Create More

Hello all you lovely tumblrites!

I stumbled across the website of an awesome artist recently, Scott Made This. This guy has done some seriously cool work, in both physical and digital mediums -- and often, right at the boundary of both.

By far my favorite of his work is Tri Me, which uses your webcam, some math called Delaunay Triangulation that I don't understand, and some other in-browser technologies to manipulate and explore computer vision.

It's worth playing around with if you have a little time. There's a lot of settings you can mess with in the top right corner that can lead to some interesting visual effects. You can also take screen shots -- that's how I took the above image, which I then touched up in Instagram.

Tumblr recently partnered with General Assembly, an online education company, to offer free tutorials in developing themes for Tumblr using HTML, CSS, and Tumblr-specific markup. I completed them myself both to see how good they are and to maybe learn something along the way, and I can vouch for them. They take a few hours to complete, but they're well worth the time if you're at all interested in learning the basics of developing for Tumblr.

This is my iPhone after reorganizing. I deleted Facebook, Twitter, games, news, and a bunch of other apps that were just taking up space. Besides some financial stuff y'all don't need to see, I hid my remaining social networks and all of the useless default apps (like Passbook...seriously, wtf is it good for) on the very last page.

Hello tumblr-ites! It's been too long!

After a crazy busy summer, I'm back to school, and now hopefully back to bringing you semi-regular content! I've got a long laundry list of things I'd want to write about, things I hope you'll find as interesting as I do.

So, without further ado, today's topic is my iPhone.

I love my iPhone. It's incredibly handy -- I love that I can carry around one little device that can do everything from taking pictures to tracking my runs to keeping me organized.

But it's also incredibly distracting.

Before I got a smartphone, one of my biggest pet peeves was sitting in a room with a bunch of people with their phones out. I get it -- you're bored. But nothing says "I'd rather be somewhere else" more than being on your phone when you're with other people.

I have since become one of those people.

It's been several weeks since I posted my oscilloscope gif for theartassignment. Right after, my follower count exploded in the space of just a few days, but with exams and everything the last few weeks, Tumblr hasn't been a priority and I haven't had the time to reach out to all you lovely people. But now I do.

So, newcomers, welcome to Create More! My name is Mac, and I'll be your host for the duration of your stay.

What's Create More, you ask? Well, basically, I'm going to be making things and writing about them. Occasionally, I'll also talk about other stuff, mostly articles I find or thoughts I have about making things. I dunno. I've been flyin' by the seat of my pants ever since I started this thing.

Anyways, for each project I'm working on, I'll give regular updates and tips and tricks I've discovered along the way. I try to stay away from writing tutorials – this blog is more about keeping track of what I'm working on while also hopefully inspiring others (that's you guys!) to use the resources I link to to undertake projects of their – your – own.

A little disclaimer at this point – as an engineer, I'm interested in technical things (programming, for example) that some of you may not know or care about. And that's fine. I won't hold anything against any of you if that scares you away. I promise, though, that I'll try to explain things as simply as I possibly can. I also promise that I'll talk about more-accessible things... I've been very pretty tech-heavy through now, so I plan on branching out more.

Glad to hear it! If you’re working on such a project yourself I’d love to swap tips and ideas!

Consumption is a habit. And it's one that I fall back into time and time again.

Recently, I've been reading up on why that is, why passive entertainment is so addictive, and in the process I've come across some interesting – and very cynical – perspectives on the 40-hour workweek and its connection to passive entertainment.

According to David Cain in this article,

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of [consumerism] is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions, people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.

Indeed, Henry Ford, who is often credited as the "inventor" of the 40-hour workweek, understood how giving his workers more time outside of the factories – but not too much time – would lead to such an inclination towards purchasing entertainment and commodities (like his cars). In 1926, he said in an interview that

The industry of this country could not long exist if factories generally went back to the 10-hour day, because the people would not have the time to consume the goods produced. For instance, a workman would have little use for an automobile if he had to be in the shops from dawn until dusk. And that would react in countless directions, for the automobile, by enabling people to get about quickly and easily, gives them a change to find out what is going on in the world - which leads them to a larger life that requires more food, more and better goods, more books, more music - more of everything.

Since then, according to Cain,

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Although I'm not sure I completely buy into the idea of a sinister, multi-corporation plot to make passive consumers of us all, I do think this is an accurate description of the way our fast-paced, consumer culture effects us. And while I'm not trying to knock on passive entertainment, it's important for us to realize that it's neither the only option nor always the best option.

In the third episode of The Art Assignment, artist Toyin Odutola prompts viewers to create a gif of something intimate and indispensable.

I wasn’t initially going to participate, but I was in the circuits lab early Friday morning to finish a project with my friends, and I eventually had the place to myself after they left for class. I was playing around with some optional stuff at the end of the lab and ended up building a sample-and-hold circuit. When I hooked it up to the oscilloscope, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked exactly as expected with little to no troubleshooting – and trust me, that’s a rare occurrence. I found the simplicity and beauty of the waveforms mesmerizing, so I recorded them.

The circuits lab is an intimate place to me because, as a future electrical engineer, I will spend a significant portion of my time as an undergraduate in this well-lit, well-equipped room. And for electrical engineers, nothing is more indispensable than an oscilloscope. This instrument is the best way for us to see what is happening in all those wires and components we’ve hacked together.

Create More has been pretty dormant lately. Like, since November. I'm gonna skip the excuses and cut straight to the truth – writing regularly quickly fell to the bottom of my priorities once I got busy, and stayed there even through winter break.

So, here begins my renewed effort at updating more regularly. For starters, I've redesigned the look of Create More to make it cleaner and easier to read. In the same vein, I've enlisted the help of Google Code's Prettify to clean up the sample code in my posts. I'll have more to say about that in the future.