Karolina from Flightphase made an awesome case study about the University of Dayton project. Watch me sound like a tool.

I went into the weekend thinking that I would just help out with a project that I found interesting, but instead I made the mistake of telling some people about an incredibly stupid idea Cass and I had (we tend to do that — ask me to tell you about Magnum Map some time if I haven’t already) to make a bar game out of postings from the Craigslist section, “Casual Encounters.”  If you’ve never been to that section, congratulations.  As the title suggests, it’s a place for people to meet others who want to have casual sexual encounters.  It’s split up into sections like “m4w” (man for woman), “w4w” (woman for woman), t4m (transexual for male), etc.  If you dig a little deeper, you even find categories like “mw4w”.  But the most important part is: people tend to post extremely explicit images, presumably of themselves “showcasing their wares”, so to speak.

The Erotic Photohunt game in all of its glory

The idea was somewhat inspired by the game called “Erotic Photohunt” that you find on these arcade machines in bars called “Megatouch”.  If you are around my age and sometimes go to dive bars, I guarantee that you’ve seen one of them before.

So Cass and I were trying to figure out how to “gameify” Casual Encounters.  At first we were amused by the idea of “Casual Encounters Roulette”, in which you would spin some kind of wheel that showed several pictures from Craigslist and whichever picture it landed on, your info would automatically be sent to the person who posted it. But we decided that that was too mean/risky. What we came up with was simple:  you are confronted with an image from casual encounters and the titles of 3 posts.  The photo came from one of the posts.  You have to guess which one.

So I told Kaho Abe and Amelia Marzec about this idea, and surprisingly, they liked it. Soon, Aaron Meyers and Jon Cohrs joined in and we had an awesome team.  I ended up being in charge of the API that scraped Craigslist, Kaho, Jon, and Amelia made a great physical interface with these big buttons (I’ll dig up some pictures eventually), and Aaron made the JavaScript front-end.

Below are some (“curated”) screenshots from the game.  But feel free to play yourself!

As per the rules of the Art Hack Weekend, the source is also available on Github.

Awesome new video made by Duncan Skiles of Waverly Films about the 3rd annual World Series of ‘Tubing, which was at Signal to Noise #2 at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Installation made with Hush Studios and Flightphase for the University of Dayton admissions office. When I enter the building, it is in “idle mode”, where there is some animated typography of some questions. When I enter the interaction area, a 87×26 field of cubes starts moving, rotating, and scaling in waves, and some cubes directly in front of me congeal into a surface and a video of student life starts playing. At one point, you can see the Kinect cameras installed in the ceiling.

Materials
1 32′x12′ wall
3 Panasonic PT-D6000ULS projectors
4 kinect cameras
2 mac minis (2 kinects each)
TSPS “people tracking” software (modified to use 2 kinects)
1 Mac Pro tower
custom openFrameworks software

Back in March I took part in a storytelling series called StoryCollider in Brooklyn. I was a little nervous in the beginning, but I think I get more comfortable after a minute.

You can also subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories just about every week.

into this:

Now you can!

Laser-cut mirrored acrylic with peel-off adhesive on the back. Available for free!

How to make your own (very rough)

1. Download the pattern in Illustrator or EPS format
2. Take a 8 inch piece of standard 1inch wide double-stick puffy tape and put it on the back of a piece of mirrored acrylic.
3. Put the entire thing in the laser cutter with the tape facing up
4. Set the laser cutter to raster. On a 60 watt laser, set power=65, speed=6.0, PPI=1000
5. Cut away!

In all of the coverage of the release of the birth certificate, before getting into how wrong Trump was, the reporters always make sure to remind us he is “a brilliant man” (1:20 in the above video), “a genius,” etc.

Is he? Really?

Listening to him talk is like listening to a teenager argue with his parents. He is evasive and completely transparent in his attempts to use buzzwords and stupid rhetorical tactics to manipulate the situation. And yet people still say he is brilliant! It’s baffling!

I think that this must be an instance of a tendency that people have to think that anyone who can make a lot of money is a genius. Maybe not an Einstein genius, but genius nonetheless. They think there must be some kind of higher intelligence that it takes to make shitloads of green. And I guess I’m the last person to weigh in on what it takes to make lots of money, but I still think that this belief is totally and dangerously wrong. It seems to me that the only thing that makes Trump special is how little character he has. And that is what lets him do selfish and inane things and manipulate the easiest led amongst us.

