This was all over tech news headlines today, but Google is finally supporting IMAP for Gmail. I’m excited about this for a couple of reasons — first, it means that I can finally back up all the e-mail I’ve sent over the last couple years or so since I started using Gmail. I love Gmail, and I can’t imagine going back to an email client with less support for viewing e-mail threads, but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with all that personal data living only on Google’s servers. The other reason I’m excited about this is that it opens up some new possibilities for me to play with visualizing e-mail again. When I was working on Emdash I used my MIT e-mail account for testing, so I was missing over a year’s worth of sent messages. Now that I can access those messages easily with an IMAP interface, I have some data I can use to start working on visualizing two-way e-mail communication. And I can use E15 to do it. I’m psyched.
Archive for October, 2007
Tiny Printed Circuit Boards
Made using the Modela in the Media Lab machine shop, and of course a soldering iron:
They don’t do too much other than transmit "hello world" over a serial connection. Today I’ll be writing a little code to get the larger board to blink an LED and respond to button presses, exciting I know. We’re using an ATTiny45 processor which has a different instruction set than the chip we used in the microcontroller lab I took last year, but hopefully it won’t be too different.
E15 blog / Visualizing Wikipedia
Last week we put up a blog for E15, and today I wrote my first post about some work I’ve been doing with images from Wikipedia. I was struggling to come up with some interesting paths to use for laying out images & text, when I found a good Wikipedia page with a list of different types of curves. The page didn’t have any images, though, so I wrote a script to find the related images and lay them out in E15. The results look nice so far, and I’ll be playing more with the same data this week.
Learning how to make (almost) anything
One of the classes I’m taking this term is MAS.863, "How to Make (almost) Anything," where I’m learning how to use a lot of the fabrication machinery at the Media Lab. There’s a website for the class where all the students are keeping a record of their work (myself included), but I also want to write about my projects here. About every week or so we’re taught how to use a new tool, and then assigned to make something with it. A couple weeks ago the "tool" was the laser cutter and the "assignment" was a 3D Construction Kit.
My construction kit had 4 parts, seen below:
I used the laser cutter to make a bunch of these parts out of corrugated cardboard. The pieces "press fit" together, meaning they can be assembled using the slots cut into the pieces, without any adhesive (if you’re interested in the science of how this works, there is a paper you can read). I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to build with my curvy shapes, but I was pretty happy with the results. Here are some pictures of things I built:
