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The Apple ][ Video Player

An interesting bit of new media art and a gloriously difficult hack all at once, this work explores the modern ubiquity of digital video by bringing it to the 30 year old Apple ][ family of 8-bit computers.

Video files (converted from short animated GIFs) are loaded into memory via floppies. The files are made using a Python script and played back with a decoder written in 6502 machine language. Compression is achieved via a combination of Run Length Encoding (RLE) on frame updates, and the LZ77 algorithm on full frames.

This project has enjoyed a bit of notoriety on the Internet and has appeared on such sites as:

• Hackaday
• Cult of Mac
• Adafruit

link to Hackaday article

The @tweetTrek Twitter Account

The goal of this project was to create a weekly, automatic event for people who like Star Trek and MST3K style comedy.

During a show, commentary is sent as replies to the @tweetTrek account. This makes the content searchable, and puts it out of the way of those not also following the account. Participants vote to select the episode that will be viewed that week by interacting with the bot, and highlights from the last show (as judged by the number of favorites) are retweeted throughout the week.

Automation is done using Python scripts, the 't' console based Twitter client, and the Linux cron daemon.

link to @tweetTrek account

Retro Arcade Control Panel and Game Console

Built into an old writing desk, the layout of this panel was tuned so that I would have a relatively cheap platform on which to practice the oddball control scheme of Williams Defender. A few added tweaks also make it a suitable controller for Stargate (Defender II), Asteroids, and a very large number of other games. It even has a passable NEOGEO layout for more modern stuff like the Metal Slug series.

It functions as both a USB controller for a PC, or as a standalone game system driven by an internal Raspberry Pi. It runs the AdvanceMAME and MAME4ALL emulators with an AdvanceMenu frontend -- all made available as part of Shea Silverman's PiMAME (now called PiPlay) Linux distribution.

link to PiPlay (by Shea Silverman -- not me!)

Some Quick Data Science: A Look At The San Francisco Tweetspace

Right after grad school I started working on a dream project of mine: A location-tied message posting app. After a lot of consideration I decided that the best way to implement this idea was as a Twitter client, and so, Landburd (now in beta!) was born.

At its most basic level of functionality, Landburd searches and returns tweets associated with various apps in order to give the user a sort of basic sense of what’s happening nearby. The kinds of tweets I’m currently presenting are posted via Swarm, Foursquare, and Instagram. I also show regular tweets if they’re...

read on medium.com

Pronouncing "GIF": A Psycholinguistic Approach

Animated GIFs have been kind to me. The small amount of Internet fame I've managed to garner is due mostly to a very niche GIF-related project I finished last summer. So lately I pay a little more attention to the format, and yes, the Great Pronunciation War often weighs heavily on my mind. Today I'm thinking there's a good reason...

read on medium.com

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