OK, rant over.

I started a project forever ago called DeleteCity. It is a plugin for WordPress that finds videos that have been taken down from YouTube and posts them on your blog. Here is a (new and improved!) explainer:

I just got around to actually making it, so now I am looking for beta testers. If you have a WordPress blog and want to save the Internet, please get in touch! If you don’t have my email address, just leave a comment on this post. The deletecity website isn’t ready yet, but the plugin works, so if you just want the plugin and don’t want to be a beta tester, you can get it on Github!

more detailed description after the break

When you make a Github repository, one of the first things it asks you is if you would like to import a subversion repository. But for some reason this wasn’t working with the Unlogo Google Code repository.  It would just hang while trying to get the authors or something…

There is also an entire help page about moving from Subversion to Github which recommends svn2git or git-svn.  Neither of these worked for me either.  They would just kind of fail silently and nothing would happen.  So, being the masochist that I am, I decided to just write a little bash script that loops through each subversion revision and commits it to Github.

I’m sure this script is missing a lot of things — I am by no means a SVN, GIT, or bash master.  It doesn’t deal with deleted files at all — I couldn’t figure out how to do that, so I am going to just remove all orphaned files at the end manually.  But the nice thing is that is is simple and you can customize/improve it how you wish.

Suggestions are very welcome.

script is after the jump.

#!/bin/bash

# First make the git directory
# Of course, you will want to change this to your repository
echo "Making the local Github repository"
mkdir Unlogo
cd Unlogo
git init
git remote add origin git@github.com:jefftimesten/Unlogo.git

#Make a .gitignore file that will ignore the .svn metafiles
echo ".svn" >> .gitignore

#Check out revision 1 of your SVN repository into the current directory
#Similarly, you will want to change this to your subversion repository
echo "Checking out the subversion repository into the same directory"
svn co -r 1 http://unlogo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ .

#Get the total number of revisions in your repository
REVISIONS=`svn info --revision HEAD | perl -ne 'if(m/(Revision:) ([0-9]+)/i){print $2;}'`

echo "$REVISIONS total revisions.  Starting..."
for ((i=1; i<REVISIONS; i++))
do
	echo "Getting revision $i"
	svn update -r $i -q

	echo "Adding all files from revision $i"
	git add **

	#Get date and author of commit
	AUTHOR=`svn info | perl -ne 'if(m/(Last Changed Author:) ([^(]+)/i){print $2;}'`
	DATE=`svn info | perl -ne 'if(m/(Last Changed Date:) ([0-9-: ]+) /i){print $2;}'`

	#The commit message is the 3rd line down of svn log -r $i
	MESSAGE=`svn log -r $i | head -4 | tail -1`

	echo "COMMITTING revision $i: $AUTHOR $DATE $MESSAGE"
	git commit -q --date="$DATE" -m "$MESSAGE" 

	echo "PUSHING revision $i"
	git push -u origin master
done

I just committed 129 revisions of my SVN repository to Github. Nice, eh?

haarspider is a speed project I did today.  It spiders through webpages and finds faces in images and creates an average face. You can get the source code at Github.  It uses haar cascades to find the faces, so it could actually find anything you have a haar cascade for.  Here are the ones that come with OpenCV:

1. eyeglasses
2. eye
3. frontalface  (this is the one I am using in the samples)
4. lefteye
5. righteye
6. fullbody
7. lowerbody
8. upperbody
9. eyepair_big
10. eyepair_small
11. mouth
12. nose
13. profileface

I’m not totally sure how haar cascades are generated, but I think it’s pretty much the reverse of this.


EXAMPLE USAGE
---------------
haarspider --url http://www.cnn.com --levels 2 --max 1000 --profile cascades/haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml --out cnnfaces.jpg

This will:
1. find all images on cnn.com and find faces in them
2. find all of the links on cnn.com and find all of the faces on those pages.
3. Go back to 1 (depending on how many levels you specify)

Press 'o' at any time to output an image.

I’ve been gittin’ it up†† over at Github recently.  I think I’ve racked up over 100 commits over the past few months, but I completely made that up, so I’m not sure.

