COVID-19 Arrives For a month or two it was off in the distance, then suddenly it was on us: COVID-19. When Fab@CIC and District Hall and Cambridge Hackspace closed their doors, you join a number of local Slack- and Zoom-powered COVID groups. But without sewing skills, you can't help the mask cause. So you shift your explorations to a humbler "information pain" challenge: "touchless."
Doubling Down on Gesture Sensors After flirting with a capacitive sensor on some Mixed Reality rides, such as inviting people to "touch the oak leaf," you had to abandon the capacitive sensor. Asking someone to touch something suddenly seemed like a dangerous request. So I started converting everything to "touchless." My first enabler was the APDS gesture sensor.
LCDs - Again When you start talking to Evan about possible touchless projects, he mentions using a "Time of Flight" sensor, and an 16x2 LCD display. You have no idea what a Time of Flight sensor is, but you remember 16x2 LCD displays. You had a brief dalliance with them way back in the early days. Perhaps you should give them another chance.
Place Report: Somerville Bike Trail Sculpture Garden With District Hall closed for the holidays, and a second Covid surge descending like a cloud on indoor places all over, you decide to take your placemaking research outside. It will be safer there, you reason, and you could safely recommend a visit, if you find something worthwhile. You start with a sculpture garden that had sprouted up alongside a nearby bike trail in Davis Square, Somerville.
Place Report: Pine in the Sand After the sprawling, messy, free-form expression along the Somerville Bike Path Sculpture Garden, you are up for something minimal and curated. Pine in the Sand fits the bill. It's a striking installation: a single living pine tree atop a sand dune, surrounded by concrete barriers and a cluster of granite blocks.
Place Report: Ninja Walking in Bow Market A Place Report visit to Bow Market in Somerville, MA - Ninja style, with a DJI Osmo Pocket 3-axis gimbal camera.
Where do you go with your new, free, glowy virtual workboots from Lowe's? Also pandemic related: a place report from the metaverse, just as corporations were starting to place bets on the new, virtual territory.
Place Report: Goldfish Mega Bites Mountain, Decentraland A video Place Report from Goldfish Mega Bites Mountain in Decentraland, in the metaverse. Buried Goldfish, glowing boots, a billboard, a pick axe, and a new backpack, with a virtual salty snack.
Place Report: Mona Playground "How-To" is a big part of the evolution of the metaverse. Hence the Mona Playground. A place to learn anti-gravity, portals, textures, door navigation...
Halfcourt Basketball in the Metaverse Of all the rides in Meta's colossal metaverse project, the first one that caused me to pause for more than a second was the no-frills halfcourt basketball court located at the edge of the Plaza in Horizon Worlds.
Place Report: Newsprint Art in Allston Back to the physical world, to the Boston neighborhood of Allston, which Harvard University recently expanded into, to grab some "Art in Prints" by local artists for 25 cents. It is now on its seventh edition. These prints are dispensed in old fashioned metal boxes, so called "honor boxes."
Place Report: A New Canyon in Cambridge: Cambridge Crossing It doesn't make any sense geologically, but there's a canyon emerging in Cambridge. A remote urban canyon, surrounded by tall cliffs of glass, metal, and concrete. Way over on the far eastern tip of Cambridge: past Kendall Sq., past Lechmere, past even East Cambridge. East East Cambridge.
DJI Mini 2 Drone Doing more Place Reports, so I upped our arsenal. This drone, selected by Max R., is just about perfect for the job. It's an easy way to get off the ground for more perspective.
Straight Up from District Hall A new direction from District Hall -- straight up. Starting at 100 feet up, looking out at Boston Harbor.
Experimenting with Vertical, Phone-First Media Instagram and YouTube have woken up to the TikTok threat. Which means that there are now 3 phone-first platforms available for Place Reports. You start out with, and end up sticking with, YouTube Shorts.
Snag A snag is a dead tree that's still standing. I was looking for something to shoot in a vertical format. This snag is vertical, for now.
