NYC Resistor

Saturday May 7th! Come one, Come all!

NYCR will be hosting our super duper Interactive Show.

The theme this year is ANYTHING INTERACTIVE. That’s right, ANYTHING… INTERACTIVE. That includes people, peoples!

Music? yeah, we got it.
Blinking lights? hello? c’mon, you know we got that covered!
Stabby things? why do you think we have an 18+ policy?

So come and be creative, come and grab a drink, come and meet the Resistors. Screw it, it’s a Saturday night and we like to have an excuse for a blow out kind of party so just come!

$10 tickets in advance, $15 tickets at the door

Tickets now on sale

Listen up, golddigga! We got some puzzles from Red Bull to solve. We found a secret room. That was fun.
-… -.–   – …. .   .– .- -.– –..–   .. – …   … .–. . .-.. .-.. . -..   -… .-.. . – -.-. …. .-.. . -.–   .–. .- .-. -.- .-.-.-

Update: Added a better version of the spectrogram.

The inPulse watch is a great platform to hack on. It has an ARM7, 32 KB of flash and 8 KB of RAM, Bluetooth, a buzzer, an OLED screen and a button. Not much by today’s standards, but plenty to play around with. The programming environment is very much like a microcontroller; no multitasking, no dynamic memory, and very constrained memory/cpu. That is, of course, what makes it so much fun.
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So there’s been some news regarding Scrabble making some rule changes as of late. I’m not sure I hold with all those rules, but I figured if we’re looking at making scrabble better I’d toss my hat into the ring.

My new scrabble tile set provides game players with a fully international character set through the miracle of character set encoding standards. By using my entirely hexadecimal tile set you can deploy your scrabble words in full unicode, or simple ascii. I think however, I might need a bigger board. The memory space on this bit of antiquity is a bit on the small side.

More on My Flickr

Dear Parker Brothers, this is a parody. Please do not threaten litigation. I mean you no harm. In fact I am quite sure my suggestion of homebrew tile sets can only increase interest in scrabble and scrabble related paraphernalia. I am your friend. Love me as I have loved you. Please.

PARTY TONIGHT! BE THERE OR BE AN EQUILATERAL RHOMBUS!

Here’s a flyer I whipped up for today’s party. Looks like this one is going to be awesome. Can’t wait to play with all the cool projects. There’s going to be a DJ this time too! Make sure you’ve RSVPed!

Ok maybe it’s a little smaller than life-size, but it’s a hella fun way to play Katamari.

More details on how it’s put together can be found on my blog, kellbot.com

A friend and I had dinner in the little Hudson River town of Beacon NY last night, after a day hike on nearby South Beacon Mountain.  As luck would have it, Beacon is home to the Retro Arcade Museum. Despite the enticing name, we almost didn’t bother checking it out since it was fairly late, and from a distance the museum appeared to have closed down for the evening. What a mistake that would have been!  Inside was the finest collection of classic arcade games, pinball machines, console and handheld games I have ever seen (not that I’ve seen a lot of these, but it was still *very* impressive). The owner, Fred, gave us the grand tour, which includes a hilarious party room in the back dubbed “grandma’s kitchen”, outfitted with yellow formica everything, just like your nana’s — perfect for hosting hipster birthday parties. We didn’t have time to play the games but for ten bucks you can enter the matrix and play anything you want for a full hour. And these are not a bunch of PacMan machines you could find on eBay. Fred has obviously done a lot of homework, and legwork, and acquired a number of very fine examples of early games, including many electro-mechanical ones and first-of-their kinds. It is truly a museum. Of awesome.

Beacon is a 75 minute train ride from Grand Central, and the museum is a one mile walk from the train station. Aside from the museum, Beacon has a number of other cute shoppes and restaurants so this would make an excellent day trip for the whole family. I shall be back.

Noah Zerkin, is a regular at NYC Resistor events and craft nights. Also pretty well known in the local community for his DIY augmented reality work. In fact he gave a quick talk ( his first ever =P ) at IgniteNYC 3. He just posted this video ( saw it via twitter ). I am reposting it so people can get super excited by the work he is doing. It’s amazing stuff. And it can best be described as…. Nintendo eat your heart out.

Or for fans of the wizard… “It’s soooo baaaad…”

All of the excellent sketches contributed for the Spooky Box Halloween party project are up on the wiki. Go download them and wet your appetite for all the great Processing classes coming up!

Sign up for Processing and Arduino – Tomorrow night!!
Sign up for Processing 101: Hello Pixel – November 22nd