Every now and then an idea comes along that is such a no-brainer, it makes me wonder how it took so long for someone to finally think it. BEEP is just such an idea. My pals Vega, Nico, and Justin Lund are developing it on Kickstarter. Check it out and support them!
This is the beginning of a little boy. Imagine a small, special box tucked discreetly away within a very large place, filled with moments, pictures, and stories, all notions of a little boy named Daschel.
This past week alone, two pals of mine, who have historically resisted change, have traded their old-school cell phones (of the Symbian variety) for next-gen SmartPhones. One, an Android, the other, an iPhone. Upon getting home and beginning to introduce themselves to a new paradigm in communication technologies, each contacted me separately to ask what they need to know to get each to work the way they want, having discovered things about each that come up short.
Technology, by the way, is always a trade-off. For each convenience offered, there are always new obstacles to overcome.
As far as operating systems go, this is a seemingly timeless (and predictably endless), Coke vs. Pepsi debate. The two leading mobile/tablet platforms, Android and iOS are both far from perfect on their own. While they do have much in common, such as superb haptic interfaces and decent battery life, this is true especially when it comes to making each work the way we want, out-of-the-box. There is a tradeoff involved in each of them. This overhead includes installing and configuring them to work just the way we like.
iOS, for example, while far more mature, stable, and predictable in performance, is missing a great deal of core functionality, requiring that each be jailbreak it in order to fully realize the device’s potential as a tool, both for work and play.
Android, on the other hand, is friendlier in this regard, however, lacks much of the stability and ease-of-use, requiring third party ROMs installed for seemingly every other app. This is reminiscent of Windows’ driver requirements, each of which further contributes to a system’s unpredictable performance.
Much of this is due to the Android Market being less discerning in terms of the quality of apps it allows into the wild. We do complain about Apple’s App Store for not being as utilitarian as we’d like, however, it is far more discriminating about the quality of apps offered. This, in addition to superior hardware design, contribute to making iOS the more stable and predictable platform.
The best of breed, IMHO, is jailbroken iOS. The addition of tools, such as coreutils, Terminal, OpenSSH, and SBSSettings, adds the invaluable functionality of Debian to the stability of the existing platform atop the elegant design and usability of the hardware.
As stated earlier, though, not without a little time and effort ; )
As an example, one of the additional steps required on iOS (post-jailbreak) occurs after installing and configuring OpenSSH. Upon connecting to devices, we see the following error once we are logged into a shell and perform the ls command to view contents of the current directory:
>ls
>ls: unrecognized prefix: hl
>ls: unparsable value for LS_COLORS environment variable
#544871 – coreutils: ls complains about LS_COLORS: unrecognized prefix: hl, color define has been changed from hl to mh, which produced the error.
There is a simple solution to this. Do:
vi /etc/profile.d/coreutils.sh
modify the dircolors value thus: eval “$(dircolors -b | sed s/hl/mh/)”
then do: source /etc/profile.d/coreutils.sh
Well-known is documented is great, however, it is preferable to not have to modify anything at all and without requiring additional time researching and/or sleuthing. Things are indeed getting better, though, and as each evolves, we will continue to see improvement in the way each is used and developed, requiring less and less overhead at the outset in order to have access to the modern Swiss Army Knife that each can and will eventually be – out-of-the-box : )
We just wrapped a short and sweet showcase shoot of Leviticus Tattoo Studio. Kurt and crew are a pleasure to work with and are renowned in the world of ink. Check them out if you’re seeking an artist to create a one-of-a-kind work for you:
This 10-minute short film is made up of clips found on YouTube by Chris Beckman, who collected clips of people dropping their video cameras and edited them together into this artful masterpiece:
Behind the scenes with the Exploratorium, A Curious Summer and Tinkering Unlimited as they prepare to work with young learners to harness wind’s invisible power through discovering where it comes from and how to predict its behavior while studying aerodynamics and lift. Through tinkering with wind-powered machines and vehicles, such as a paragliding wing, turbines and sailboats and designing kites and gliders, this hands-on experience will open new doors into the mysterious power of WIND.
From a selection of 29 individual storyboards, we drew two scenes randomly and made a short screenplay from them. Then, using resources immediately available to us, we made this short film in one day on location @ Tinkering School in Montara, California:
Go cart design, assembly and testing by the inimitable Team Tinker with snippets of boat model design and other moments of singular, whimsical tinkering mastery. Thanks to Moby for his song, Porcelain.
Think, Make, Tinker: Theo, Isaac, Leo, Max, Hannah, Nik, Sam, Jacob, Julie and Gever set off to test their inventions on Day 6 of Tinkering School. Nods to King of Hawaii for the groovy surf vibe.
