Roundtuit

I’m going a bit crazy with the Facebook apps this week. I think the best ones are those that allow you to share your current environment: iLike shares your recent playlist from iTunes, and there are those that share your blogs, del.icio.us tagged items, GoogleReader shared items, etc.

But what about an app that makes a thumbnail from your current wallpaper, and shows it on Facebook? I have a huge collection of wallpapers that I randomly rotate with WallpaperChanger. Many of them give me giggles, like that above.

And sharing giggles is the core activity of life, isn’t it?

Contributed by Rob Smith

So, I took the plunge, and got myself an iPod. Two comments for those consider it:
1) The interface is the value added everyone says it is, and
2) Get yourself some InivisibleShield. It’s awesome. Why the heck doesn’t it just come with the iPod (whose only design flaw seems to be how easily it scratches)?

They were out of everything except the 160Gb, so now I’ve put on all my music, photos, podcasts, and recently recorded TV. And I’ve still got tons of room! What else needs to be there…?

So, back on that interface again: Coverflow is one of the best things about it. Being able to browse through the cover art just makes it more like the old days, where that art was a part of the musical experience.

But the part of that experience that is missing are liner notes. I know I’m not the first person to comment on this, but this is a roundtuit: how hard could it be to write a downloadable liner notes system that works with the iPod!!

Contributed by Rob Smith

All my friends come up with clever T-shirt ideas. At least they seem clever at the time.

One of them bought a nice printer, and some good transfer material, and with a little work (well, alot of work) he printed some pretty good gear.

But, what I want is a printer that prints directly on the shirt. So I can just have an idea, wear it out that night, and find out that I’m not with stupid, I am stupid.

Contributed by Rob Smith

I would really like to have a large display screen, maybe just an LCD scrolling banner, that I could mount on my wall which shows the title, artist, and album of the music that I am listening to. I was thinking that it could hook up to an ipod dock or directly to a computer. Since I have more music than I can keep track of, it would be nice to know what is playing at a glance from across the room.

A related (and maybe cheaper to make) idea would be to have the same information scrolling very large across a computer screen as a screensaver linked with the music program. I haven’t seen one of these yet, and it does not seem like it would be that hard to make.

Someone please do this!

Contributed by Rebecca Maya Lessem

(any chance of a “been done” on the screensaver angle? I couldn’t find one)

Like every right-thinking person, I’m fascinated by the possibilities of AJAX, and I love Google Maps, and all the wonderful Google Map Hacks that spring therefrom.

A couple of interesting hacks are:
MyConcertDates, in which you can type a date, and get back a (nicely color coded) Google Map of concerts in the USA.
EVMapper takes in keywords and dates locations, and gives you events on a Google Map.

Of course, these two really should be combined. But what would be even more interesting is a tool which scanned the ID3 tags of MP3 files on your computer, giving you a multi-selectable list of artists whose show you might like to see.

This way, you could get the answer to “is there anything on (in this area and time frame) that would interest me”, without having to remember what things interest you. Perfect for those of us with broad interests and/or dysfunctional memories.

What were we talking about, again?

Contributed by Rob Smith

Remember that first kick Trinity does in The Matrix (back before The Wachowski Brothers made two sequels so bad they travel back in time and make the first film horrible)? Regardless of these later sins against film, that one moment is awesome.

The “bullet time” or “flow mo” Matrix effects work by having a series of synced cameras, and morphing from one to the other. If you use movie cameras (many just use still cameras), you get a matrix of perspectives in time and space, that you can move through in several dimensions.

So why not take that one step further, and make whole walls of cameras? What I envision here is something like plasterboard (sheetrock) with embedded cameras, and connectors at the edges. The apertures could be as small as pin pricks, virtually invisible, so the walls could be used as general set components. Given that you’d have lots of cameras, you could get by with small apertures and limited pixels, since you could reconstruct images from several nearby cameras on the backend.

Once every surface of the set is a camera, you could do very dramatic movements through the time and space of a set, along a multitude of paths.

