Prodical’s Blog

I started this blog as an exercise in recording my own thoughts, research and creative activity – as well as learning more about the WordPress publishing platform.

Early on it was pretty much a solely personal exercise… but as I’ve tweaked the site layout, added Search Engine Optimisation, generated a few trackbacks from busier blogs etc. I’ve been noticing a steady increase in visitors.

My posts generally don’t have ‘Allow Comments’ enabled – so I thought I’d open a sticky ‘Comments Welcome!’ post that did. So if… :

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I set out to jailbreak my iPhone with a list of possible gains…

I can’t say it’s been a wholly pain-free experience… I managed to ‘brick’ my iPhone several times and was forced to ‘restore’ loosing some data I hadn’t backed up – but hey – what did I expect? A few weeks on, I’ve regained a bit of device stability,  gotten used to the new functionality and interaction and I’m happy I did it. Here’s how I’ve gotten on…

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I’d been having some issues mixing the PeasyCam and Obsessive Camera Display (OCD) libraries in the same Processing sketch – which I’ve now sort of resolved and learned a thing or two in the process…

I found that switching between a PeasyCam and non-configured OCD viewport camera feed made PeasyCam behave idiosyncratically – loss of mouse control, some offsetting of Z-axis distance (only on the first switch back from an OCD feed – it’s consistent from then on), clipping of the scene – as if the farClip setting in OCD has likwise adjusted it in PeasyCam – though clipping isn’t actually assignable within PeasyCam itself.

Turns out PeasyCam is now at v0.8.1 – I was running an older version – and the documentation now includes a number of methods I hadn’t noticed before.

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I’ve come across this really interesting 3D scanning technique before – but I’ve now spent a bit more time following the various links and exploring it in more detail…

I’m keen to try it for myself and wonder if a ‘micro’ projector such as the Optoma Pico PK 101 DLP and IPEVO Point 2 View USB webcam and/or ‘tricked out’ PS3 Eye Webcam could be a compact and affordable solution – and possibly for live performance too?

There’s a good overview of the technique in the May 2008 post Turn a webcam and projector into a 3D scanner which also provides some Processing applets and code examples and lists useful references and links.

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I got my iPhone 3GS at its launch in June 09 – and though I do love it I reckon it lacks some important functionality and could do with several usability improvements – and I think I’m not alone

I also have an iPod Touch 2G – which I jailbroke with the Dev-Team’s redsn0w 0.72 shortly after getting the iPhone so I could explore Homebrew development – and though I had intended to keep the iPhone ‘official’ – six months of playing and testing has convinced me to jailbreak my iPhone too and unlock some of its hidden potential.

This fairly lengthy post outlines my research, choices, process and outcomes…

Here’s some of what I think I’ll gain:

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I have video documentation from PEAL that I’m planning to edit in FCP… but it’s in .mts format and from a couple of different HD AVCHD camera sources…

After a bit of head-scratching and online research I got to a reasonably straightforward and speedy solution… and in the process managed to clarify a few significant terms for myself such as:
Mbit/s V MBps
Apple ProRes 422
Similarities and Differences Between 1080i and 1080p

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Since the Apple software update to Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 1 I’ve been having problems running some of my Processing sketches – particularly those using MIDI – and Java applets such as SevenUpLive 1.4.

I’ve also been experiencing some memory access errors e.g. “Invalid memory access of location 0×0 eip=0×917108d0” with monoControl and some of my own sketches – which I think are issues with OS X, Java and RAM?

A googled forums.sun.com post and referenced Processing forum post seems to indicate I’m not alone.

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This was a fairly convoluted journey…. but I think I’ve managed to uncover a relatively simple method for importing 3D models into Processing… with help from Marius Watz of the excellent Code & Form: Computational Aesthetics blog via the “rapid prototyping” STL format.

Marius has provided a really useful selection of libraries, code snippets and workshop example sketches at his website and at the Code and Form code repository and has now also released his own unlekkerLib library – “a collection of utility classes that I use frequently, and which I’ve attempted to clean up enough for other people to use. Currently, the most significant features are the STL class for exporting 3D geometry for rapid prototyping and the TileSaver class for outputting high resolution stills from OpenGL applications.”

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It’s been a while since I’ve spent a bit of time browsing and catching up with developments at the monome.org community site – though I’m always interested to see what’s been going on – and typically a few things caught my eye:

MonoControl – “an adaptable and flexible midi control application written in Processing for Ableton Live (or any other DAW) which, if configured correctly, should report all controller changes to MonoControl which then adjusts the LEDs on the monome. The app uses the buttons of the far rhs column of the monome to navigate through 8 different pages – and in each you can create combinations of faders, crossfader, x-y faders, push, toggle and note buttons and button matrixes – all stored in an an xml file.” (my somewhat edited version of the app description)…

This is exactly what I’ve been hoping to develop myself using Nick Rothwell’s shado…so I started to implement it into my Mirror2 real-time video processing Processing sketch and it’s working well…

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