The crowd and judges went cuckoo for “sticks” at the Soap Factory’s 10 Second Film Festival last night – the announcer and the crowd of thousands continued to chant “sticks” long after it screened, especially after I neglected to claim the win (until later) because I couldn’t hear anything! Gee whiz, what can a fella say but thanks to the Soap Factory, Chris Cloud, Dan Huiting, and Kevin Albertson from MPLS.tv, the local celebrity judges Barb Abney from 89.3 The Current, Chris Pennington, and Robyne Robinson. Yet another thousand reasons why Minneapolis is the greatest city in the universe : )
“Lars can eat carrots really fast” was a crowd pleaser, too, and when i didn’t hear the call to claim the award for ‘sticks’ evidently they chose this as the next winner, which i didn’t go up for either because i STILL couldn’t hear anything! : P
Steelpans may be the friendliest instrument of all – unless you can think of one that’s any friendlier…?
This particular steelpan is not full-sized but still has an incredible sound. It’s tuned diatonically and is a magnet to even the slightly curious. Something about it makes it less intimidating than it is friendly.
It’s not an instrument to be used in every song or arrangement but anytime it’s played it injects the space with its festive mode. It has an easy feel to it, played with small, wooden mallets with rubber tubing on the ends for tips. An old pal showed me how to swirl various sized metal balls around the inside to make a hypnotic sound.
The first instruments developed in the evolution of steelpan were Tamboo-Bamboos, tunable sticks made of bamboo wood. These were hit onto the ground and with other sticks in order to produce sound.
thinfilms is pleased to have the honor of working with Gever Tulley this summer in San Francisco.
Gever is a gifted, self-taught computer scientist and developer, having started his professional career at age 16. He is an inspiration to me and to many, many others. His work with the Tinkering School enables children as both learners and teachers, working towards the goal of bringing the next generations back into touch with play, discovery and the other whimsical tools that put our minds in closer natural proximity to innovation.
Here’s Gever’s most recent talk at TED, worth watching because he explains this like no one else can:
If you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a feature film I could tell you the steps to take to do that, but every working documentary filmmaker I know has gotten there through their own unique path. There is no career path.
Audience, the latest media installation from rAndom International, is outta sight – as the viewer walks through it, the mirror-fellows track them, making each viewer the “focus” of the piece as they are reflected in each little mirror:
Some think content will keep getting longer and longer until movies are 3 and 4 hours long. That’s fine. OK with us. We also like the idea of not spending 3 or 4 hours to get something out of it.
Like music, there is a time and place for a long song and a short one. We like them both. We do listen to waaay more short songs than long ones, though. This is the reason we love still images more than films. If our house was on fire and we had to save still images or films, we would have to save the stills. We know. Sounds surprising! We work in motion but, like most of our favorite filmmakers, we think in stills. Moments. In a moment, a still image can change our lives. Films take a little longer.
Which is one reason we created and curate 10secondfilms.org. In 10 moments, a film can pack quite a wallop. Some maybe not so much, but are still worthy as friendly exercises in media literacy.
Compliments coming from fellas like these make us feel pretty darn swell, to say the least. Thank you, Gever and Howard. You both have our most humble admiration and deepest respect.
This is all just to say that we believe the experience of producing media should be a friendly one for all ages, especially as technology can still be an obstacle to the creative process for many of us. As an exercise in media and visual literacies, the 10-second format is vital. It minimizes the need for complex tools. These moments as movies are gratifying and occasionally inspire larger, more ambitious projects.
Make a 10 second film with any device that captures motion pictures.
No editing — One take — 10 seconds maximum length — Sound is optional.
Have a 10 second film you like?
We’d love to hear about it and perhaps even feature it on the site – click here to tell us more.
This is the beginning of a little boy. Imagine a small, special box tucked discreetly away within a very large place, filled with moments, pictures, and stories, all notions of a little boy named Daschel.
This past week alone, two pals of mine, who have historically resisted change, have traded their old-school cell phones (of the Symbian variety) for next-gen SmartPhones. One, an Android, the other, an iPhone. Upon getting home and beginning to introduce themselves to a new paradigm in communication technologies, each contacted me separately to ask what they need to know to get each to work the way they want, having discovered things about each that come up short.
Steelpans may be the friendliest instrument of all – unless you can think of one that’s any friendlier…?
Some think content will keep getting longer and longer until movies are 3 and 4 hours long. That’s fine. OK with us. We also like the idea of not spending 3 or 4 hours to get something out of it. 
