Furthering my explorations with the BitmapData and classes, I came up with this effect. It’s surprisingly easy to change one or two variables and have it give off an entirely different effect. I think my next step will be integrating this with your webcam.

bitmapimage_v8_videosquares

Having a week off from work will do weird things to a person. I assumed I was going to sit around being as bored as I could possibly make myself, but I found it actually had the opposite effect. I ended up starting up a bunch of random projects, and I think the most interesting ones that came out of it was my flash Morse DeCode projects.

In my pursuit for taking code outside of the computer, I bought an Arduino board to start playing around with circuit boards. Once I got one LED light blinking I started thinking about what you could do with one flashing light. The first thing that came to mind was morse code.

This video I threw together explains the rest of the Morse DeCode project.

My future plans include optimizing it to read at a faster rate, inserting spaces between words, and eventually turning it into something that could theoretically be used by certain disabled people to communicate. I am sure there is a lot of other technology out there that is more advanced, but there is something special about the idea that anyone in their home can create the technology to help others communicate.

Update (Jan 4, 2010):

As Anne Frank says “no one ever became poor by giving”. So on that note, here is the source, as is.

Morse DeCode Source

In case you are wondering, I had no idea that quote existed. I had to look it up. My brain is not full of Anne Frank quotes. In case you wondered

So it has been a little slow on Blog lately not only because of life obligations, but also because I have been focusing some of my free time in creating a new division of Visual Advance called Labs. Seems like these labs are all the rage these days, so I had to have one. Actually the decision came more because I all the sudden had an obsession with making these random clock concepts and I needed a good place to distribute them.

Give them a look and feel free to download any of the screen savers. Hopefully there will be some more Chronometer projects on their way.

Visual Advance | Labs

Robert Hodgin at Flight404 has been doing some amazing stuff with Processing. It is almost depressing to compare my day 1 explorations into processing with the stuff he is doing now. He recently submitted a video for a recent Radiohead music video contest.

Apparently he had hesitations on submitting it feeling it wasn’t “Radiohead enough”, but I think it is the complete opposite. Maybe I am reading too much into it, but a secluded, mysterious bubble floating in darkness is a fairly accurate depiction of Radiohead (and that wasn’t a dig at them).

Discovered at: Motionographer

I just updated my entire photography section on Flickr. Somewhere around the sum of 130 images. Here are a few of my favorites, some of which I hadn’t discovered the first time through my collection.

As always, my full Flickr stream is here.