Download the album free!

After instigating Awesome August and challenging myself to finish 4 projects this month, my first order of business was to start putting the finishing touches on my 8-bit album, “Resistor Anthems”. The overarching theme for all of my Awesome August projects is “open everything” and accordingly, this album is released under the super-permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. That means you are free to download the music, use it however you like, mix it up, mash it up, and use it in podcasts, videos, or commercial projects however you see fit, so long as you provide attribution, preferably like so:

Music: [Track name] by Eric Skiff, http://glitchnyc.com/music

In the interest of making the music as open and easy to repurpose as possible, I’m also putting out many of the Garage Band files used in the making of this album, which contain direct dumps of each nanoloop channel. I wasn’t 100% organized when I started putting this album together, but there should be some great samples you can pull out of there, and if there’s anything you hear on the album that you’d like to work with but can’t find, just let me know

This album was composed primarily on a Gameboy using nanoloop 1.3 and 1.5. Thanks to Bre for lending me his cart and vintage GB!

You can listen to individual tracks after the jump:

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Here at NYCR, this is no ordinary August we’ve just started… This, my friends, is Awesome August.

What’s Awesome August you ask? Well, in order to make this hot summer month live up to its new name, we’ve challenged each other to get off our collective butts and finish up all those great projects, neat ideas, and crazy pipedreams that we’ve been talking about since January and get them done this month.

Like many other Resistors, I’ve had a few projects brewing for far too long, and it’s time to get them done and put them out there. I needed to give myself a deadline, and here it is. I’ve pledged to finish, document, and publish 4 awesome projects in August. It’s a tall order, but I’ve got some great stuff in the hopper, and I’m excited to finally get them done. The idea of Awesome August caught fire at NYCR, and when I issued the challenge to the rest of Resistor as well, everyone in the room stepped up with at least one amazing project that they’re going to finish this month!

So, this will be a busy (and awesome, yes, we’re going to totally wear out that word) month here, but Awesome August doesn’t just stop with us. I’m issuing this challenge to everyone who’s got a project on the burner but hasn’t gotten around to finishing it up. Now is the time! Finish it up, snap some pics, write up a blog post, and tag everything #awesomeaugust so other people can find it, and add a link in the comments here.

Finally, Join us on August 22nd for the Interactive Party – Justin’s already started his Awesome August project for the party – a giant 8′ lite brite!.

You can see what everyone else is tagging with “#awesomeaugust” here:

Help us spread the word! You can link to this post here: http://bit.ly/awesomeaugust

Light bulb + coat hangers + canvas scrap + percolator + 2 hours = table lamp win.

This weekend there are four nifty classes in which to swell your brain full of fabulous information! Whee!

Back by popular demand, Arduino Web Server. An amazing trick that you ought to know:   http://www.eventbrite.com/event/379352654

And for beginners with the desire to make a beautiful and professional electronics project we have Printed Circuit Board Design with EAGLE CAD:      http://www.eventbrite.com/event/393349519

Like lasers? How about lasers that can cut things? Well, we have one and we will teach you how to use it! I know! Amazing!    http://lazzzor.eventbrite.com/

Hey you! How about a nice cheap beginners soldering class? You’ll feel great!    http://www.eventbrite.com/event/397488900

This is gong to be an amazingly educational weekend!

So my hair is thinning the same way my Dad’s did. I’m spending a lot of time tinkering with electronics. I remember how tall his workbench used to seem, the mysterious tools and smells when he worked on his HAM radios. I never knew much about what he did at his job – he had a security clearance, it was Cold War R&D on the fringes of ’50s and ’60s Washington D.C. – but I knew it had something to do with the space program. Recently I read in Airstream Magazine (I bought a ’58 Overlander two years ago, to turn into a recording studio in the new Girls Club building) that Melpar, my Dad’s employer, had built the Airstream-based quarantine units that the astronauts had to stay in when they came back from the moon. Couldn’t let alien moon-bugs destroy the Earth.

When he died in ’92 my Dad left his workshop as messy as ever. While he was alive it had an animating intelligence. Afterwards it was mostly junk. But I claimed a circuit-board vise and kept it for the next fifteen years or so. It got lost in the shuffle, though, and I miss it. I’ll have to order one just like it. I need it now.

(by Dave Pentecost – thanks to Nick Bilton for jogging some memories)