Experiences in Life and Research

Book Review – “Not Your World Music: Noise in South East Asia”

The second half of 2017 was full of good reads for me. Of the 23-25 (mostly non-fictions) books I read during the course of the year, at least 4 or 5 were excellent. Top reads included, “The Gene: An Intimate History” by Siddhartha Mukherjee, Bioart and the Vitality of Media by Robert Mitchell, and Alone Together: Why we Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle.…

Future Now: The 2017 Ars Electronica Festival

This September I was invited to participate in the Future Innovator’s Summit at the Ars Electronica Festival 2017. This was a wonderful opportunity to spend several activity packed days discussing some of the biggest questions arising from the emergence of increasingly complex technologies with an interdisciplinary and multicultural group of artists, scientists, philosophers, researchers and…

How to Build Your Own TalkBox

TalkBox is a Hardware You will need the following ingredients to make a TalkBox: TalkBox Module Raspberry Pi 3 Micro SD card (at least 8 gigs) USB Speaker Touch Hat for Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi Official case Battery Power Supply Wires (Alligator clip or otherwise) USB Key Chassis Foamcore Regular Tape Conductive Tape Velcro Tools Soldering Iron and Solder Service Knife (Cutter) Cutting Matt…

Technological Love/Fear: Reflections from CHI’17 Conference

This week, I attended the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’17) in Denver and saw many excellent and thought-provoking talks about the interaction(s) and relationship(s) between humans and technology. CHI is a yearly international conference that attracts ~2000-3000 attendees from academia, industry and beyond who come to share and learn about the latest research in…

Baltimore Stories: Warm up

I first heard about Baltimore at a PopTech-affiliated conference in Brooklyn, called The City Resilient (which I wrote about in another blog post). In a short heartfelt talk, Ali Smith of the Holistic Life Foundation described how he had learned Yoga at a young age in Baltimore and found it extremely useful to calm his mind and control his feelings when growing up. Ali, a tall black man with a…

Bologna, Florence and Venice

Bologna is an underrated Italian city with a tumultuous recent history. It is known as “La dotta (the learned), la rossa (the red), and la grassa (the fat)! The first nickname is given to Bologna because of its well-respected university. Founded in 1088, many intellectual heavyweights, Dante, Petrarch and Thomas Becket among them, have frequented this institution. There is a tradition among the…

Thinking about Time in the Eternal City

Funny how as we get older, we try to compensate for our lost years by contemplating our achievements: titles, possessions, family, experiences. We think of the money we made, the degrees we earned, the children we raised, the loves we felt, and after a time of reflection, we like to think, “Time flies, but I have lived!” But what is time? And what is the value of a life? What is the meaning of…

“Stairs of Death” at Mauthasen Concentration Camp Touched by kisses, Covered with bruises, My body is a chain, A snake eating its tail. Step by step, These endless stairs, My life is a short sentence, Written again and again. Looking at a blind sun, Talking to a deaf moon, My tears are drops in a flood, Evaporating before they hit the earth. You won’t remember me, And I don’t remember them, The…

The country road from Linz to Mauthausen is beautiful and peaceful. My bus stops at small villages and picks up polite and quiet passengers. The landscape is green and hilly. It is hard to imagine I am so close to a place that, for close to a 7 years, was the site of profound human suffering. I’m on my way to the Mauthausen Memorial.The Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp was one of the most…

Baking Pi’s 4: Working with Touch Pi

I have taken some time off from writing about my Raspberry Pi prototyping but I have been busy prototyping and making a GUI program for the Raspberry Pi.  I started with the wonderful Touch Pi design from the wonderful people at Adafruit that adds a Resistive Touchscreen to the Pi! I made many changes to this system which I will describe in future posts. But essentially, this is what the…

Bangkok The word “overwhelming” comes to mind when trying to describe Bangkok, and not in a bad way. There is so much to see, to taste and to think about that the city might give one a culture (and heat) shock! The morning after I arrived in Bangkok, I walked from my hotel to a sidewalk restaurant and had a breakfast of fried rice and egg. It was excellent and invigorating with the right amount…

The multicultural city-state of Singapore provided me with a gentle entrance into Asia. Arriving at 5 am at the Changi International Airport, I took the efficient and clean metro train into town and walked into the financial heart of the city (which reminded me of Shanghai and Vancouver). A mix of well-dressed Asian, Indian and European people were walking to work with coffees, teas and other…

Baking Pi’s: A Networked Rafigh

In the “Baking Pi’s” series of posts, I describe a number of projects with the Raspberry Pi that I have been doing in the last few weeks. In this post, I will describe how to make a networked Rafigh using a Raspberry Pi. I will first describe how to connect the Raspberry Pi to the physical world and how to control it over the Internet. Next, I will describe how to connect this setup to a small…

Baking Pi’s 2: Touch HAT

In the “Baking Pi’s” series of posts, I describe my adventures with the Raspberry Pi embedded computer. Each segment describes a specific setup. This series is fairly technical and is meant to be used to create digital prototypes. Raspberry Pi with Touch Hat and Fruit! In this post, I will describe my experience using Raspberry Pi with a touch sensor to create an interactive sound box. This post…

Baking Pi’s 1: Set Up

In the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with the amazing Raspberry Pi embedded computer platform. In the “Baking Pi’s” series of posts, I will describe how to setup and use a Raspberry Pi for different applications. Raspberry Pi is a powerful and affordable credit-card sized computer. With some basic programming and networking skills and a lot of patience you can use it to setup…

In November 2015, after attending the MXD 2015 Design Conference in Mexico City, I was invited to visit indigenous weavers in a Mayan village close to San Cristobal de Las Casas in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The Mayan weaving tradition of Chiapas is world renowned and has continuously existed since per-Colombian times. I was delighted and honored to accompany my great friend, Karla…

Visiting Frida Kahlo on the Día de Muertos

The “frog-shaped” per-Colombian urn on the left contains Frida’s ashes. I looked at the ancient frog-shaped Mayan jar on Frida‘s dresser again; according to the excellent Museo Frida Kahlo’s audio guide this is the final resting place of the revolutionary artist who had asked for her ashes to be put in a jar in the shape of a “frog” after cremation. The “frog” was the nickname of her (in)famous…