External monitors connect the virtual and the physical world
Sometimes I like to take my MacBook to the dining table and work over there. I’m currently drawing some logo drafts with a physical pencil, so I need more space – and I have these comfy candles set up there. These things are making work post working day feel less work.
But there’s one downside: my external monitor is on the desktop (a physical one, of course). Since I just decided to try out some of my drawings with Illustrator I opened it up and figured out that the Preferences window is sitting on my external monitor (changing Illustrator Workspace won’t move it and I’m currently not into deleting Preferences). So I grabbed my MacBook, walked over to the desktop and connected the external monitor. Then I moved the missing virtual window to my Laptop screen, disconnected the monitor and physically went back to the dining table. Mercifully, I have a monitor at home and didn’t have to drive to the office.
There’s virtually no causality to this posting. I was just staring at my 4 meters afar, switched off screen, felt amused and wanted to share this with you.
Happy 2008!
multi-point tracking using a wiimote
this is very cool… i must try it out soon. here is the full info, or just watch the vid:
iPod shuffle in the washing machine
… does not sound like a good idea, huh?
I also found my wife’s iPod Shuffle at the bottom of our washing machine a few weeks ago. The Apple headphones were also washed. We took the Shuffle out, let it sit for an hour or so to dry out, and she then popped it into her laptop PC (I wasn’t going to let her try it on my PowerBook!) and it immediately started charging, and played music just fine. The headphones seemed dead, but after a day or so of drying out, they were also OK. So, my advice to you is let the unit sit for awhile (which you’ve probably already done…) and give it a try. Since there are no moving parts in the Shuffle, nothing should have been destroyed by washing it.
DO NOT TEST IT YET! Of course you are anxious to see if it “still works”. If it is wet inside, and you power it on, it will die instantly, before your finger is off the switch! Since you can’t easily open the iPod, I would KEEP IT TURNED OFF in a warm-dry place for a week, blow dry at it once or twice a day, while shaking/tapping it gently on it’s edges.
Water will play havoc with ANY live circuits! If your iPod is dead, that would be the cause. However, most electronic parts (power sources removed) can handle a wash quite well. Industrial maintenance departments do it routinely. Dust, grime, grease and such, all add up to potentially short a circuit, corrode contacts, etc.
Overnight soaks in heavy cleaners, with a water rinse in the morning is common. Just make sure everything is FULLY DRY, inside & out, BEFORE returning anything back into the live circuit!
Blow drier on low heat, will help. Compressed air is faster, as long as it does not force water into part seams like a relay cover… Common sense rules. Wet is bad, dry is good!
I should have read case 2 before I plugged it in my computer - mine seems to be dead (it froze my computer, then I took it off and the battery light was red, the computer worked again). We’ll see, maybe it’ll work again in some days.
So if you’re as stupid as me, read case 2 carefully before you do anything with your washed shuffle.
[Update] All of a sudden, my iPod shuffle works again! Don’t ask me why, I connected it to my computer several days later and it works just fine. Loading up my new The Decemberists albums and walk around a bit, bare-footed, singing along, jumping around like a fuckin’ hippie.
Less, but better musical instruments
As a result of some personal events during the last couple of days, I am writing this post to rid myself of some thoughts. I will probably rewrite parts of it or add some more aspects. When I’m saying “musical instruments”, I’m refering to modern electronic instruments – software and/or hardware products for music creation and audio production.
First of all, I’d like to quote the first two paragraphs of a very interesting article on the O’Reilly Digital Media Website:
If you ask musicians what they value most about making music, most of them will say—in some form or another—flow. Flow is that wonderful sense of being lost in your work, when “work” becomes joy. Time disappears, and so do distraction, anxiety, and just about everything else, yielding to a pure unity of creator and creation.
So wouldn’t it be strange if many of today’s musical instruments were designed to prevent or destroy flow? According to a recently convened group of audio experts, that seems to be the case. The group issued a report stating that most electronic musical instruments are complicated, confusing, and just plain frustrating to use—and when it comes to supporting flow, they compare poorly to instruments that have been around for centuries.
I had my first contact with music software through Cubase 1.0 on an Atari in the late 90s and I got first insights to audio software development when I worked on the GUI design of Native Instrument’s Reaktor 3 in 2000. I felt and still feel appropriate to work on that kind of projects since I am an Interface Designer and an actual user of audio software since quite a time (you can listen to some of my music on the Nitrada website, hehe). What amazed me most back then were the seemingly endless possibilities this field had to offer: There were innumerable different programs and plugins for music creation and audio production out there and each could do plenty of cool things. You could find new and innovative ways of doing this and that sound or rhythm –or something you just couldn’t imagine before– almost every day. Most software products were digital rebuilds of our existing music hardware world instead of being new unique and self-confident solutions.
