I’m thinking of switching back to pc’s. In a way it feels like I joined an awesome cult (mac) only to find out that there is another cult (win) across the street that has an indoor pool, robots and all the gravy you can drink. Of course that gravy could kill you and those robots could severe your limbs at any moment, but what’s life without some risk? The latest HP and Dell laptops have serious hardware packed into them that the Macbook Pro just doesn’t cut it when it comes to live video processing. So after reading a lot about what gear other performers use, I’m thinking of taking the plunge and grabbing an HP laptop, something like this one. Lately I’ve been having fun with a little Acer Aspire One (warning: the Aspire One website has really annoying music)., and even loaded up Resolume to see what it could do (sort of a success, but mostly it sucked).

OTOY Rendering Engine

This video looks amazing, it’s a new 3d environment that is top secret. Apparently the video was not meant to be released for the public but it’s so god-awful awesome it needs to be shared. The concept: this virtual world is rendered in the cloud and streamed to your browser.

As raytracing becomes more and more common I’m starting to get a lot of ideas for including 3d worlds in my interactive work – not to mention the possibilities of integrating data from the web into virtual environments.

Scott has posted some creepy video soup on his Oily Films blog. Watch closely for the dog hair.

OILYFILMS » Blog Archive » Primordial Soup pt.1.

Just a quick note that my sculpture Astroturf Cocoon will be featured in the show Unreal Victoria at the Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria. The opening is tomorrow night, Friday August 8th from 7-9pm and will be open until August 13th. This show is curated by Kirk Schwartz, CAC Chair of Media Arts, in collaboration with MediaNet.

detail of Astroturf Cocoon

What a wild, wild week.

First the really big news – Grand Theft Bicycle has been accepted for a show at the Stride Gallery in Calgary. We don’t know when it will happen yet but I’d guess it will probably be within the next 6 months.

Then this morning I got an email telling me that this is box/this is machine has been accepted into the Bearded Child Film Festival (Minneapolis/Grand Rapids) and will play not just once but twice – how sweet is that?

And last but not least, Love&Olson are playing a semi-private gig next Tuesday Thursday evening at Discovery Coffee with our old friends i send data live. You can watch a blip from my preparations below or on Vimeo.

QC test from robotoverlord on Vimeo.

I spent a bit of time this morning working with SWFObject this morning and tried to splice it into a regular page template to produce a sIFR like effect. And it worked. Seamlessly. All in all it took me about 20 minutes.

If you’re looking for other kinds of flash objects (like mp3, movies, etc) try out swftools or for a full-on API for SWFObject, SWFObject API.

If you are a nerd or geek with a bit of spare time on your hands, help TechCrunch realize their dream of a $200 tablet built for the web. They’re looking for programmers that can help them build a tiny OS that will run firefox and possibly skype.

Via TechCrunch
We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It.

Nice little article about the adoption of Open Source by the finance sector, great news for advocates of OSS.

The Finance Sector: Open Source Rising | OStatic

Though the average user is unaware of the change, the web has been revolutionized in the last decade by the mass adoption and maturation of open source technology. Publishers, programmers, corporations and even governments have embraced open source as a reliable and elegant development methodology for projects of all shapes and sizes.