Metaverse Gumball Machine Launches in Decentraland After exploring some metaverse sites (Meta's Horizon World, VRChat, Decentraland, The Sandbox), I launched the Gumball Machine into that overhyped universe. To compound the hype, you can program the machine to dispense NFTs.
Metaverse Gumball Machine Launches in the Physical World, aka District Hall It would be a shame to launch a Gumball Machine only in the Metaverse, without creating a physical twin. So this is what users saw who arrived via District Hall, Boston. If you just received a laser-cut token from the Internet-Connected Metaverse Gumball Machine, this is how you'd get your Free NFT.
WHAT is going on here? How to Describe Your Metaverse Gumball Machine project It's a space shot into the emerging galaxy (or fake chimera, or group delusion) known as the metaverse. It blasted off from its perch in the Lounge in District Hall Boston in early 2022.
WHY Metaverse Gumball Machine? Now that both Gumball Machine locations (Decentraland & District Hall) offer Free NFTs, you have to decide... Why? Here's one answer.
Easy Metaverse/Blockchain First Step -- Get a Wallet Does anyone care right now about the blockchain and the metaverse? Maybe not, with good reason. But if you're thinking longterm, you can take a first step down that path by setting up a blockchain wallet. MetaMask is a good place to start. It's free, like most of them. But what you'll like most: Metamask doesn't try to dumb down the blockchain experience.
Tough Love on YouTube Shorts Looking for advice on making YouTube Shorts? These guys give it to you straight. With lots of BIG TEXT to DOUBLE DOWN on their POINTS.
Why You Should Try Tactical Placemaking So many placemaking projects originate, and stagnate, in municipal development departments. Or else they get massaged into initiatives that the town or city wants to do anyway. Could "tactical placemaking" be a way around that?
One Thing You Don’t Know About this Famous Glue: Original Gorilla Glue. Notes & Annotations One thing you don’t know about this famous glue: the original Gorilla Glue. PLUS an important, BONUS reminder. Gorilla Glue, the original version, expands, a lot. It foams. The bead you put down slowly grows 2 to 3 times.
Holiday Tree at District Hall features "TikTok Lights" When District Hall joined up with a neighborhood "Holiday Tree" campaign, I knew our tree would feature TikTok lights.
Not an Advent Calendar, an Invent Calendar, and I'm Day #6 Proud to be part of a Holiday Countdown, alongside a Floral Book Wreath and Origami Robot Paper Circuits Kit.
A New Ride: Demo Guy With the gachapon machines up and running, I started casting around for a new idea. Maybe something character-based? I began exploring automata culture, and looking around the city. My automata explorations led me to the U.K., where this art/craft flourishes. As for Boston characters, there was one group of dudes I could hardly avoid: construction guys (and gals).
Modifying Gentleman Jack I downloaded a 6-page PDF with the paper cut-outs needed to create Gentleman Jack. But I wanted/needed to customize it. Gentleman Jack seemed to be a Victorian-type of chap. He's wearing a top hat, for example, and has wide, rounded sideburns. We had to fix that. QuackYeah was happy to oblige.
Coming soon... Cranks! A crank converts circular motion into reciprocating motion. It also works the other way around, but that doesn't interest me now. I want to use servos (circular) to get that connecting rod going -- to power automata. I'm working with a few crank kits I found online, starting with an extremely simple one from PaperMech. This classic crank, btw, is from Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements, originally published in 1868.
From Continuous Servo to DC Motor My strategy with my emerging Demo Guy automata was to replace the hand crank with a continuous servo. But when I pitched the idea to Jack Greenfield, over lunch at a Shwarma place near the Northeastern campus, he had a better idea. "Why not just use a DC motor?"
3D Printing Motor Mounts After testing the newly-arrived motor at Cambridge Hackspace, it was clear we needed a mount to keep the thing from skittering around the table every time we connected it. Given the motor's commodity status in the DIY world, I was confident I could find one that I could 3D print on Thingiverse. It did not disappoint.
Placemaking Report
