuseki |
Realtime Demo Wannabe |
my demo touring continues this week with a trip to Finland for the Assembly demo party! i’m so psyched! trace, neurokin, and i are working on a small demo to submit. we’ve had very few days to work on it though so are trying to keep the scope small. hopefully we can finish in time.
so that i won’t be crazy bored during the 14 hours of travel i got some new PSP games. i got final fantasy 2, lego star wars 2, and me and my katamari. they better be really good! when i went to spain last year i lucked out and got addicted to untold legends and that killed like 10 hours alone on the flights in. i never played through final fantasy 2 before so i’m hoping it can do the same for me this time.
i tried to get a sitter for my cat but had two bail on me so now my cat Scratchy will be hanging out at a boarding place. i haven’t told him yet, he’s really going to hate me!
i’ve been too busy to post the last couple months but there’s been cool stuff with the Guild Wars expansion coming out and the XPLSV floating teeth demo maybe i’ll get a chance to post whlie bored in an airport, but certainly expect some live blogging from Assembly.