Thing #1 is Medium’s shortform and you’re looking at it right now. Something about the magic numbers 150 and 30. There’s more to it, but let’s keep this short!
Thing #2 is NFTs. You know how an artist’s signature makes a limited edition print special and valuable? This is a bit like that, except for digital art through clever use of blockchain technology. The guys at eBoy put some up for auction and so did I — based on that cursed AI pixel art project.
What do these two things have in common? I think they are both part of a noticeably accelerating trend: content value capture on the Internet is democratizing. I’m excited to see where these experiments go next!
How a few lines of code turned my Trump bot into a Musk bot
Four long years ago, I introduced a project to ridicule and exploit our ex-president’s irresponsible use of social media.
[Trump] really likes to use Twitter. He uses it to express strong opinions about all sorts of things. Occasionally, those opinions are targeted at publicly traded companies. You see where this is going.
Little did I know that a whole new level of irresponsibility would eventually get him suspended from the platform and bring about the end of the industrious Trump2Cash bot.
Luckily, there is someone ready to pick up where the two of them left off. …
That time I put a Raspberry Pi inside an Apple iSight because nobody stopped me
It’s a pandemic outside, many of us are working from home, and I found myself buying a webcam for the first time since the last century. I was not the only one.
The webcams out there today, they do the job. You just plug them in and get a pretty nice video feed. But they’re not exactly design icons. I thought that, maybe, we can do a little better.
Allow me to take you back to the year 2003. The iPod is still a thing. It’s playing “Hey Ya!” by OutKast. You can get an iBook in white plastic. Life…
A short apology and a longer explanation
Look, I may have accidentally summoned some demons from the pixel art underworld. I don’t know what is happening to these little creatures, but it sure doesn’t look good. They appear to be melting and turning into other objects. I’m really quite sorry about all this, but it happened and I’m here to tell you about it.
Sometimes no user interface is the best user interface
There’s something special about the layout of a print-edition newspaper. A news website has infinite vertical scrolling space, but a printed front page is fixed to the same size every day. This constraint creates a very particular aesthetic and — if done well — a sense of typographic balance.
I wanted to preserve this analog feeling and infuse it with the possibilities of smart home technology. That’s why I made Paper, a radically simple prototype that does exactly one thing: show today’s front page on a large e-paper display.
Sometimes no user interface is the best user interface. This project…
Why I created Accent, the smart picture frame with a pop of color and no cables
Screens live a double life. They serve us dense information in bright colors, only to transform back into black mirrors. We have gotten used to it, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
As more and more connected devices arrive in our homes, it’s a good time to remember the principles of Calm Technology, first formulated at Xerox PARC in 1995. They talk about how technology should respect our attention and remain in the background most of the time, how relevant information should be presented calmly and make use of the periphery.
New prototypes from the living room lab
A while ago I made a smart mirror for my bathroom. Maybe you’ve seen it. It started with a particular image in my mind. I wanted to build a piece of technology for the home that feels new and futuristic, yet simple and clean. The mirror blends in seamlessly with its environment and doesn’t aggressively compete for my attention. I wrote about how it works and the parts I used, source code included.
And it’s open source so you can help make it better
Like many who call the United States their home, I have been worried and confused by the start to Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s hard to know how to react to the misdirected anger, the blatant racism, and the “alternative facts”, which are increasingly threatening our civil liberties and our planet. It’s important that we take to the streets and fight back. Seeing that happen does give me hope.
Personally, I have a very particular set of skills, skills that allow me to have some fun with Mr. Trump’s emotional incontinence and maybe effect positive change along the way.
Our new…
When I couldn’t buy a smart mirror and made one instead
Sometime late last year I realized that I wanted my ordinary bathroom mirror to be more like the future we were promised in the movies.
There doesn’t seem to be anyone selling the product I was looking for. The individual parts, however, were fairly easy to get. A number of people have done similar custom builds recently, but I had something different in mind.
So I ordered myself a two-way mirror, a display panel and controller board, plus a bunch of components and arts & crafts supplies. …
