Category: Post

     Several years ago, my girlfriend Sarah bought me a notepad, which I promptly put into a pocket of my bag and forgot about. I unearthed it a few days ago, and noticed some of the ridiculous details for the first time.

     There are two different designs on the sheets: one features a dog drinking in his doghouse with a bird perched atop the roof, and the other depicts the bird sniffing / pecking his arse. I’d love to know what the text says, or what is supposed to be going on here. Any insight is welcome.

     I got this email Yesterday. Totally great.

     Hey I wanted to thank you for inspiring me. Your ridiculous mix CD packaging gave me an idea for a Valentine’s Day gift.
– Clint

     When I first read about the touchscreen and wireless capabilities of the Nintendo DS, the first thing that crossed my mind was how perfectly suited it would be for mimicking those touchscreen games that litter bartops across America. This probably has a lot to do with the minor ‘Boxxi‘ (aka Samegame) addiction I developed a few years back.

     The primary manufacturer of these games is a company called Merit Industries (Incredible Technologies – The ‘Golden Tee‘ People – offer a competing platform called ‘Touch It‘). Each unit contains dozens of relatively simple 2D touchscreen-controlled minigames, of the ‘ridiculously addictive’ variety. There’s a good page with an overview of all of their offerings here. This seems like a natural project for porting over to the DS, so I’d be surprised if Merit hasn’t already licensed it.

     If they haven’t, then it’s definitely something that should happen once the DS Homebrew community gets a bit further along. The first step towards making this happen would of course be gaining access to the Merit program data and taking a look-see at what exactly is going on in there. The earliest Merit machines were ROM based, they soon graduated to CD-ROM and have since adopted Hard Drives. The past few years worth of Merit machines routinely sell for close to a thousand dollars on eBay, so it makes sense that there is no shortage of internet banter about cloning them.

     The consensus seems to be that the data can be copied, but there appears to be some sort of hardware DRM that prevents cloned hard drives from functioning properly in Merit Machines. I’ve seen no mention of anyone trying to examine the data from a programming perspective. Merit’s own Hard Drive FAQ is here.

Bonus Idea

     While thinking about my first idea, another one occurred to me. Seriously, so many ideas!

     You know that NTN trivia system that some bars / restaurants have? Again, DS coding capabilities still have a ways to go before this would be possible, but its concievable that someone could throw together a similar interface with minimal effort – the only stumbling block would be supplying a large, changing batch of questions.

     Perhaps a more appealing solution would be for someone to figure out what protocol NTN uses to communicate the questions and answer choices to the handheld units, and devise a way of intercepting the data and parsing it for use on the DS. Let me tell you, that would be ONE COOL DUDE.

     In late 2002, I took several photos of Spoon at a show in Ohio. I did this using my girlfriend’s 35mm camera, which was loaded with black and white film. The following week, this film was loaded onto a reel and placed in a tank for developing. The tank was then placed in her trunk.

     In January of 2005, she got a flat tire, and finally had to clean out her trunk. It was at this time that the tank was unearthed – still sealed tight, but having weathered two winters and summers in the car. I took the tank in to a local photo shop and had them develop the film.

     The negatives definitely appear to have been affected by the time / temperature / etc, but there were still some fun shots, which I posted to Flickr. Woo.

     I’ve lately gotten into the bad habit of drawing faces on each milk jug I come across, as seen below.

     I was taking a picture of my latest effort in his natural environment (The fridge) when it occurred to me that there should be somewhere online where people can share images of the insides of their refridgerators (a la MTV’s Cribs), JUST BECAUSE. Then I realized that someone smarter, stronger, and faster than me had probably already started such a group on Flickr, and I was right. There are, in fact, two distinct groupings of this variety: whatsinyourfridge, and whatsinmyfridge. Here’s mine (Click the image for a larger, ‘Nosy Neighbor’-sized version):

     Now, should you feel the compulsive need to add faces to Milk Jugs as I do, I encourage you to upload photos of your creations to Flickr tagged with ‘Milkjughead.’ The world would be a better place if you did.

     After reading this Ask Metafilter thread about life-altering experiences in childhood, I was reminded of the first book I was ever able to read on my own – or more specifically, the book I was perusing when the entire process of reading finally ‘clicked’ for me.

     It was “Look Out For Pirates,” volume #22 in the Random House Beginner Books collection, originally published in 1961. I searched Amazon to see if it was still available, and found this page – filled with comments recommending that it be reprinted for both nostalgic and educational purposes.

     As I recall, we had it checked out from the library for so long that we eventually had to buy it. I’m amazed I still remember this, so I’m curious if other people remember the first book they were able to read on their own. Post in the comments if you can.

     This one requires more explaining than the others, as it ended up being a ‘failure’ in some respects. Having exhausted my supply of nerdy reading material on automated music machines in early 2004, I moved on to reading / learning about rudimentary animation technology, since knowledge of praxiniscopes and the like is in such high demand in today’s job market.

     As Christmastime rolled around, I set out to combine a praxinoscope / phenakistoscope (sometimes spelled with an ‘i’) hybrid with the faux ‘music box’ concept I had constructed the previous year. The first step was to find something to animate. I ended up using frames from an old phenakistiscope disc that I found here. If all went according to plan, the animation should look like the image below:

     I divided the CD face up into 12 equal wedges in Illustrator and dropped each frame of the animation into a wedge. I ended up with a pretty decent recreation of the Phenakistiscope disc. Animating this disc required devising a way to construct a 12-sided, reflective cylinder. I tried several different methods, and what I finally ended up doing was getting some reflective cardstock and folding the cylinder together from a template I cooked up in Illustrator.

     In theory, the reflective surfaces on the 12-sided cylinder in the center of the photo below should reflect each frame of animation as it rotates. In the end, it never really came together as well as I wanted it to. The animation sort of works, but the seam in the cylinder disrupts everything. If, for some reason, you share these bizarre interests and would like to make an attempt at smoother animation, I’ve included .pdf files containg my template for the 12-sided cylinder and the CD Label below. You’ll be relieved to learn that this concludes the ‘Out-of-Season XMAS Crafts’ portion of our broadcast.

Music Box – “Caroline” (Harry Nilsson)
From: My Diningroom Table