Sam Jacoby

Shopcraft as Soulcraft

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Shopcract as Soulcraft belongs to the category of things that make me feel bad about myself. It keeps company with technology executives who turn treehouse builders, itinerant and beautifully-penniless bicycle adventurers, and Instagram feeds of lithe young people on sunwashed yacht outtings with Derrida paperbacks. If you're into that good kind of hurt (and I am), it's a solid, quick read and well-worth picking up.

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Rolling with Backbone + Marionette

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Over at Formlabs, we've been putting together a new frontend application using Backbone + Marionette. I've done a fair amount with Backbone, over the years, but have never really grasped it. I mean, I understand the basics, but the lack of prescriptive patterns has always troubled me. I like to know the right way of doing things, so the free-and-easy choices that Backbone presents has always been a bit challenging. It's not that I mind formulating my own patterns, it's that design-patterns can provide a window into the choices that an author's intentions. It helps explain why something is designed the way it is, rather than just how. I find that useful.

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Message Mondays

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If you drive in Iowa—on the interstate, at least—you can't miss the highway alert signs. I remember seeing these growing up in LA. They were usually switched off or had a nursery rhyme reminding you to buckle up.. I never once thought, "what a missed opportunity!"

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Computerese

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I work with computers a fair amount, so now and again want to keep track of things I've learned.

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Hiking the Gros Morne Long Range Traverse

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A group of my friends periodically comes together in (increasingly) far-flung parts of the world to remind each other of our mutual affection. The most recent round took us to Newfoundland, a ragged slash of land off the Eastern coast of Canada. The ostensible object was the Long Range Traverse, a trail across the mountains that run the length of Newfoundland's Gros Morne National Park. This was as unlikely a mission as any for this particular crew. I wouldn't say that we're wholly unathletic, but it's not what springs to mind. That said, we're all reasonably competent at various things—from television trivia to expounding conservative ideology—so with a bit of prep (see below), it worked out. It was pretty, too.

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Computer Scientists' Websites Look Terrible

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I've always taken pleasure in the fact that the websites of most computer scientists are abysmal. This is because they write them themselves and they don't give a damn what you think. They have better things to do. Like write Python.

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Drawing the Electric Synth

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We’ll explore conductive inks and other materials to create unique, interactive musical instruments. Learn the basics of embedded microcontroller programming and circuit design, while crafting miniature synthesizers using a combination of electronics, programming, and art materials.

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The Speaker Paperish

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After puttering along with carefully-crafted, if under-powered conductive silver speakers for a few weeks, an inquiring mind pointed me towards the small, cottage-industry of DIY paper speakers using enameled magnet-wire (SparkFun). They've led a fairly fertile life online, courtesy of Jose Pino, who has put up a number excellent projects.

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Tracking Changes

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Inspired by @jsvine's experiments in version-control at drafts.jsvine.com, I thought I'd expose some of the bones that tick beneath my site. I run these pages through the Hyde static-site generator--Jekyll's underloved Pythonic-cousin--which despite being a little complex for the job, I like.

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On Youth and Aquariums

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I’ve been returning to aquariums with a force, lately, rigging-up a new set-up with a couple of neon tetras and a dozen-odd cherry chrimp that I picked up from Ebay.1 I got started with aquariums years ago, in elementary school—I don’t recall why, exactly—but perhaps it had something to do with growing up by Allan’s Aquarium, one of the finest fish stores around.

At any rate, with aquariums on the mind, I dredged up my very first forays onto the Internet. These are gems from the rec.aquaria usenet, now archived on Google Groups. I remember posting these, sitting on my dad’s lap on the dial-up that we had from UCLA.

Here’s a sample, posted in September of 1996:

My angel fish laid eggs. What do I do

Sam Jacoby

Russell Jacoby (rja…@ucla.edu) wrote: My angel fish laid eggs. What do I do

Sam Jacoby

Buy cigars…

Jeff Walther

9/18/96

Thanks, Jeff!

The rest, on subjects as diverse as lighting levels and fungus, follow:

  1. A First Query
  2. Help!
  3. My Angelfish Laid Eggs
  4. Yep, they laid eggs
  5. Now the eggs have fungus
  6. Those babies are swimming around
  7. I can’t keep my plants alive.
  8. I got some frogs
1.

Shipped for 12 bucks from Florida, USPS priority. Arrived alive and kicking. A bit of a miracle in the heart of winter.

