First Look – Flight of the Orion

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NASA: Flight of the Orion… from Full {Circle} Werks on Vimeo.

This short animated film depicts the flight and orbit of the NASA's new spacecraft that will take humans far beyond low-Earth orbit.

We used some original Apollo audio samples and created some bespoke effects, music and atmos to create a complex audio collage from scratch.

All sound design, music and effects by Chris Wiseman at Full Werks studios, UK

Many thanks to NASA and archive.org for the footage and their continued support.

Live long and prosper….

www.nasa.gov
www.fullwerks.com
http://twitter.com/FCmusicandfilm

Working remotely from Loosecubes HQ

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photo 4

Taking the Fueled office mobile with Fueled Senior Editor Brady Donnelly at the Loosecubes headquarters. Love their canvas army tent, and open, friendly office space. Booking was a breeze, and they were well setup up to address the most common new office worker questions – Wifi password, water, and bathroom.
Look for more Loosecubes post very soon.. ;)

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Previously, I wrote about Loosecubes being like AirBnB for office space.

Fueled at Loosecubes photoset on Flickr

How Blogging Has Helped Me Apply the DRY Principle to Conversations

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I recently had an online conversation with old friend Dakota Blair. It had been a while since we talked, and so there was a lot to catch up on – where we’re both working now, life events, tech news, etc. Throughout the course of the conversation, in response to about half of the questions Dakota asked me, I found myself sending him links to blog posts I’d written in the past. For example, my response to “what are you currently doing for work” was simply “here, check out this blog post”, with a link to the blog post in which I detailed exactly who I’m working for, and what I’m doing – complete with links to everything, list of clients, etc. I had already taken the time to answer that question in full, and so instead of typing out the answer again, a simple link answered the question fully. I love this method for answering question. Not because pushes people away, but because it allows me to remain closer and have more detailed conversations with people. Instead of my hacking out a half-assed response to that question, I can now simply send the link and give full answer. Less energy for me, more room for detail, closer relationships.

In explaining this methodology to Dakota, he aptly made reference to the  ”Don’t Repeat  Yourself” (DRY) principle for software development, which simply states:

“Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.”

For me, my own DRY Principle universal knowledge base is my blog. And thank you for reading it. :)

Dont repeat yourself – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Descriptive Camera Uses Human Intelligence Tasks to “Develop” Photos

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Does a higher HIT bit get you better camera “resolution”?

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content. … After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still “developing” in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.

Descriptive Camera.

Moving your iPhone Stream to Paper: Networked Receipt Printers

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Over the last year or so, there’s been a bit of a trend to get what once was a purely digital news stream and turn it back into paper. The coolest implementation I’ve seen of this trend has been the use of receipt printers – those tiny thermal printers that are ubiquitous in retail shops, quickly printing on long rolls of paper.

Couple a receipt printer with a mini computer and a network connection, and you’ve got your latest news feeds, tweets, instagram pics, and anything else you can imaging on a low-tech piece of paper. A few notable projects:

Berg Cloud Little Printer

Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.

You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from — it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special. We have an incredible group of launch partners, and in the run-up to shipping we’re working with them all on custom publications.

Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer

Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.

Tom Taylor’s Microprinter

The microprinter is an experiment in physical activity streams and notification, using a repurposed receipt printer connected to the web.

I use it for things like reminders, notifications, and my day at-a-glance, but anything that can be injected from the web and suits text only, short format messaging, will work.

daily summary

More from Wired:

Your Twitter Feed as Newspaper: A Look at the Tiny Printer Trend | Design | Wired.com.

gokey: keeping your keys safe on the go

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An interesting concept, but I’m not totally convinced. I already run with my large-ish Garmin Forerunner 310XT GPS watch on one wrist, and try to keep the stuff I run with to a minimum. If you must run with a metal key on you, this could be a workable solution – however, how about just stashing your key somewhere when you go for a run – a lockbock on the doorknob, hiding it in a planter, or any of the other tricks of the trade. Anyway, to make wearing another wristband truly valuable to me, how about giving it a bit more functionality. Split the band in two and make it into a watchband, so I can use is in conjunction with the watch I already wear. How about integrating a contactless payment RFID chip in the band, like the Rumba Time GO watch, so I can pay for that post-run coffee without going home to grab my wallet? How about custom stamping it with a runners emergency details?

Give it more function than just holding a single key, and maybe I’ll wear it. And don’t make it look un-wearably toy-like, like the Rumba Time watch.

gokey is a sleek silicone wrist band that conceals your key when you are out and about. This accessory is not only stylish but serves a purpose. While there are many work arounds for storing keys, none of them offer a worry free experience. gokey alleviates this running stressor and brings peace of mind to your jog.

gokey: keeping your keys safe on the go by Francesca Passoni and Cristina Cook — Kickstarter.

Rumba Time GO video:

Infographic: The Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom

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Another great one from Column Five Media: The Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom

For over a decade, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation have tracked economic freedom around the world with the Index of Economic Freedom, creating 10 benchmarks that gauge economic success. This interactive heat map created with The Heritage Foundation allows you to explore the 10 freedoms — from property rights to entrepreneurship — in 184 countries. The map is rendered in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), allowing us to draw complex shapes directly into the HTML, style them using CSS and attach JavaScript code that triggers when the user interacts with them. This means that the way the data is visualized to the user changes according to their actions and requirements. Using SVG instead of Flash provides compatibility on Apple products and increased support for mobile devices. The application also uses the D3 JavaScript library to optimize the rendering of the map and its data population.

Afghan Photographer Massoud Hossaini Wins Pulitzer Prize

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Gripping… this pic from photographer Massoud Hossaini, of a 12 year old girl screaming after a suicide bombing, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

The explosion of which the young girl, Tarana Akbari, is a survivor killed more than 70 people. Among the dead were seven of Akbari’s family members, who had traveled to Kabul in honor of the holiday Ashura; nine other relatives were wounded. The Pulitzer announcement calls the photograph, featured here, “heartbreaking.” Hossaini, who works with Agence France-Presse, is a native of Kabul and was raised in Iran. He was a political activist prior to taking up a camera, and got his start photographing Afghan refugees living in his adopted country. He returned to his home country in 2002 and is still based there.

Massoud Hossaini — AFP / Getty Images

Afghan Photographer Massoud Hossaini Wins Pulitzer Prize – LightBox.