January 2012
3 posts
Experience Engineering
And I don’t mean Imagineering. And I don’t mean user experience design. Today I have given a name to a practice which is much more widely practiced than anyone would prefer to admit. It is experience engineering. I defined it quickly in this tweet as:
The numbers are all wrong, the math makes no sense, and the user is happy with their experience.
Naturally there is the well known...
Embracing Non-Privacy
I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine, Lisa Long. Don’t bother looking for her, she doesn’t exist on the internet. Lisa works in enterprise software, providing professional support and operations. She makes a point to not post publicly about anything, lest her professional image be tarnished. What different industries we work in! I post publicly about almost anything. On...
Information is Beautiful
I’ve slowly made my way through David McCandless’ Information is Beautiful. Information is indeed beautiful, and so is this book. As a lifelong lover of facts, just pure and simple facts about things that I can rattle off at house parties and have people stare and wonder why I know that, those kinds of facts, well, this book is full of them. Of course, I swore that I’d never...
November 2011
9 posts
BSS not Basic Service Set
I’ve been reading my way through the interviews at the back of Supergraphics. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is a woman whom I’d like to meet. With this many honest and biting quotes, she most assuredly has more than a few stories to tell. Some of my favourite quotes from her interview.
Can you describe how you came to do this [original Sea Ranch supergraphics] project?
I was having an...
Techcrunch TV Interview with RjDj →
Here’s a pretty good interview with Mike Butcher from Techcrunch about what’s going on at RjDj. Overall a good description of what Reality Jockey is all about and what’s coming in the future. Plenty of super old footage and creative editing ;) Filmed on the roof of RjDj London headquarters.
WatchHaven’t seen one of these on a while. Street Fighter Zero 2 intro with a nifty time lapse intro. Here’s a better version of the video. Discovered in a Shoreditch bar.
(Possibly) My Favourite Designer
It has been said that Buckminster Fuller was a charlatan. “Some people say that [he] is an authentic 18-carat genius. Others just laugh and laugh. …it is easy to imagine how that might have come across to somewhat less imaginative audiences: as a bluff or, worse, as a scam.” After reading his biography, Your Private Sky edited by Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, I would...
WatchStory time! I had a conversation with Joe White recently. Hanging out at Allpress. We were filming an interview about RjDj’s upcoming app. While testing out the video we got off on a tangent. But I find it so funny that it must be worth posting, right?
Incubus
William Shatner
Esperanto
30 Days of Night
Drag Me to Hell
B Movie
Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death
Finally, I...
Valkee - Brightening your Winter →
Valkee has been on my radar for some time now (months? A year?) possibly through ex-colleague Petteri, and it’s always been a bit of a curiosity for me. The company claims to be able to alleviate seasonal affective disorder (SAD) using a headset that shines light into your ears. And they have evidence to back it up. Sounds completely awesome. Sounds completely crazy. Sounds like a slight...
October 2011
1 post
Don't Want Your CV
This weekend RjDj had a stand at Silicon Milkroundabout and presented our company, our vision, and perhaps most importantly, ourselves as individuals. I enjoyed the event very much, it was well organised and well attended. The majority of the attendees were students, new grads, or young professionals with only a few years experience. It would have been nice to see some more people with more...
July 2011
4 posts
Visualizing a Hit →
I have this argument with people all the time. Can cultural artifacts typically associated with human emotion or creativity, such as aural (e.g. music) or visual (e.g. paintings) art be algorithmically created or otherwise reduced to a formula which any person (or thing!) can follow? The answer to me is obviously YES! Most creative types will balk at the idea (lest their own existence be...
June 2011
5 posts
WatchI had the great opportunity to be invited by Peter Svensson to speak at Android Only in Malmö last week. You can see the presentation here, but the jist of it is a motivational speech about the opportunities to innovate in the mobile sound/music space using very flexible audio programming languages such as Pure Data (i.e. libpd) on the Android platform. Obviously RjDj has a lot to say about the...
May 2011
10 posts
Coderwall →
I hate the gameification of everything. Yet here we are. Badges for coding. I suppose, I can now “show off” with something that I am doing already and love. I’m curious to see how many people adopt it (at least those on github) and what variety of badges are forthcoming.
Paper at AES 130
My friend and collaborator Matthew Yee-King presented our joint paper, “A Comparison of Parametric Optimisation Techniques for Tone Matching” at the Audio Engineering Society conference 130 on Sunday, May 15 in London. We started work on the topic beginning in October 2007 under the project name “Synthbot”.
The original goal of the project was to produce software capable...
AES 130 Recap →
Michael Hlatky of Accessive Tools offers his review of the Bounce to App panel that he organised at AES 130.
Bounce to App
This past Saturday I had the pleasure of participating in Michael Hlatky’s Bounce to App panel at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference 130 in London. I was on stage together with Michael Macmillan, CEO of Bounce Mobile, the creators of the FirePlayer, a mobile remixing app, and Jörn Loviscach, professor of mathematics and computer engineering at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld. Also...
3 Dreams of Black - Danger Mouse →
I really enjoyed watching the new 3 Dreams of Black video by Danger Mouse. I’m very impressed with the possibilities presented by WebGL (though I’m really just an audio guy) and the future that the video itself promises. Beautiful, immersive, and fantastical! (now if only Google would choose some better music to along with their tech demos). I have to say though, with all of these...
The Soundtrack to your Life is Coming...
I’m very excited to have the opportunity to speak at the City University of Hong Kong on Friday, May 6, hosted by Samson Young. I am also lucky to speak with William Lane of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and Shane Levesque from the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. The abstract for the talk is below:
Recorded music is irrelevant, digital music constantly adapts itself to you, and...
April 2011
15 posts
Science PhDs are Just Fucked.
This is a topic that I love to rant about, and which has haunted me for more then ten years now. Today seems like the perfect day to write about, because no less than four articles on the subject have manifested themselves before me today.
Reform the PhD System of Shut It Down
Why Science is a Lousy Career Choice
Education: The PhD Factory
The PhD Problem: Are We Giving Out Too Many Degrees?
...
Everything Popular is Wrong →
Here is an excellent article by Stefan Goldmann on the effect of the internet and technology on music. Admittedly, there isn’t very much here that we didn’t already know. DAWs removed the barrier to entry to making music, the internet removed the barrier to distribution. Hastily assembled music by amateurs can sell as well as professionally produced tracks. With barriers so low,...
UK Space Agency →
The UK Space Agency is all well and good, but why couldn’t they just call it the Ministry of Space?
iPhone Lock Screen Images
After engaging in a limited and arbitrary ethnographic study of the lock screen photos of iPhone users, I have come to the following conclusion. With probability approaching one, if an iPhone user is in a relationship and/or has children, the lock screen image will be one of the significant other(s).
As I am in no such relationship and do not have the luxury of even bucking the trend, I instead...
Fast Modulo with 2^n Divisors
I recently had a problem in which it was required to map an integer, a, to a circle with a length equal to some power of two, N. Normally this kind of mapping is done using modular division. In fact, I found a code snippet doing just that in Jos Stam’s wonderful A Simple Fluid Solver based on the FFT.
(N + (a % N)) % N;
Wow! It works, but it’s heavy! Two modulos! But when using...
March 2011
15 posts
