if you consider yourself to be a nice person...

and you use social networking at all, in any sense, please come and join my new shiny ning site and chat about how social networking has affected you. If you think it's a good or bad thing, when you started using it, what sites you use. Wether facebook bores the crap out of you or if it's the centre of your life.

NINGY NING NING!!!

for the unbelievers

it didn't work at the presentation yesterday because a bit of thread ripped. But my first Lilypad circuit works now.



It flashes LEDs. Simple enough but i'm glad everything is working. It's running an example sketch called Loop which I edited slightly so it found the LEDs.

it's here.....

and it came in a pretty little box and it's tiiiiiny.



i want to play now.

just show words

This code, put into Processing, shows you the words that are in my blog.
It looks for the things that separate words, and then spits them out.

As it's reading an RSS feed it often spits out some HTML but that not really a problem, i just need it to be aware of where a word ends and begins.


//i'm now trying to break the script down more, as i don't want it to tell me how many times it finds the word, i only want it to show me it.

PFont f; //holds onto the font
String[] fiosblog; //array to hold onto the text in my blog
int counter = 150; //where to start in the text

//delimiters (stuff that breaks up the words)
String delimiters = " ,.?!;:[]";

void setup() {
size(400,400);

f = loadFont( "Dialog-32.vlw" ); //loads the font

//this bit imports my blog anf makes it into a array of strings
String url = "http://fionnualamurphy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default";
String[] rawtext = loadStrings(url);

//join the strings back together, into one long string
String everything = join(rawtext, "" );

// the big string now needs to be split into individual words
//using splitTokens() a spaces and punctuation are the delimiters.
fiosblog = splitTokens(everything, delimiters);
frameRate(5);
}

void draw() {
background(255);

//pick a word
String theword = fiosblog[counter];

//Display results
textFont(f);
fill(0);
text(theword,10,90);
stroke(0);
fill(175);


//move onto next word
counter = (counter +1) % fiosblog.length;
}



I've basically just taken this code by Daniel Shiffman and edited it so it only presents me with the word.

I've got it separating words, now i just need it to start recognizing them. I think that's going to be the hard bit.

we feel fine

We feel fine is a web app created with Processing, with the database and data collection side of things handled with Java, Perl, MySQL and Apache. The application searches sites such as blogger, livejournal, myspace and flickr for posts including the words "I feel" or "I am feeling". Once it finds one of these phrases it looks for the sentence it is in, and and then pulls it into the feed.



After it finds the sentence, the app then looks for an emotion, from this list. Emotions are represented by different colours inside the app, yellow being happy, red being angry etc. To view a post you click on a coloured circle or square, which also contain pictures that are linked to the scentence. The interface of this app is really intuitive and sensitive to the movements of the cursor. When you click in the app the dots fly away from you, but after a while some clump around the cursor.

There are several different ways of viewing the data, each called "movements". There are six in total but i'm only going to talk about a couple of them. The view below is called "murmurs" and reminds me a bit of twitter. The dots aren't there to be played with, the data just happily makes it's way to the bottom of your screen.



You can also just see how many people are feeling what within the last couple of hours. At this moment in time a lot of people are feeling better, which is nice. Even when the data is presented in this quite static form, it still jiggles about, like it's alive.



The process is completely autonomous, the program keeps on running without any human intervention, collecting any data it finds about how people are feeling.

I think this is a really interesting site, and while i was only looking at it because it pulls in feeds of emotions which is what i want to do in my project, i've actually ended up spending quite a bit of time on the site. It's not only interesting to see what people are feeling, the interface of the app is really nice to interact with.

wordle

This is all my year three posts, made into a word cloud.

Wordle takes a web page, looks for interesting words and makes it a bit more visually pleasing.

CuteCircuit are awesome.

And they make awesome things.



Accessory Nerve is a sleeve that reacts to your phones signals. When you're getting an incoming call, pleats appear on the fabric. If you're a little busy you can just straighten out the sleeve, which will then trigger the phone to send a text message to the caller saying "I'll call you back later". A lot more subtle than getting your phone out.



This item is particularly ingenious. This is the hug shirt, which allows you to send a hug to a loved one using your phone. Sensors detect the touch, warmth and heart beat of the sender and recreate the sensation for the receiver. Bluetooth sends the hug signal from the phone to the top, and a java application called "hug me", reads the sensor data and recreates the hug.

wearing data feeds - News Knitter

RSS feeds make lovely warm jumpers.



Using 24 hours of news data feeds, News Knitter makes the daily political news into a lovely snuggly jumper. One piece of software receives the data and another analyzes the feeds and makes them into different patterns. The final product is then produced on a fully computerized knitting machine.



I think this is a very nice example of how to take the internet off screen. Although some people wouldn't really think of this as a digital product as there's no circuits or programming on the actual finished product, the information used to create the pattern was gleamed from the internet, and software produced the patterns, making the jumper a product of the internet.

i wants...

a lilypad.



wants.