October 7th, 2007 | class, mas863 | No Comments »
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:
September 25th, 2007 | e15, research | No Comments »
The PLW presented E15 at Flashfoward last Friday. E15 is an OpenGL based programming environment with a Python scripting interface; right now we’re using it to visualize futuristic web interfaces. Screenshots and video of the project can be found at the E15 website, which will be updated as the project develops. Check back for more updates soon!
September 7th, 2007 | calendar, google | No Comments »
As the title to this post suggests, you can use Google Calendar to share calendars by embedding them on your own webpage! This feature has actually existed in Calendar for a while, but this summer I worked on a new version of the embeddable calendars with fellow intern Mike Fitzgerald and our host, Michael Bolin. The new embeddable calendars use Javascript and are a lot more interactive than their HTML-only predecessors. Plus, they look a lot more like the full version of Calendar, and the agenda view has been redesigned to be (I hope!) a little more useful.
The embeddable views are used within Google Calendar to show previews of public calendars, but you can also use the Embeddable Calendar Helper to share your own calendars. The helper will generate some HTML that you can put in your own webpage to embed a calendar (or two, or more). Here is an example using the MIT academic calendar:
In addition to showing the calendars, the embeddable views also make it easy for viewers to subscribe to new calendars (using the button in the bottom right hand corner). I’d love it if my classes did this for assignments so I wouldn’t have to enter everything by hand — if you’re an MIT student taking 6.UAT this term, you’re in luck. I should probably also mention that less detailed calendars for other MIT courses (lectures/recitations only) are available at wikicalendars.com. Enjoy!
August 27th, 2007 | summer | No Comments »
School is starting next week and I’ll be back at MIT in a few days. Blogging was not one of my regular summer activities, but I’ll try to write during the school year to keep a record of my projects/research. As usual I’m wondering how summer managed to pass by so quickly, but I had a great time in New York, and at Google, too. More news on my summer project soon.