One has to wonder whether Matrix’s flow mo will look cheap in a few years, like the once-awesome morphing in Terminator 2.

Contributed by Rob Smith

Tagging is what it’s all about. I sincerely believe it will become the deep enabling technology for the semantic web.

And, it makes it really easy to find pictures of the Koreshan Premise on Flickr.

One cool development in the world of tagging is geotagging: labeling content with latitude and longitude in a standard format. Think about it, if enough things are geotagged on Flickr, we can view every freaking square inch of Earth on the web. There will never be a reason to look up from your laptop!

Geotagging on Flickr is wonderfully enabled by Greasemonkey and GoogleMaps via this addin.

But why doesn’t my camera do this for me! What I envision is a camera with GPS, that puts a geotag directly on the photo, so when I upload it to Flickr, it goes with it. And why stop there!

Why not put in a time code, altitude and three more degrees of freedom that specify the tilt of the camera!

Then you could use the combinations of data to merge everybody’s photos on the web into one continuous movie of anything everywhere, all the freakin time!!!

Mwa-ha-ha-ha.

Contributed by Rob Smith

Given the great mass of recent movies striving to exploit the carnal instincts of Comic Book Guy (see Aeon Flux, Fantastic Four, Sin City, etc.), someone desperately needs to knock out a She Hulk script. There must be droves of green muscle goddess fetishists waiting breathlessly for this product.

But who to play the violent verde vixen? I suggest Meryl Streep.

Written up by Rob Smith, blatantly stolen from a suggestion by Mike Swaim

So, you’re sitting in Starbucks, working on your iBook, admiring the girl in the Starbucks across the road (who is working on her iBook), and you turn off your iPod for just a minute, perhaps to answer your cell phone.

And, surprise of surprises, you find yourself toe-tapping to the public music swanking its way out of the coffee shop sound machine. Of course, Starbucks has the specialty CD on sale at the counter, but those shiny platters aren’t your scene.

Why can’t you just hit a button on your (wireless enabled) iPod, or your iBook, and just buy the currently playing tune (or the current CD, or playlist)?

This sort of on-the-spot buying may be the only way to get people to buy music anymore: tapping into that lovely moment when a certain song plays, and you realize the girl at the other Starbucks just smiled at you.

People just don’t understand why the electric guitar must be extraordinarily loud. It’s not about some mindless sonic penis extension power trip (well, it is, but that’s not all it’s about). When a guitar is super loud, complex resonances and feedback loops emerge, between the air, the room, the wood of the guitar, its strings, its pickups, the structure and tubes of its amp, even the guitarist’s own body. All of this is part of the instrument.

If you aren’t loud, it’s like playing a violin without a bow. Sure, you can make music on it, but there’s a big difference between tinkling and soaring.

So players like me, who live in the dense population of a UK city, can’t play our real instrument at all, at least not without risking rankled neighbors and visits from the boys in blue.

Artificial solutions will never substitute for turning it up to 11, but I think I have a small idea that could simulate the experience.

There’s a neat guitar toy called the eBow.

It’s basically a magnetic oscillator with a 9-volt battery that you hold over a guitar string. It’s a way to excite the strings without touching them (the way acoustic feedback can), but with the silence of magnetic energy. It gives you bow-like effects (thus the name).

Unfortunately, the eBow is for one string at a time, and has no real control. In my experience, you play with your eBow for a few minutes, then it vanishes into your gig bag, with thoughts of how cool it could be.

But what if you mounted an eBow-like magnetic oscillator over the guitar bridge, coupled it to a mike or an input jack from your amp (so it could “listen” to your playing), and then ran some DSP to control the magnetic oscillations, using pre-specified and programmable profiles, that give simulated feedback effects?

Sort of an ebow on high-tech steroids.

I think this would be awesome for middle-aged rockers who want to be Hendrix through Headphones. It might also create an interesting new hybrid instrument for non-masturbatory performance.

UPDATE: Turns out this is a Been Done! See the comments for details of where you can actually get devices of this sort. Thanks to the commentors for the info!