Usable Stuff

1. Code for Art – This is 50+ sample openFrameworks apps that I use in the class of the same name that I teach at the Parsons Design & Technology program. You can check out the syllabus and lessons at my teaching website: prof.crouse.cc
2. ofxASIFT – ASIFT stands for Affine & Scale Invariant Feature Transform.  It is an algorithm for image matching by Jean-Michel Morel and Guoshen Yu.  ofxASIFT is an openFrameworks wrapper for it.  It is not real-time.  In fact, it is pretty slow.  But if you need some really good image matching for, say, still images, then this is the way to go.
3. Craig2KML – I spent the past 2 days completely obsessed with this one.  It is based on a project I did a long time ago called Earthify.  But now I’ve translated it into a little c++ program that uses libXML2, libKML, libCURL, and TidyLib.  It takes a craigslist search like this:
   

   http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/nfa?query=&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk=2000&bedrooms=&addTwo=purrr&hasPic=1

   and turns it into a KML file, which you can then open in Google Maps, like this:

   View Larger Map

   Stay tuned for a web-based version of this.

4. ofxJSON – This is probably the most usable of the bunch. Yet another openFrameworks addon for working with JSON using jsoncpp, a really nice object-oriented JSON library.  I have a few changes in mind, but it is pretty stable.
5. ofxBerkelium – “Berkelium is a BSD licensed library that provides off-screen browser rendering via Google’s open source Chromium web browser.”  ofxBerkelium is — you guessed it — a wrapper for Berkelium so that you can render fully-interactive web pages (including Flash!) inside an openFrameworks project.

Experimental/In Progress

1. ofxClutter – Clutter is a great interface library written in C, and I wanted to create a wrapper for openFrameworks, but they really discourage you from using raw OpenGL when using Clutter, which effectively makes it incompatible with openFrameworks, so I’m not sure I will be continuing with it.  I originally discovered it when looking for an alternative to the Cocoa library, CoreAnimation, so if you are making something that involves a lot of 2D transitions, fades, etc., you should check it out.
2. ofxOpenCV22 – Yes, openFrameworks already has an openCV addon, but I’ve been working with the new version of OpenCV outside of openFrameworks, and I have some ideas about how to make it play a little nicer with the object-oriented structure of newer versions of openCV.  Pay no attention to the code that is in there now — it is old stuff that I committed when I was still trying to follow the formula of the old addon.  In addition to all of the old stuff like face tracking, optical flow, blob tracking, etc., my version will include lots of stuff for feature detection. I’m primarily making it from stuff I am writing for Unlogo, so I’ll be committing more when I have a chance to work on Unlogo some more.

†† I considered taking this out, but you have to respect something that sounds so horrible on so many different levels. It stays in the post!

[DOWNLOAD IT FROM GITHUB]

[Berkelium] takes advantage of Chromium’s multiprocess rendering to isolate browsers from each other and can render to any buffer in memory. The user of the library can inject input and javascript code into web pages to control them, as well as listen for events generated by the page such as navigation events, load sequence events and paint events. Berkelium provides a small API for embedding a fully functional browser into any application.

My bike.

See it also on Flickr. Notice the date (December 15, 2009), and the fact that the caption is “Jeff Crouse’s green and yellow Bright Bike.”  It wasn’t a super expensive bike, but I really liked it.  It was a Frankenstein bike made by a friend of a friend.  The lovely yellow retro-reflective tape was put there by Simon Jolly as part of Michael Mandiberg‘s “Bright Bike” project. I would often get compliments on it as I rode down the street because it was so distinctive and unique.  I have fond memories of trips to Coney Island and summer rides around Williamsburg on this bike, not to mention the daily trips to work when the weather was nice.

On December 4, 2010, the bike was stolen from right outside my 3rd floor apartment door.  The front door of my building — a thin metal gate — leads you into tiny mail/trash room.  This door doesn’t close very well.  The second door closes, but you have to kind of push it closed.  So my guess is that the front door was open, as it usually is, but someone (it could very well have been me, but I’ve lived here for quite a while and know the door situation) failed to push this second door closed when entering or leaving, and some asshole came in and took my bike.

I was on my way to a holiday party when it was stolen.  The funny thing is, we took a car service to this party, and while we were in the car, I saw a dude on a green bike with reflective yellow stripes riding down McGuinness Blvd in Greenpoint, and I thought to myself: “Wow, that looks just like my bike!  But it can’t be.  My bike is safe in my building.”  When I got home, I realized that this wasn’t the case.

