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One of the highlights of a year on the west coast was my awakening as a mycophile. Only one hunt yielded enough to eat, but I was hooked. I got a shiitake log and some oyster plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti. The mad genius in charge, Paul Stamets, turns out to be almost as great as the fungi themselves. I guess it was only a matter of time until TED found him.

Get the book: Mycelium Running.

You all know what to do when you hear the secret word, right?

Secret Word is a plugin for iChat.

Download Secret Word.

Secret Word uses SIMBL, JRSwizzle, Sparkle, and the Secret Word of The Day. Thank you!

Preview fonts before installing! Drag fonts onto the icon or into the list. See type with a customizable preview line and a full paragraph of text.

Type Slug was created for Mac OS X 10.2, before Font Book. It remains appealing for its simplicity.

Download Type Slug (Mac OS X 10.2+)

Enter a date:

Do you think reflected images are the coolest thing since candy buttons? Your favorite site hasn’t jumped on that bandwagon yet? Now you don’t have to wait! Install reflection.user.js to make the whole web shiny.

Requires Firefox with greasemonkey. Taken directly from Reflection.js.

For this XM radio device, I developed a software prototype simultaneously with the design documentation. The prototype turned out to be useful in several ways — during design, we could try things out and make empirical decisions; it was a great artifact for client meetings; and it served as interactive documentation for the firmware developer.

The device has a two-line LCD display. A 5-way pad with a few extra buttons navigates the menu tree. This prototype separates the UI and app logic with a simple but sophisticated message-passing layer that makes it completely scriptable, allowing features such as saved states and modes that are not accessible directly through the device UI (for example, battery disconnected). It is written in java and embeds the processing graphics library for rendering.

Launch the simulator
View the marketing site

Magic Brain Lantern channels the collective conscious
Magic Brain Lantern is a test of singularity intelligence
Magic Brain Lantern is environmental background software
Magic Brain Lantern is available for iPhone and Mac OS X

magicbrainlantern.com

A favorite Thinkmap project, the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Ecosystem Explorer is a fun and educational tool bringing scientific research to high school and early college students and the general public. The Chesapeake Bay is one of the most productive habitats on the east coast, and provides a great example of the complexity in who eats who. The visualization is built directly from data collected in the field.

NOAA Chesapeake Bay Ecosystem Explorer

View the Ecosystem Explorer demo. This project uses thinkmap core, extensive custom java and python for data processing. It was originally built for a kiosk with Internet Explorer 5, so it has some weirdnesses in other browsers, but holds up surprisingly well.

“Vernacular is an interactive software droid. It is an associate data processor whose function is to augment our use and understanding of the information culture in which we are immersed. We’re artists of the Star Wars generation. We grew up with cybernetic visions of a twenty-first century. Buck Rogers looked old school, our future was intelligent robots like R2D2 that did not merely respond, but transformed the data flow around us. Vernacular addresses the meta-language of ‘infomatix’. It is a software in which the associative patterns of one’s data is rendered in molecular form.”

Vernacular premiered at EAI in New York in April 2003. Vernacular was created in collaboration with Howard Goldkrand and Beth Coleman. The application and source are freely available for download. Vernacular is based on Craig Reynolds’ flocking algorithm and simple particle physics. It generates spatialized audio and OpenGL graphics. Vernacular requires Mac OS X 10.2.3 or above.

Vernacular at EAI
Soundlab | Cultural Alchemy

Download Vernacular (Mac OS X 10.2.3+) | Source