filipecruz

Today we haven’t done any­thing at all. Nah, just kid­ding. We seem to have grown well adjusted to our new home, the days are almost rou­tine and the nights grown more social, every­one seems to be so tired that work on projects after din­ner doesn’t quite work out as imagined.

New ideas for projects still pop up every other sec­ond but we’re now slowly start­ing to focus more on specifics. Pedro seems to be nearly done with the OSCBus link to Pachube. And Francesco seems to be pol­ish­ing up his ants project some more, atleast it was rumoured that we can already get some inputs from both the fish and the ants for our promised audio mis­chief ses­sions. We haven’t quite man­aged to have some of those yet, but we def­i­nitely will. We should also prob­a­bly con­nect it to AssaultCube, just to reuse late night gam­ing pwnage from our gamer residents.

Sér­gio man­aged to get the hall lights also synced up to OSC so it’s now clear that com­plete and total world dom­i­na­tion is eminent.

Fil­ipe has been busy with his secret new projects and also pet-sitting his fishies, who seem not to be doing so great, prob­a­bly new water tank related, so they’re get­ting a new one tomorrow!

Jorge been busy all day build­ing a frame for his VJ mixer, it’s look­ing good by now, just wish my brain could already be able to fil­ter the dremel sound by now!

Cata­rina and Tiago tried to assem­ble a new breed of TV-B-Gone’s, but seem to have failed mis­er­ably so far. Hope­fully tomor­row they’ll suc­ceed in a lit­tle more than just find­ing all the pos­si­ble ways that it won’t work and we’ll have some­thing more to show and tell to the world.

The bio­plas­tic sam­ple tests have been some­what neglected but we promise we’ll report some­thing back about them. Guil­herme has returned to the res­i­dency and seems to be work­ing on some evil plans for world dom­i­na­tion for his robots, we hope to have some fol­low up info on that in the next few days aswell.

Mean­while Tara has been push­ing for­ward her plas­tic bag fab­ric PCB ideas with a few speaker cir­cuit tests.

All in all it seems that the daily project meet­ings have set­tled down to lunch hour. Which fluc­tu­ates. And excur­sions to the ran­dom local shops are now com­mon atleast twice a day. This care­fully devised and heav­ily pon­dered time man­age­ment scheme is eas­ily enabling us with the lat­est cut­ting edge tech­nol­ogy, which allows us to put together some­thing as exquis­ite, bril­liant, inno­v­a­tive, rev­o­lu­tion­ary and so right­eously dedicated.

Day started with a small queue to access the show­ers and a break­fast table side projects meeting.

Today’s plan for world dom­i­na­tion involved:
– Con­nect­ing OSCu­lat­tor with Pachube
– Track­ing fish in the fish tank
– Cook­ing bio­plas­tic sam­ple exper­i­ments
– Twit­ter bot with pro­cess­ing and/or javascript
– Tak­ing apart old key­boards
– Plan­ning a real­time vide­owall for AZ Labs

Most of the goals were reached despite the usual setbacks.

Bio­plas­tic is sick. It’s basi­cally starch, water, glyc­er­ine and vine­gar stired together and heated slowly to a pasty bub­bly form that takes a day to strengthen up. Today we cooked a few vari­a­tions of the stan­dard recipe to make a few sam­ple exper­i­ments with dif­fer­ent ingre­di­ent ratio, cook­ing time and thick­ness, to com­pare the prop­er­ties and pos­si­bly maybe prob­a­bly fig­ure out some inter­est­ing use for them in future projects. They take about a day to cure, so we have no con­clu­sions just yet, but we’re all pretty sick of the smell of vine­gar by now! Stay tuned for the fol­low up, com­ing to an hack­er­space blog near you soon.

Fish are nice. We like fish. Fil­ipe brought some with him and seems to be plan­ning some cute track­ing sys­tem instal­la­tion. A crack in the main exper­i­ments tank hold him back a few hours while the sil­i­cone patch dried up, so it isn’t quite oper­a­tional just yet, but we’re already work­ing hard on the next evil step for world dom­i­na­tion: devis­ing a clever way to cen­tral­ize and reuse his lit­tle fishies track­ing val­ues. And share them with the world while we’re at it. Who knows who might need a bowl fish track­ing stream of val­ues out there.

We took a lit­tle walk wan­der­ing about Montemor-o-Novo, quite a peace­ful town as it turns out, we man­aged to find an open restau­rant with some excel­lent tra­di­tional Por­tuguese food, which was nice. Mean­while, back in the new tech world, our plans for tonight’s generic audio mis­chief jam got held back by the lack of a mix table, some lag with nin­jam wire­less and an all­nighter live broad­cast stream pump­ing out of Autechre’s web­site.