Back in September, I had my backpack (containing laptop, wallet, hard drive with tons of work) stolen in San Jose, CA while at the 01SJ festival.  I’ve had bad luck with theft recently.  I reported it to the police immediately, complete with the serial number.  While I was still in San Jose, I checked a few pawn shops, Craigslist, EBay, but gave up after a day.  I never got it back, nor did I expect to.  So, I don’t know why I didn’t report my stolen bike to the police — but it was probably because I had no serial number and assumed that the police have better things to do than finding stolen used bikes without serial numbers.

Today, I was having lunch at Saltie on Metropolitan Ave, and as I was eating my lovely Scuttlebutt sandwich, I noticed a bike right outside of the window, directly in front of  of La Bella Mariella Pizza II, that looked just like my bike but with black stripes instead of yellow.  This is what it looked like: (click for bigger versions)

Notice the yellow tape peeking through in this one.

They didn't even bother covering this tape.

Same exact brand.

Same shitty mountain-bike breaks with yellow piping.

Definitely my bike. Single speed, green bike with yellow tape.

Upon closer inspection, I concluded that it was *definitely* my bike. You can see the yellow reflective tape in some of the pictures, and in others you can see black tape sloppily wrapped over the yellow tape.  There is simply no doubt that this is my bike.  If you compare it to the top photo, you’ll see that it has different grips and pedals. This is because the grips were badly worn after a few years of use, so I replaced them this summer.  I don’t know who changed the pedals — probably whatever shop the thief brought it to.  You can see that it had cages (the little things you put your feet in), and the pedals were metal and somewhat small.  I imagine this isn’t ideal for delivery people (all of the other bikes at that rack belonged to delivery people at the 3 restaurants on hat block), so they replaced them.

I went home and (after posting the pics on Facebook, of course) called the 90th precinct police station in Brooklyn.  I realized that getting this bike back was a long shot, as whoever now owns it probably bought it from a shop and has no idea that it is stolen, and I never had the bike registered.  Literally all I have by the way of proof of ownership is a Flickr page from 2 years ago. I talked to a nice — if somewhat slow — police officer.   I clearly explained my situation and apologized for not registering my bike or reporting the incident when it was stolen.  I told him that I knew that it was kind of a long shot, but I just wanted to know if I should bother to come to the station and pursue this any further.  The officer asked me *three times in a row* how I knew it was my bike. He wasn’t confused or dissatisfied with the answer — it was as if he forgot immediately after I said it.  I patiently explained about the reflective tape, the color, the wear pattern, and the brand 3 times.  I told him repeatedly that all I wanted to know was whether or not I should even bother to come down to the station, but all he seemed to want to do was explain to me all of the problems with my situation.  About how it was really my word against whoever now claims the bike.  About how it’s probably not even the thief who now has it locked up, but someone who bought it in some shop.  And how I really should have had the bike registered, or at least reported it after it was stolen.  Finally, he said that I should come down to the station and at least report it.  It was a pretty frustrating phone call.

So I walked the mile to the station in the 15° weather. On the way, I was happy to see that the bike was still there. I was a bit paranoid that I had aroused suspicion by taking many pictures of it and it would be gone. I brought my own Kriptonite U-lock with me because I was considering throwing it on there before I went to the station, but didn’t want to do anything that might piss off the cops right before asking them for help.

I talked to a few officers who were genuinely nice and seemed to want to help. I showed them the pictures, and they agreed that it was definitely my bike, and they were ready to help me out.  One of the officers who seemed to be in charge said that, at the very least, I should go put my lock on it also so that it doesn’t disappear. Bingo!   So they offered to take me over to the bike rack in a car that was heading out on patrol.

While we were waiting for the patrol car to show up, a bunch of officers, including the two that I was going to ride with, were looking at the pictures on my laptop and kind of commiserating with me.  I was explaining how I had kind of given up on it, that I had already ordered another bike, but that it was frustrating that it was locked up 4 blocks from my house and I couldn’t do anything about it.  One of the officers that I was going to ride with (we’ll call him Good Cop) was totally on board and was assuring me that we were going to figure it out.  But his partner (Bad Cop) wasn’t buying it.  Like the officer on the phone, all Bad Cop seemed to want to do was explain to me, over and over, the reasons why  my situation was not good.  I politely reminded him of the pictures I had showed him, and that it was 100% my bike.  He snapped back: he didn’t care if the picture looked *exactly* like the bike.

“There are a lot of cars out here that look exactly like my car.  That doesn’t mean that I can just go take one!”, says Bad Cop.