Amazon EC2 Microinstances

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Over the past few days, I've been playing around with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now, I've been a spectacularly satisfied customer of A Small Orange for years, but I've been lately frustrated by the limitations of shared hosting. As I play around with different application platforms (Rails, Django, NodeJS), as part of my continuing professional-development-program, its clear that I need a bit more than 250MB of space and a restricted shell.[^service]

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A Visit to the MIT Glass Lab

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The Glass Lab is something apart at MIT. Less lasers, more 15th-century Italian glassblowing. I'd assumed that it was a hold-over from the days when chemistry departments blew their own glass and the like, but I believe it comes from the materials' science department, or some such. There is a much coveted lottery every semester, where a lucky dozen or-so get a chance to learn the craft. I've missed every opportunity, alas.

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Words I've Looked Up

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This is a list of words I've looked up for one reason or another.

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Hidden Layers

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The journey continues. This is part of my work as a research assistant in the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab.

This is the design that I drew the board up from. Looks pretty good, right? Well, I was happy: lot's of complicated little parts, colors--enough for me to feel like I was doing my job.

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Reports from the City

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Recuperating this week from a grand time in New York City. We converged on its gray shores last week to stop by the Open Source Hardware Summit, where people vaguely gesticulated in the direction of "open source" and show-cased their projects. The good men (and they are that) of Industry City Distillery were there, handing out thimbles of vodka.

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99 Fridays & IR Throwies

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Thanks to the inestimable efforts of Valentin Huen, we pulled together a whopping 500 IR Throwies for the Media Lab's latest 99 Friday dance-party cum project-showcase. I use "we" rather loosely: I was racing against a conference paper deadline, so Valentin heroically recruited a small army of people to scale up the IR Throwies project. It came off pretty well.

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TapClip v.2

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In preparation for a workshop last weekend--I populated the ten bare-bones boards I'd picked up from Advanced Circuits (see my last post). I've done a bit of this now, but with Brian's ever-essential help, I got really cruising. The ten boards probably took about an hour with a few hiccups.

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Building Boards

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My circuit board order came in -- it's always astonishing how tiny the things are, these boards are about the size of two postage stamps, side-by-side. The "barebones" option from Advanced Circuits is a pretty good deal too. These cost $8.90 apiece, which is pretty reasonable. I know that APC Circuits has really quick turn-around for boards with solder mask and such, but I didn't need it. I'm mostly proud for remembering not to pour a groundplane, as it makes it a pain to solder.

DSC_0359

Nice & pretty like.

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PaperClip

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I've been working on the software for TapClip--which is rolling along, in preparation for a workshop next week. So far, it's working pretty well, though the minim library is causing me some grief. There appears to be a noticeable lag-time when using loadSample to queue a .wav file in memory.

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Gerber File Extensions

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Every time I send off Gerbers for production, I am baffled by the array of files that the CAM job in Eagle generates. I'm happy to be ignorant. That's fine. The issue is, when you upload your files to most board fabs, they cheerily list the half-dozen odd things you've sent them--and ask you what they are? Top solder mask? NC drill file? I know nothing of this. So--some research later, and this is what we've got.

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Using Arscons

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I've used Arch Linux for years -- always a bit ineptly, I must admit -- and a while back, mostly because of a new job (and the allure of ditching my open-source sensibilities and using Adobe CS), I switched to a Mac. I've been happy enough, but there's something about coding in Snow Leopard or Lion or Cat or whatever we're on, that I've never really liked. Too slick, maybe. I find I work better in heavily constrained environments.

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Touch Tiny v.1

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I'm going to be doing a quick layout to test out the various QTouch chips--which Leah has warned me, work little-better than the code we've got running on plain old ATtinys (which is what the QTouch chips are, basically).

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Hello, World.

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With some consternation, I’ve overhauled my website.

Much is due to the fine work of Steve Losh, whose work I’ve assiduously cribbed, both in web design, .vim configs, and much else.

This site is powered by Hyde, which is complex enough to make me feel smart, and simple enough to be actually useful. The Golden Grid System gave me all of the nifty “Responsive Web” tricks for free. Fun fact: I helped put Ethan Marcotte’s e-book together for A Book Apart back when I worked for Threepress.

The code for this website is hosted on GitHub. Not much to see, but knock yourself out if you’re so inclined.