Today, things have changed a bit. There are still millions of ways to go out there, but several new approaches show an in my opinion good and reasonable direction for electronic music creation: Ableton Live, a pretty intuitive music production environment; or the apparently pretty fresh Meta Intuitive Navigation Technology that t.c. electronic just started within one of their reverb plugins; or the Lemur Multitouch Control Surface by Jazzmutant; or the Machinedrum and Monomachine by elektron from sweden …
But something really important has changed for me personally: I’m not impressed by infinite options anymore, I’m just overwhelmed and burned out. All these new programs and plugins appearing everyday in every corner that always make me wanna check them out for musical but also for professional research reasons distract me from focusing on something that still should be the essence: making music.
This lets me think of John Maeda’s post-digital idea. On one of his websites, he writes:
I am often asked what my term “post digital” signifies. It is a term that I created as a way to acknowledge a distinction between those that are passed their fascination with computers, and are now driven by the ideas instead of the technology. It is not an expression of Luddite-ism nor is it a loaded term like that icky “post modernism” business. If we are to consider the book by Nicholas Negroponte Being Digital as an affirmation that the computer has arrived, then the “post digital” generation refers to the growing few that have already been digital, and are now more interested in Being Human. Buying a good computer is easy. Being a good person is something that cannot be merely bought … even on the great god of eBay.
For example the sheer fascination for fast computers, large hard disks or extra deep color resolutions shouldn’t lead to overloaded software sampler monsters – just because the potential technical possibilities are more compared to an oldschool AKAI Hardware Sampler from 1988.
Of course new technical capabilities should be considered and used, but with a clear focus on the creative workflow, the output, the music – or the human part within the process of playing or producing music.
I don’t wanna sound negative, there definitley are excellent tools out there (I listed some above), I enjoy some of them and have a lot of respect for the development effort of complex software products. But I am seriously saying that I think many audio software or hardware concepts should be more progressive and more deliberate. More concentration on the user as a human being should lead to new electronic musical instruments that help and inspire musicians and producers with their music creation/production instead of distracting them with endless features and possible applications.
When I’m talking to friends who are also involved in electronic music production I can feel a clear tendency: As a result of frustration with superficiality a lot of those countless plugins are getting erased, sound libraries are getting shrinked down. And in search for inspiration and to enhance creativity through intentional limitation, powerful software solutions are getting replaced with dedicated hardware machines that don’t do very much, but do it better than everything else. And help you to intensively use their full bandwidth to create actual output instead of just being a one night stand.
Right now I’m enjoying my brandnew Machinedrum, digged up my analog Mackie mixer and work with my pretty limited yet handy BOSS FX pedals again … :-)
Simplicity
I was just reading John Maeda’s Third Law of Simplicty where he states the following:
Simplicity is not driven by reducing the quantity (of anything) for the sake of achieving less, but more in the issue of increasing the quality of an experience in ways that a rich holism of many elements can be achieved. Which brings us to the third law of simplicity which I hereby entitle the “Add Whipped Cream and Cherries” approach:
When the richness of an experience
is increased in a manner that facilitates
the perception of the overall intent,
by all means don’t skimp. Add more!
I think this helped me to realize a bit more, why I think that Dieter Rams’ Less, but better should be interpreted quite differently than the pretty common minimalism cliché Less is more – I wrote a bit about this here (some comments in german, though).
If you want to express both of them as something like a design method or approach, I think the difference could be something like this:
Less is more
To me the is makes it a pretty inflexible dogma. It assumes and pretends that something automatically works just because it is less. It might seduce you to underestimate a given challenge, to satisfy you with something you could actually do even better. To me it doesn’t really cry for experimentation. Although a very minimal design can be the result of a profound and sophisticated development process, as a principle it still has this (mind-)limiting aftertaste.
Less, but better
But better has a much more inspiring, mind-activating and challenging undertone to me: Try to solve it with little – it eventually won’t work well enough, so add more until you think you’ve found the perfect balance (remember: you wanna do it better). And if you think you went over the top, feel free to radically remove things again before you start falling in love with a mediocre solution. Or maybe just stop designing for a moment, show it to your friends and colleagues – or erase all you did and restart the next day with another idea in mind.
It’s a creative process. There are no absolute measures for little or much, for less or more – it’s about creating an experience that makes sense, works, is fun … appropriate to its given aim.
So finally Maeda’s More is better-headline is a perfect example how the meaning of an apparent principle can get pretty blurred or distorted if you isolate it and do not have a look behind the curtain.
[Update] It’s always the same: bloggers write faster than they read. While continuing to read Maeda’s Simplicity, I figured that all other laws are also really illuminating when thinking about – yeah, simplicity! :-)
[Another update] I hate the word “bloggers”.
Heart Cloud
It’s funny how it starts to look somehow 3d if you watch it for a while:
A turquoise texture
Johannes just had an association when he had a look at a design I’m currently working on. He then sent me a link to something (his association), which triggered an idea in my head. I’m saving this here for future reference:
Behind the scenes
Photos taken from the Becker Lacour website
Two short notes to myself:
1. I like behind the scenes photos the way they are done on the Becker Lacour website.
2. I like the fact that all photos on Martien Mulder’s website have the same dimensions.