But I was nice and polite and patient — I completely understood my situation. I wasn’t trying to question him or his assessment of the situation. All I wanted to do was see if there was anything that could be done.  But at that point, my spirits were sinking.  The car arrived and we headed over.   It was my first time in the back of a police car — those things have no leg room whatsoever. On the way over, he continued to explain the hopelessness of my situation.  He seemed to be getting more and more hostile — not mean, just clearly less concerned about me and annoyed that I would have the audacity to put him through this.

We parked across the street from the bike rack and walked over.  The officers wanted to talk to the restaurant owners to see if any of their delivery guys had bought a bike recently.  I asked the officers if I should put my lock on the bike, as someone at the station had recommended.  Bad Cop said that was a terrible idea, and that he didn’t care if a police officer had suggested it because it “didn’t make any sense.”  I wondered what I had done to earn his total lack of Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect.

First up, the owner of the pizza place — no luck.  None of the delivery guys claimed the bike.  In fact, one of them said that the bike had been there for at least a week.  Apropos of nothing I said, Bad Cop was very skeptical and said again that the only proof that he would accept was a serial number, but that if it was still there in 2 weeks, I should come by and cut it loose, adding “but I didn’t tell you that.”  Good Cop asked to see the photo again, and pointed out that the pedals and grips didn’t match the bike on the rack.  I explained that I had the grips changed, but I didn’t know about the pedals.  This was too much for Good Cop.  He was no longer on my side and told me that the picture actually did more harm than good in terms of proving my ownership.

So the officers went into the Thai place next door.  While they were inside, the owner of the pizza place told me that I should just put my lock on the bike and come back later and cut off the old lock.

It was about 3pm at that point — apparently the delivery guy at the Thai place was due to arrive any minute.  But the officers were through with me.  They said they weren’t “going to wait around here in the cold,” but encouraged me to wait and confront the delivery guy when he arrived.  I asked them what I should say to this guy if/when he shows up.

“Just ask him if he bought the bike recently”.

And then what?

“If he says he has, call us.”

Bad Cop warned me against putting my lock on the bike or trying to cut it free myself (presumably unless I wait 2 weeks first), and they left.

I waited for about 10 minutes, realized it was ridiculous, and went home.

The End.

I created a little CV web app for the musician/”mad beat scientist” FlyingLotus back in November, and it launched today.

I’d like to give super big props to Eugene Zatepyakin, aka in-spirit.  Eugene used the Alchemy Project to compile a SURF algorithm into ActionScript, and the Apparat framework to optimize it, resulting in a totally real-time matching algorithm in ActionScript, ASSURF.  Without his work, this definitely wouldn’t have been possible.

If you have any of the album art, click here to try it out.

The Rockwell Group

Starting in  November, I worked for 6 weeks with the Interaction Lab at the Rockwell Group.  It was loads of fun, and great to work with such smart guys.  I went to Portugal and Bristol, UK to install a project for Timberland, and worked on a recently launched installation for Cosmopolitan Hotel.  I was kind of a hired gun on both of these projects, brought in at the end to help them meet their deadline, but I’m glad I got a chance to work with them and I hope to work with them in the future.

Flightphase

Back in July, I did some work with Karolina Sobecka (who I met at my Minneapolis Art on Wheels residency) and Jim George for Infinity.  Like Rockwell, I was just a kind of hired gun, but the project turned out really well, I think.  I mostly worked on hacking OpenTSPS (not-so-coincidentally developed by the Rockwell Lab), optimizing the people tracking to make the interaction smoother.  The project was built in openFrameworks.  Another group who I hope to work with again very soon.

The project was commissioned by Hush Studios.  There are some additional photos on Flickr.

Listings Project

Listings Project is a free weekly email of living and workspace for rent, sublet, swap, and sale focused around our arts community.

I signed up for the list a few years ago when I was looking for a place to live, and recently I was put in touch with Stephanie Diamond, who runs the list.  This was one of those situations where a little work on my part could save Stephanie a ton of work, so it just kind of made sense.  I have made the submission process database-driven, and we will continue to work on more improvements in the coming months.

