Life & Research Notes

Via Nivi and The Technium.

Luis Blackaller and Kyle Buza just released the E15:oGFX site, with software downloads, tutorials, and documentation. They’ve made it incredibly easy to get up and running. Nice work dudes.

Noah showed this to me today. It is quite something.

processing.core the processing developer reference is very handy. api developer code processing.org documentation java

Muhneer blog fantastic student blog, including his experiences building a multitouch display. definitely a cool resource. blog interaction diy tui tangible multitouch student netherlands

Siftables Siftables are cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. They act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them – piling, grouping, sorting – to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications. tacolab technology interaction mit medialab interface siftables

the daily mariks > documentary about objectum sexuals if you had to marry an object, what would you choose? video culture documentary sexuality object

Taking Apart the $819 billion Stimulus Package – washingtonpost.com not the clearest visualization. could benefit from some compactness, perhaps via mouse interaction/exploration. but definitely a lot of good research and data in here. data politics obama government visuaization economy

Craigslist Foundation Blog craigslist foundation started their blog web blog community nonprofit craigslist foundation

Trackmate sweet tangible media project open sourcing and DIYing a nice, simple, inexpensive webcam-based tangible interface. via kjhollen. hardware diy medialab interface opensource tangible tmg

Installing Oracle Instant Client on Mac OS X | Digital Sanctum nice basic sqlplus+oracle setup for mac. howto mac java sql oracle

www.lettersfromvietnam.com “For the first time, I’m reading hundreds of letters that my father sent to my mother before, during, and after his tour in Vietnam. I don’t know what they say and I don’t know where this is going, so we’ll be finding out at the same time. He passed away in 1992 when he was 44 years old, but they begin when he was 19. She was 17…” history blog archive vietnam letters

Seed: 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic bruce sterling’s more pessimistic take on the future. “Indeed, the year 2009 is shaping up as a planetary Enron. Enron was always the Banquo’s ghost at the banquet of Bushonomics. The moguls of Enron really were the princes of contemporary business innovation, and the harbingers of the present day.” future economics politics science environment brucesterling

Seed: The True 21st Century Begins “Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.” bruce sterling’s optimistic piece on what we’re collectively in for next. future politics science environment economic brucesterling

Bacolicio.us ~Mmmm, Bacon~ this really is helpful. these guys are genius. web funny food bacon

Bacolicio.us ~Mmmm, Bacon~ amazing bacon on the taco tacolab bacon

BRIO Wooden Toys – Network wow, amazing brio network playing toys. design network toys

The web in the world great presentation by Timo Arnall on the web of things, pervasive/ubicomp, etc. via oreilly radar web future map design technology sensors presentation rfid

I LEGO N.Y. – Abstract City Blog – NYTimes.com cute lego depictions of nyc. via tang. lego play city design cute photos nytimes funny

build.kiva: Blog – Introducing the Kiva API wow, the kiva api is out. so great to see them continue on this awesome trajectory. web api microfinance programming social nonprofit

Apache CouchDB: The CouchDB Project big distributed database using http/json api. written in erlang. weird. future data rest programming http apache database couchdb

making friends with hill shading (tecznotes) lovely article/tutorial on hill shading. gis sanfrancisco geography maps hillshading cartography stamen

transit data (tecznotes) stamen dude’s transit database, scraped from 511.org data sanfrancisco database sqlite

Jump Associates via huned. growth strategy firm. some combo of social research, design, and business. gotta say, it looks a little too new age though. business design innovation strategy consulting

My friend and Taco Lab accomplice David Merrill gave a fantastic talk at TED last week on the Siftables project that he and Jeevan have been pursuing. The video went up today. Congrats Dave!

We quietly opened up our new Taco Lab Blog a few weeks ago, along with a small refresh of the main TL site.

It’s a little ridiculous it’s taken us this long to get our blog started. But now that we’re coming up on our one year LLCification anniversary (March something!), we’re noticing that we’re a lot more comfortable and efficient with the basics, and we have enough interesting projects and initiatives going to warrant some regular updates.

So please check it out, and check back when you think of it. The shiny new blog has me rethinking this one too. Lately I’ve slipped into the habit of simply recycling content from other places rather than creating my own. So I may make some changes in my approach here to try to start actually writing again. If so, yay.