Staticfree Blog

This is my first Threadless submission and my first attempt at design of this sort. It's a cheerful reminder that we don't have to use solar cells to be powered by the sun. If you like it, you should go vote on my design so it can become a shirt!

I haven't been updating this blog all too often, but I have been updating my website! Perhaps I should unify the two at some point, but for now, here's a list of some new stuff:

• Dots! - a graphical way of representing large numbers, in order to better visualize and compare them. How big is 45986 anyhow?
• n770 hacks - I finally got my n770 back from repairs and will be posting various hacks that I do there.
• Infrared Photography - some more IR photos, such as the one above from my recent hike in the White Mountains.

I've been playing with my infrared-modified Canon Powershot A40 some more. I've managed to work around the blurriness due to the confused auto-focus and have done some post-processing work to make the images cleaner. At least for starters, I think I've managed to come up with some images worthy of the time it took to hack it :-)

Below are a few of my favorites so far. Check out my infrared gallery for more or go visit my flickr page to leave a comment.

Having left France Telecom R&D in search of different waters, I arrived at the shores of the Media Lab, where I'm now employeed at NeCSys.

My first day was on Monday and I've already been overwhelmed with new names and faces. I am determined to fix that as soon as possible; there are some amazing people and projects here and I plan to meet them all. If you are at MIT and reading this, stop by E15-463F and say hi.

Tina and I went for a walk around town, enjoying the 10°C weather. We took my recently-modded Canon that now only sees near-infrared. I'm still working out the kinks with the mod, so some pictures are slightly blurry.

I finally did the Bluetooth handset mod using a vintage Series-500-ish handset. It can connect to my phone and using the button on it, pick up the phone and do voice dialing. Click the above image for more details.

I finally made a real version of my 24h analog clock. You can play along at home, as I put up some notes and pictures about the build process. I think it looks quite nice in our kitchen.

I have been working on a design for a noon-at-the-top 24h analog clock. It is going to become a real clock for our kitchen, as soon as I buy the hardware for it and get the face printed.

For fun, I decided to animate the SVG source so that it displays the current time in your browser. You can see the smaller, live version of the clock that should work in quality browsers such as Firefox.

Of course, this is all released under an open-ish license (non-commercial), so feel free to hack away! See the project page for more details.

Update: I've updated the design to version 2.1 so that it works better across platforms. Apparently the text-on-path feature isn't reliable for spacing things out. This new version seems a bit more readable from a distance, too.

I just completed my first IR webcam mod, loosely following the simple directions found on this forum: open it up, scrape off the infrared filter from the lens with a screwdriver, add a visible light filter (in my case, a Wratten 87), and finally close again. This particular webcam (Intel CS-330) is nice for experimentation in that it has an adjustable lens for focusing close up on things.

I modified the directions slightly, so I could preserve as much image quality as I could manage. Instead of scraping off the old filter with a screwdriver, I opted for 600 grit sandpaper (use higher if you can find it) and a little veggie oil (I think you're supposed to use mineral oil, but this is all I had).

So far, it works! So far, I haven't had much to look at yet as almost all our apartment's lighting is compact fluorescent and emits little IR. The above photo was taken in my bathroom with the only remaining incandescent light bulbs. Of course, my shirt and hat are both black, despite them showing up as bright white and grey (respectively) in the photo.

Once I get some daylight, I'll be posting many more photos to this gallery. As I have a lot of the Wratten 87 filter left, I may mod a more portable camera as well for experimentation in the wild. I was able to see quite a bit with just the Wratten 87 filter held in front of my Nokia 6103's camera (that photo was taken during the day).