Globes iPhone app

Marshall and Nora , aka Ligorano/Reese, are two great artists who I met while at Eyebeam. One of their projects is a set of snow globes that feature a single word, including all of the seven deadly sins, and a special “Fuck” globe.  I am working on making an iPhone version of the globes using openFrameworks, the Bullet physics engine, and a OBJ loader made by Bill Dudney.  It’s been a bit of a struggle, seeing as how I am still slightly above n00b level with OpenGL and I have never worked with loading OBJ files before — much less with the restrictions of OpenGLES — but I’ve just about got the flakes flying around like real snow inside the globe.  Stay tuned!

FlyingLotus
Almost a year ago, I started working on computer vision project for the musician Flying Lotus.  Originally, I was writing a server-side demon for matching submitted images.  In fact, it’s the same daemon that I used for the POP Magazine app.  But recently, I discovered some pretty amazing work by in-spirit.  Eugene used the Alchemy Project to compile a SURF algorithm into ActionScript, and the Apparat framework to optimize it, resulting in a totally real-time matching algorithm in ActionScript, ASSURF.  Using ASSURF, I was able to write a little Flash app wherein users could hold up albums, cds, and printed artwork, and “lock in” the matches at different angles. When you get the right combination, it triggers a download of a secret track or other special feature. It was supposed to launch in November, but it still hasn’t launched for some reason, so until then, here is a demo that I made for the Warp guys:

Like a lot of people, I have a little stash of project ideas in the back of my brain that just sit around, taking up room, not being gracious enough to die, and not urgent enough to make themselves into reality. So some time in January, I will take 10 days off to bulldoze my way through as many of these ideas as possible.

These are small, sometimes stupid projects, but there is something to be said for pushing out a bunch of projects quickly.  It’s a chance to tackle the “release early” part of RERO, scratch 10 itches at the same time, and make room for new projects.

I am going to aim for differing levels of “completeness” depending on the project, but I think the constraint of 1 project, 1 day will instill in my some kind of superpower that will allow me to make the most of the allotted time.

Vote!

10 is a nice round number, but I have more than 10 ideas!  What to do?  I could leave it up to you.  Please read the descriptions below and vote for the 5 you like the most. And let me know if you’d like to help with any of the projects!

See the projects and vote after the break!

Fishle.gs

You know those Christ fish you see on the back of peoples’ cars? Did you ever wish you had little acrylic, adhesive-backed legs that you could stick on them. I will make them for you!  That’ll teach ‘em.  I call it Guerilla Atheism (or at least guerilla anti-creationism).  I bought the domain www.fishle.gs!
Current Level of Completeness: none
Desired Level of Completeness: Website with instructions for making legs, and a few of them for sale
Technologies: Laser cutter, PHP/HTML
Difficulty: 5/10

Magnum Map

Once upon a time there was an iPhone app called I Am Rich. It cost $1000 and did absolutely nothing except impress anyone who saw that you had it on your phone. This purpose of this app is also to impress people, but not with the size of your wallet. This iPhone app would tell you the closest store that sells Magnum brand condoms.  Somewhat based on both the Seinfeld episode and the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode. In collaboration with Cassandra Gero.
Current Level of Completeness: none
Desired Level of Completeness: Beta app
Technologies: Objective C
Difficulty: 8/10

CraigsRoulette

According to Nerve.com, the Craigslist Casual Encounters section is “an online bulletin board where armies of people yearn to hook up in a wide spectrum of ways”, not to mention the home of “sexual pioneers.”  Combining the random social connection of ChatRoulette and the thrill/risk of Text Roulette, CriaigsRoulette is an iPhone program that invites users to “spin the barrel”, which causes the app to cycle through images of posters on Craigslist CE. When it eventually lands on one image, it automatically dials the phone number (or perhaps sends a text message) to the lucky Craigslist user. In collaboration with Cassandra Gero.
Current Level of Completeness: none
Desired Level of Completeness: Beta app
Technologies: Objective C
Difficulty: 8/10

The Typwriteizer

Inspired by Steve Lambert’s Self Control app, The Typwriteizer (sp?) is a simple program that, when launched, will immediately restart your computer in a mode where you can only open your selected text editing application.  Great for anyone who absolutely has to get some writing done!  Great for people for whom SelfControl doesn’t go far enough, like gamers.  Granted, this application might soon be made irrelevant by cloud computing and more apps becoming web-based, but I still think it’s a cool idea!  TypwriteizerOS would be even cooler…
Current Level of Completeness: none
Desired Level of Completeness: Beta app
Technologies: Don’t even know yet
Difficulty: 9/10

