Yet another in a long series of ridiculously packaged mix CD’s. Check out the three-tiered pop-up text! NERD.
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Category: Post
Around December 2003, I discovered the Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, and got it in my head that I should learn to make music boxes. What little information I was able to turn up on this archaic process proved to be too involved for the purposes of that year’s gift-giving, so I defaulted to an electrical solution, based in part on a project I had been working on in school the previous semester.
The project was a talking clock, designed to speak the time at the push of a button. I used the knowledge of IC-based audio playback that I gained in completing this project to build a simple circuit that would play a song of my choice when a switch was triggered.
From there it was simply a matter of tracking down a box big enough to house my cobbled together mechanism while managing to appear ‘Christmas-y.’ There’s a clickable quicktime video of the ‘Music Box’ in action below. When closed, the lid of the box opens a switch that leads to the 9V battery, so the same battery is still chugging along without having to involve a user-invoked power switch.
Music Box – “O Holy Night”
From: My Diningroom Table
One of the great features of Flickr is that you can subscribe to be notified via RSS whenever someone posts a photo tagged with a search term of your choosing. One of the tags I subscribe to is ‘Mosaic,’ which comes up with lots of photos of relic-variety mosaics, as well as the occasional mind blowingly awesome modern mosaic.
Today’s feed contained this image. What is it? That requires a bit more explanation.
There is a group on Flickr called ‘Longline‘ that is described as follows:
“The idea of this group is to create a large mosaic of collective pictures, that has a web of lines running through all its constituent images, separating the full image into patches and creating emergent shapes. The concept should be visible in the group icon I created from the first four images in the pool. Join in the fun!”
Really nerdy people will wonder if the production of this mosaic is automated, and I’m going to venture a guess that it is, based on the tagging methodology for the longline group:
“The picture should be tagged with the “long line” tag. In addition there needs to be a “LL” tag coding the sides the line connects to in the picture. The sides are numbered, starting from the top in clockwise direction. A picture connecting the left to the bottom and right would thus be tagged with “LL234”
…So it looks like the latter tag could easily be used to write an application to logically arrange the images into a connected mosaic, based on which sides are specified (Further research shows that I was right).
The first thing I thought of when I saw the mosaic was the NES game Pipe Dream:
In summary: Obscure puzzle game sub-genre + Flickr group + mosaic + this iPhoto poster tutorial [via Waxy] = some awesome wall-art.
I’ve been obsessed with those 3″ mini CDR’s ever since I realized you could buy them in bulk. Unfortunately, the sleeves that are available for CD’s of this size all have some sort of aesthetic imperfection that drives me completely nuts. This is because I’m insane. As part of my Christmas 2004 “ridiculous mix CD” campaign, I decided to solve this problem. I began the project with three goals in mind:
- I would “borrow” this idea from craftster: a year of mix CD’s.
- I would use mini CDR’s
- I would devise a mini CD sleeve that met my ridiculous standards
I’m pleased to report that I accomplished all three.
The first thing I did was tackle the sleeve design. I never realized how much work went into designing a simple envelope, but I went through a whole range of prototypes before finally hitting on a design that worked for me. Some of the rejects are pictured below.
Since I’m such a nice guy, I’ve included a .pdf of the sloppy sketch I used for a template, so you can make your own Kempa-approved aesthetically perfect mini CD sleeves. Just click the image below. I transferred the template to thick cardstock for extra durability. As you can see from the photo below, the finished product is delicious looking.
Next, I constructed a special box to hold a year’s worth of sleeved mini CD’s using the duct-tape / cardboard method I outlined here. I covered the result in brown Kraft paper, and added an inter-office envelope-ish closure mechanism. Finally, I spent a kabillion years making 12 mix CD’s. The final product is below.
I got an email a few days ago with the subject line “This is not spam.” Naturally, I assumed that it was spam. I let it sit in my inbox over the weekend, and in the midst of my weekly Sunday-morning ritual of trying to catch up on a bazillion things before the week begins, I discovered that it was not, in fact, spam. Magritte would be proud.
You’ll note that the reason I never seem to catch up is because I waste time awkwardly photoshopping dead artists into bad jokes about email.
On the grassy part of a beach in Ann Arbor during the Summer of 2002, I suddenly grew to gargantuan size and began eating oblivious sunbathers.
I just posted this to my flickr account and then searched the tags for any other photos tagged with ‘forcedperspective.’ No dice. I was hoping for a bunch of pictures of people holding their arms out with tiny siblings standing on their hands (example). Maybe there’s some other keyword I’m not thinking of.
Lessons of the internet: If you’re looking for something, put up a webpage asking for it. Eventually someone who can help you will stumble across it and get in touch. That’s what happened with this particular song. I posted the following early last year:
“I’m on another ridiculous quest.
In 2001, I heard that there was a tribute to the Who’s ‘The Who Sell Out’ in the works, featuring the likes of Zumpano, The Flashing Lights, The Young Fresh Fellows, Swag, and members of the Blake Babies, Cheap Trick, the Smithereens.
Towards the end of 2001 a 30 second clip of Zumpano’s track surfaced on Audiogalaxy, and that was the last I ever heard of the project.
