Work on rigging Make a bigger splash! continues at Claremorris leisure centre.
The installation has 35 neon tubes in all, and will feature 2 types of sound-activated animation of the 3D neon drawing.
The structure has to support 200kgs of transformers, and its 8m in the air.
Phew.
I’m testing the control system for Make a bigger splash!
The neon tubes are powered by ‘metalbox’ transformers and ‘neonline’ dimmers.
The dimmerboxes take a 10v analogue control signal from a showtec multi-exchanger, which is a dmx controller for analogue lighting gear.
The dmx signals come from an enttec open dmx ethernet unit, controlled by the artnet protocol via ethernet.
I have written a puredata external to output artnet packets, based on the pd netsend object by Miller Puckette. Open source is great.
And it worked first time I plugged it all together..
The ‘Duh worm’ exploit as reported by the bbc, affects only jailbroken iphones with openSSH installed, and installs software which spreads to other iphones, monitoring smses and details entered whilst banking online. While presently only affecting iphone users in the Netherlands, it seems likely that a version could easily be tailored to any phone network.
The exploit spreads because all iphones normally use the same root password- ‘alpine’, and while this is not normally a problem as there is no way to log into an unmodified iphone from a console, when openSSH is installed from the jailbroken appstore ‘cydia’, it allows full control of the phone through this open door.
However, openSSH is not a standard feature installed when jailbreaking an iphone. Cydia users have to choose to install it, it is made very clear that its only purpose is to allow network login to the device, and moreover, the installer page instracts the user to change passwords immediately. Considering the type of user who uses iphone openSSH, (me for example) this instruction is very likely to be followed.
What is interesting is the way this was reported by reuters, and by many other online news sites such as The Irish Times.
“The vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones, and for good reason. These hacks not only violate the warranty, they will also cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison.”
“The only iPhones that are vulnerable to the Duh Worm are “jail broken” phones, where users disable key Apple security features to get around the terms of usage agreement that they are designed to enforce, analysts said.”
Mainstream reporting of the flaw glosses over the need to install openSSH and repeats the uninformative “key Apple security features” line. Is it just me, or do these ‘analysts’ work for apple, who have a clear interest in enforcing iphone carrier agreements for as long as they can?
‘Make a bigger splash!’, a public art installation by Me (Tim Redfern) and Mark Cullen, is a sound responsive 3d drawing in cold cathode light tubing (neon).
Today we had our first chance to see most of the components of the installation together.
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- Lining up the main structure
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- The installation hangs from here
We just received the 2m diameter steel superstructure for the ceiling-mounted piece, which acts as a hanging platform and also accomodates the 35 1-4kv transformers (which pack quite a bit of weight).
Unpacking the components and checking the platform for size we got the first feeling for the actual scale of the piece realised from drawings, exciting!
Next the wiring..
I wish I was brave enough to eat live scoprions.
I’m in Beijing presenting a paper, and staying in a really amazing hostel.
I like this take on breakfast:
‘muesli with fruit and yoghurt’
==
yoghurt and icecream topping on a bed of sliced apple and banana, topped
with raw oats and decorated with a sprig of parsley!?
PlayApp is a software library for processing to stream processing sketches to Playhouse, an interactive lighting installation that will turn Liberty Hall into a low-res colour display with sound throughout the Dublin Theatre Festival in October.
PlayApp is a simple class that transmits every frame drawn by the sketch as a UDP packet. There is also a preview sketch that allows you to visualise your sketches as a 30×11 window animation on the building. Optionally, you can also take control of the top ‘marquee’ floor which has 7×5 greyscale pixels in each window, and use sound which will be broadcast on short range FM radio.
PlayApp as it stands can be used to display any kind of procedural graphics/ sound, or to visualise any kind of information from the internet.
We would love to show interactive PlayApp sketches which turn the building into an interactive sequencer or multiuser sketchpad, we are using osc to access the building from networked iphones and we are planning to add a way to get DTMF commands into processing via an asterisk server. However these types of applications will have to be run by special arrangement as they require more setup.
Playhouse will run from September 24th-October 19th.
Sketches and movies that play on the building will be documented with a camera facing the building and will be automatically archived.
In order to use this HSPDA modem for smsage I need to adapt it to use an external antenna (as it is housed in a metal box..)
Following this post, it seems there is an antenna connector internally.
Opening the case it a little tricky, you can lever it open but you basically have to snap a one-way snap connector to get it open. I love invalidating warranties.
Looking closely, the antenna connector seems very similar to mmcx, although the pin goes in the other directions (male connector: female pin). Is this a reverse mmcx?
As it happens, I have an unused HSPDA antenna I took out of a dead dell laptop, which has an mmcx connector.
I made a pin to join the 2 female connectors from a tiny piece of wire.
Hooking it together to test, I needed to clamp the sim holder to the board.
It seems to work. I tested it using xhe220stat.
Just back from a few days in Bristol working with Duncan Speakman and Kathy Hinde making some mobile sound installations using PDa on the gumstix.
We were interfacing phidget USB sensor boards which allow a wide variety of sensors to be conveniently accessed.
I am very impressed by the phidgets ease of use and the quality of their documentation: however there is no off-the shelf way of talking to them in pure data.
One result is a new external for pd and PDa for the phidget 8×8x8 interfaceKit (linux only).
you need to download and make the phidget linux library
make & sudo make install
The external allows you to set the digital outputs, read the digital & analogue inputs, and set the threshold sensitivity for the ADCs.