Deal With It 2.0

Last week I made a little speed project called DealWithIt.app. I told my friend Aaron about it, and he got really excited.  I was a bit confused because it was extremely simple and stupid, but I thought maybe he just really liked the Deal With It meme.  Later, we were talking about it, and apparently he thought that I had made an app that was constantly searching for faces on your screen and, when it found one, it triggered the sunglasses.  And honestly, I wanted to do that — I just didn’t want to spend a ton of time on something so stupid.  But Aaron has shamed me into wanting to do it.
Current Level of Completeness: 1.0 version
Desired Level of Completeness: 2.0 version with features mentioned above
Technologies: OpenCV (Haar classifiers), OpenGL (read screen buffer)
Difficulty: 4/10

Airhorn Bike Handle Attachment

It’s not really bike season any more, but when it was, my ride home was constantly stained by Bike Rage when stupid pedestrians would wander mindlessly into the bike lane and I would have to scream out in a passive-aggressive way, “Uh, EXCUSE ME!”  The alternative is to get a dinky little bike bell, and honestly, no one takes bike bells seriously, especially in the hectic mess of SoHo Broadway on a Saturday afternoon.  You need something that people have no choice but to acknowledge, and hopefully get a little scared in the process.  An airhorn!
Current Level of Completeness: none
Desired Level of Completeness: published assembly instructions and working demo
Technologies: A trip to Home Depot, possibly laser cutter
Difficulty: 5/10

Spiderman Sticker Dispenser

When people park their cars on the side of the street that is being cleaned, they are rewarded with a big neon sticker on their car window shaming them for standing in the way of sanitation.  I’d like to do the same for cars that park in bike lanes.  But more importantly, there needs to be a way for bikers to administer this punishment without slowing down.  This is where the Spideman Sticker Dispenser comes in.  This is a device that you wear on your wrist that allows you to quickly and easily slap a sticker on a car.
Current Level of Completeness: none
Desired Level of Completeness: published assembly instructions and working demo
Technologies: A trip to Home Depot, possibly laser cutter
Difficulty: 8/10

He, She, or They?

Has this ever happened to you?
Hipster 1: “Hey man, did you get that new Joe Dirt and the Purple Nurples album?”
Hipster 2: “OMG No! But I want to because I love them!”
Hipster 1: “Uh, them? Get your pronouns straight, you douchebag. Joe Dirt and the Purple Nurples is just one girl.”
Well then this is the app for you!  Simply type in the name of the musical act in question, and it will give you an unambiguous answer to that crucial question.
You probably shouldn’t vote for this one.  Too stupid.
Current Level of Completeness: none
Desired Level of Completeness: beta app
Technologies: Objective C
Difficulty: 3/10

3fram.es iPhone app

3fram.es is a newish project by Aaron Meyers, and for a while now we’ve been wanting to make an iPhone version.  It should be very easy with the work I’ve done on the Unlogo uploader, so it’s just a matter of churning it out.
Current Level of Completeness: none
Desired Level of Completeness: beta app
Technologies: Objective C
Difficulty: 7/10

Moustachizer

If you are like me, you lay awake at night wondering what your favorite movie would look like if all of the characters had moustaches.  Well I went ahead and started making an app that can answer that question for you.  This one is kind of cheating because I definitely have to make this.  It was a prize in the Unlogo Kickstarter campaign.  But whatevs I can put it in here if I want!
Current Level of Completeness: some
Desired Level of Completeness: working FFMPEG filter
Technologies: Objective C
Difficulty: 5/10

Pandastream WordPress Plugins

This one isn’t as immediately attention-catching, but there ar a bunch of times that I could have really used it.
Current Level of Completeness: some
Desired Level of Completeness: beta version of plugin
Technologies: PHP
Difficulty: 6/10

In a world of globalization and rapid social change does religion provide the common values and ethical foundations that diverse societies need to thrive in the 21st century? Or, do deeply held religious beliefs promote intolerance, exacerbate ethnic divisions, and impede social progress in developing and developed nations alike? To encourage a far-ranging discussion on one of human kind’s most vexing questions, the 6th semi-annual Munk Debate will tackle the resolution: be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world.

http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/Religion

Deal With It
Deal With It (Universal)
Source Code

Thanks to Akira_At_Asia who made the ofxTransparent addon!

Stay tuned for proper credits.

== Edit – fixed link ==
Download Source

It will be very embarrassing if it fails again.

http://eyebeam.org/events/unlogo-workshop

Please spread the word!