Category Technology

MMX – The Start of the Post-Digital Decade

2010 and after are going to be about post-digital, by which I mean what comes after we’ve finished staring at our screens. We’re going to see an explosion in the amount of physical objects that would have been impossible without using digital process in the workflow, and objects that won’t work without a connection of some kind [...]

Some Old Disks

Uncovered during seasonal tidying, a small cache of 3.5 floppies, still sealed with their “license agreement” stickers. Why do I blog this? One of these disks has been left, unopened, for thirteen years. The other came in an eight-inch box, decorated with Alber’s trademark screenprints, that I used as decoration. Now, possibly six years after [...]

Basic Tech III – Life, NCL.AC.UK and Everything

I realised today that I could have titled this “Life, the University, and Everything”, which would have worked a lot better. Hey ho. The grandiose title of this piece could be read as a sign that I’m going to write about things other than relevant to the course. In general, I’m going to steer clear [...]

Old Video, New Post

I’m putting this up because my mum told me she liked it. Thanks! It’s a video made with the programming language Processing, inspired by the work of Douglas Coupland.

Basic Tech II – The Poptart at the End of the Universe

I’m eating a lot of pop tarts at the minute. So let’s have a quick diversion into the history of pop tarts. Pop tarts are a form of sugary pastry sold by Kellogg’s. The achieved a small amount of notoriety in the early 1990’s, in the UK at least, for burning the hands of a [...]

Basic Tech I – (The Hitchhikers Guide to Regex)

The current state of my Basic Techniques project is this: It doesn’t work. However, this is a defeatist attitude. Not quite as defeatist as I’ve been considering (it doesn’t work, I’m never going to understand regex, and I’m going to stop bothering with programming being the other considered viewpoint). On the other hand, sometimes the [...]

Creating Displays with Processing

Again, this blog post is part of my basic techniques module, so you might not find this thrilling… casual readers might want to skip this blog post and come back later. As part of my basic techniques module I wanted to work on something quite simple. I’ve broken it down into lots of smaller chunks, [...]

Basic Techniques Blogpost

As part of my coursework, I’m creating a text analysis tool. The coursework also states that blog posts are part of the working progress. Therefore, if you’re not on my course or working with Processing in some form, I doubt the post would be interesting to you. What is the best way of storing a [...]

Let a Thousand James Hugonin Paintings Bloom

James Hugonin is an artist who lives in Northumbria, and makes paintings that reflect his surroundings by taking the predominant colour for each day and painting a square in that colour. This is very procedural art, and therefore it lends itself very well to make a computer program that does the same thing. This would [...]

Processing Exercise – Click, Mortal!

This is a small amusement (it’s not a game, it’s too stupid) where you click the mouse to make something happen. This stems from Jamie asking us how we could make the exercise of drawing a five-pointed pentagram ‘more evil’. Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that (in the West) the [...]