A little poking around this week has revealed that the project was being put together by a label called Futureman records – apparently a Detroit based project run by someone called Keith Klingensmith. There used to be a website at www.futuremanrecords.com but it’s gone now. I’m hoping someone loosely connected to me by friendster might know something about it.
It sounds like a fun project – “The original album, we are doing every word, every chunk, in order. The Radio London stuff, and the ads between the songs, are all going to be covered.” Does anyone know what happened to this release?”
A few weeks ago, Jeff T. contacted me with the whole track. It probably won’t hold the same appeal unless you’ve also been looking for it for four years, but here it is either way. I’ve also added it to the Zumpano Rarities Page.
Zumpano – ‘Silas Stingy’
From: The never-released “New Sell Out” album
(A tribute to ‘The Who Sell Out‘)
Hoping for similar success, here are two more obscure bits of media I am (passively) searching for:
Apparently there was an episode of Darkwing Duck that was a parody of Twin Peaks. It was titled ‘Twin Beaks.’ I’d like to see this.
I’m also looking for a specific clip of the November 7th, 2002 episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Guests on this episode included both David Cross and Amy Poehler. During her chat with Conan, Amy told an anecdote that was lifted from the ‘Customs’ skit on Mr. Show. The crazy part was that David Cross (Co-creator of Mr. Show) was sitting right next to her when this happened. If my memory is operating correctly, Cross looked bemused, and I couldn’t figure out if it was a bizarre ‘fake plagiarism’ gag, or if Poehler had just committed the comedy equivalent of submitting a plagiarized paper to its original author.
Update: Yupislyr provided a link to a transcript in the comments. It’s not as similar as I had remembered it. Here’s the transcript of the Poehler bit, and the transcript of the Mr. Show sketch is here (Near the bottom, it’s called “Shampoo”).
CONAN: I’m told you were just traveling? You were…where were you? You were in Canada pretty recently.
AMY: Yeah, I just went to Toronto for the day and, um, we had to go through immigration, you know? And, uh, because of the heightened security, I get really nervous now even though I’m not doing anything wrong.
CONAN: Right.
AMY: And I’m always afraid that for some reason they’re not going to let me back into the country. Like, that they’re gonna be, “No, we’re full.” You know? “You can’t come back in.”
CONAN: Right. (laughs)
AMY: So I got to immigration and I just started babbling like for no…and I don’t have anything to hide, and, uh — well…. Um, but, and the guy was like, uh, you know, “Why’d you go to Toronto?” and I was like, “Oh, I was here for a confirmation. I mean, a christening. I mean, I mean, I was here for a day and, uh, you know…I know how to make a bong out of an apple!”
CONAN: (laughs) It just comes out, yeah!
AMY: It just comes out!
CONAN: How do you make a bong out of an apple? (Amy laughs) We’ll talk later.
AMY: Very slowly!
Amazon launched a new feature today that is impossibly cool: They’ve integrated their yellow pages and Mapquest with a database of images enabling users to visually scroll up and down the block. You can see an example of what I’m talking about here, just mouse-over the sequence of images along the bottom of the page.
Amazon has a brief ‘behind the scenes’ page with a video describing their process available in Windows Media and Quicktime Formats. Essentially, they mounted a camera on top of an SUV, hooked it up to a laptop and a GPS unit, and drove up and down each street, presumably capturing images at predetermined intervals (From the video, it looks like they may have been looking ahead, capturing video for future implementation, and stripping out frames at pre-determined intervals for this project). Here’s one bit where a bus drove by as they were capturing the storefronts, blocking the camera’s view (update: UPS Truck).
Presently, ‘Block View’ is only available in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, New York City (Manhattan), Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco – but Amazon claims that “More cities and images are being added all the time. Chances are that your city will be captured soon!” I can’t wait for Detroit to get this treatment, making online exploration of the remote corners of urban ruin possible. In the meantime, Detroitfunk does a fine job of documenting the city the old-fashioned way.
Bonus additional thought: How long before NYC graffitti connoisseurs begin documenting the various tags that show up in Amazon’s database (quick example)? [Update: similarly, this slashdot comment proposes a number of games based on the photo database.] [Update Again: A Flickr group containing interesting things found in Amazon’s block view database can be found here.]
Further Thoughts:
Most of the comments on the slashdot thread relating to this deal with maintainability and how often they’ll be able to refresh the image content. One particular quote: “A block in NYC can change dramatically in a year…” got me all excited about how they could keep a record of urban changes from update to update. Then even I got weirded out by how nerdy that is. This also reminded me of an interview with Spider-Man director Sam Raimi that I read around the time Spider-Man 2 was released. The interviewer asked him what he was going to do with his Gabillion dollars, and he launched into some crazy scheme about placing cameras above New York City and taking one image per hour forever. Anyone else remember this article? [Update: Here it is]
Another interesting usability concern: “One issue that is confusing me, and I might just be missing something here, is that I can’t seem to find the other side of the street. I did a search for my local supermarket (in manhattan) and I got a great picture of the store on the other side of the street. There’s no “turn around” button anywhere. Did they just take photos of one side of the street??”
