Streaming radio has good taste, I guess
Back to my roots. I looked up an old familiar site that I haven’t visited for years: Nugs.net. Though it sounds like an online networking hub for non-violent pacifistic criminals, it is a wonderful resource for sharing recordings of live concerts. These concerts are mostly from the same genre, for lack of a better term, the jam scene. There was once a time when countless live concerts from a ridiculously wide range of musicians could be easily and freely be up and down loaded. It was a truly progressive socialist approach to sharing music. Nugs was like napster, but cooler. It was an underground site that supported sharing digital documentation of live concerts from an underground scene.
This was too good to be true. I’m pretty sure the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan threatened to sue… or someone else who’d been lucky enough to make it big in the industry. So Nugs became a streaming site for a while. One could still select and listen to any volume from its vast musical library, but the information was not to be kept. Funny, I remember thinking at the time. What’s the big deal about having access to something all the time vs. owning the information? It was made clear that a variety of companies would sell you specific concerts if only you clicked on their link. Ick!
It seems to me that greed and tech savvy lawyers have plunged this beautiful phenomenon out of it’s natural state. But there’s a bright side, I found. Thought most of the concerts weren’t available for download, some of them were. In fact, there was about one concert per band that once shared many. With a few exceptions, everyone had something up to offer. I always argue that this forum is great advertisement, — especially for bands that make most of their livelihood from touring on the road. Besides, I plugged into their streaming “radio” for a little while and caught a great clip of “Stella Blue” by the Grateful Dead, and the String Cheese Incident’s cover of the jazz classic “Birdland”. Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t have the freedom to choose from the concerts, my hard drive is dangerously full anyway. I just wish I could stream it in my car or on the subway… oh well; I’ll have to settle for good music at home.
i suck at audio blogging
http://itp.nyu.edu/~sa1310/ppmaudioblog3.mp3
wow! I finally figured out how to make an aif into an mp3 with audacity, and … nothing
to say the least, this is pretty discouraging. Anyone have any advice? I’m going to try to move my blog to my itp site… we’ll see if that helps. I think I get it, I’m just missing some silly step.
William Tell’s Carnival Sideshow
William Tell’s Carnival Sideshow is a game that I made using a small dc motor connected to a target, which lights an LED when struck with the appropriate amount of force. The force is applied via a projectile, which is thrown by one player while another holds the target. The target spins utilizing the physical properties of a fly wheel allowing the generator to light the LED for the duration of its spinning.
The original design concept was to make a game that one could use tennis balls, or something of a similar weight, to throw at a target which used the kinetic energy when struck to light small LED. The model I had in mind was the old carnival booth where a clown would try to insult people into trying to hit a target, which would drop them into a pool of water. I planned on having a small tower clown face on the top and a target below. The idea was that when the target was hit, it would spin around causing a clown’s nose to light up using the kinetic energy from the ball hitting the target to power the light.
Originally I used a small toy car motor. Spinning it around with an attached arm I could get about 2 V in an open circuit. I could only muster up to a couple of mA if I really committed to spinning the motor. This wasn’t a particularly good ratio. I managed to right up a gear system out of rubber bands and round dowels. This apparatus did well in very contained experiments, but when applied to the machine it was rendered useless almost every time I played with it.
After being discouraged by the gearing system in my prior prototypes, I used a more robust fan motor. This motor made up to 6V and with a really good spin could get around 12-15 mA fairly regularly. The fan motor was much better for my purposes. I also built my target as a hand held object rather than freestanding piece. This made it much easier to fine tune. I attached the motor to the end of a stick and used screws around the end to tie the motor on with copper wire. Then I used a factory metal fan hex wrenched onto the motor and bent around the target shaft, then screwed in, to firmly secure the object.
The first few runs of experimentation were an absolute disaster. I kept destroying my prototypes using balls/objects that were dangerously heavy for in house play. There were also problems with the spinning. The flywheel developed after knocking the target out of my “playmate’s” hands a few times. Balancing the weight of the target made the machine much more easier to handle. Also with good contact the LED would slightly more than pulse. Because we hit the target holder so many times, which became part of the fun of the game, it was deemed “William Tell’s Carnival Sideshow”. It seemed an appropriate name for this kinetic prop which squinted on with conventional mundane projectiles, but would really light up if one were to hit it with a crossbow.
blogging sounds like bogging…
Ahhh, my first real blog. I’m sort of excited, sort of ashamed. Not that I’m ashamed of blogging, it’s that it’s taken me so many shots at it to figure it out. Glowing Samurai costume, no problem. Using and remembering my User Name and Password… needs some work. Well, Hi! that’s it, I really don’t have anything else to say…. except:
itp.nyu.edu/~sa1310/ppmablog3.aif
