From The Lab
Playing the Blues by the Skin of your Teeth
The Problem While working on projects around our house, my wife Emily and I listen to music using our esteemed Bluetooth speaker. Often times, though, our quest takes us into different rooms of the house, as I emphasize to Emily the importance of parallelization for optimizing workloads. Two eye-rolls later, and at least one of […]
Procedurally Generated Art from Perlin Noise
I’ve been really interested in procedural generation after seeing all the things it can create. A month before this, on the previous lab day, Andy used a noise function to procedurally generate a heightmap in order to create a landmass. He left off saying he wanted to try to add rivers. So I thought I’d give […]
Building an FM/RBDS Transmitter using a RasPi Zero
I find it amusing that in this era of abundant personal electronic communication tools, “everyone” still wants to be a broadcaster. More specifically, an FM broadcaster. This belief stems from observing the intense competition in recent years for FCC-issued Low Power FM broadcast licenses in local communities, and more empirically, from my Internet searches to […]
What is this Caller ID thing?
Every day, billions of telephone users take advantage of an early 1980s technology to help them decide if they want to answer an incoming call. I was fascinated by the technology and wanted to learn about its origins. The December ’17 Lab Day was spent in pleasant research digging into the development of Method and […]
Social Graph via Blockchain
Many of my lab day ideas are to explore some new technology. I’ve spent a day with GraphQL, doing image recognition with machine learning using CAFFE, and doing a small ARKit demo among other things. The last three lab days, however, were not centered around a specific technology, but around a problem. Rather, a set […]
USB Thinkpad Laptop Keyboard
Once a month at Tome everyone takes a break from their daily work and gets a free project day or Lab Day, where we can work on any project based on technology. This month I worked on making a USB keyboard from a thinkpad laptop keyboard. (cross post from http://technicallycompetent.com/TMK-thinkpad-keyboard/) I made a good start […]
A Quick and Simple Spatialized Virtual Reality Audio Mixer
A few weeks ago I created a demo for a Spatialized VR Audio Mixer. This is essentially a way to give pieces of audio locations in 3D space and a simulation for what their playback would sound like on a Large Speaker Array…But a video is worth 30,000 words per second, so check it out: […]
Fun with iOS 11
iOS 11 is a funny release from Apple; one where they both implement the most basic, forehead slapping, obvious missing features, to some of the most impressive new technologies available. In most years I imagine Apple would be patting itself on the back for re-inventing the idea of ‘files’, after explicitly removing them for iOS […]
A Long-ish Write Up on Some Very Short Code
I first learned about code golf the way I assume a lot of other people learned about it: I saw an interesting question in the “Hot Network Questions” section of Stack Overflow. I clicked on the link and found the code golf page. Code golf is the idea of writing code to solve a problem […]
Melodic Automata : Good Musicians Borrow, Great Machines Steal
When planning out my first lab day project at Tome, I wanted to create something that bridged the gap between my software engineering position and my musical orchestration passion. An hour or two of research lead me to the idea of using the programming language Max/MSP to write sort of melodic generator. I played with […]
