This year Hackers on a Plane gave all the participants an RFID safe passport wallet ( probably a good idea what with our unsafe US passport technology going to a technical conference abroad ). As an after thought and with very little time available I quickly laser cut a logo stencil and spray painted them with some krylon. Came out pretty good I think. Laser cutters and acetate make for some great stencils.

As I continue to populate this blog with cool past content ( along with the new ), I come to something that cost me a lot of time in College days. As part of my grant work, I wrote what basically became a very early DAM solution. This was written around 2002, 2003. It was basically a web interface for professors to upload content for classes and whatever else, and control access to it properly. We also included methods for creating full video / PowerPoint presentations via a GUI. All of this long before youtube and other solutions hit the main stream. I wrote well over 100,000 lines of code for the application, and it was the first large coding project I ever worked on.

To this day every time I look for a DAM or CMS solution I end up thinking… Christ, that horrible first app I wrote back in college is still better than everything else out there… how pitiful is that.

Interesting to note this app was used in production at my college for six years and was running long after I left.

Heh, maybe some day I should rewrite this stuff properly. Who knows what the future holds.

While at Open Hack NYC, having a great time just relaxing and working on a few projects while friends from NYCR ended up winning 2 categories of hacks in the contests, I finally did some repair work on my Stribe. This is one of the original prototype stribe devices. Really glad I picked it up when I did as it is no longer offered in this form. It’s basically 8 touch sensitive pots and a bunch of LED bar graphs arrayed and all linked up to an arduino.

Fun little device, It’s got a full sound max integration software package… and I’ve interfaced it with processing before. I still haven’t decided what to do with it, but I am sure that eventually the perfect use for this device will avail itself to me.