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This Looks Like a Job For a Computer Nerd!

March 8, 2010 3:25 pm

by Lauren Hudgins

My friend’s company, ShopIgniter, just got a bunch of venture capital and is looking to hire. My friend would be your immediate boss, so I promise your boss would be awesome.

Interface Engineer

ShopIgniter seeks a full-time, front-end web developer with a solid understanding of standards-compliant (X)HTML/CSS with the ability to quickly slice up and implement designs created in Photoshop or Illustrator. General knowledge of Adobe software is a must. Experience working with dynamically-driven content and manipulating the DOM with jQuery or javascript is a plus. An eye for aesthetics and design is appreciated.

You Will:

* Perform your tasks quickly and efficiently, meeting all deadlines in a fast-paced work environment.
* Cross-browser test your code, support IE6.
* Accurately translate beautiful designs to the web, with pixel-perfect precision.
* Posses 4+ years of experience hand-coding websites.
* Be comfortable working on a Mac.
* Understand modern font/image replacement techniques.

You Won’t:

* Ever use the words WYSIWYG or Comic Sans in a positive way.
* Code a site without giving consideration to text-resizing and other accessibility issues.
* Use tables to layout anything other than tabular data.
* Use a single unnecessary div, span, class, id… you get the idea.

ShopIgniter, a start-up located in Portland, OR, provides a next generation ecommerce platform for physical retail, branded website and social channels. Local candidates only, no recruiters please.

Interested applicants should send email, cover letter, and résumé to jasonATshopigniterDOTcom.

Events on Saturday, August 15th

August 14, 2009 8:37 pm

by Lauren Hudgins

Mac Expo
I got a flier for “Portland’s Biggest Mac Expo” at MacForce. I’m not too sure what goes on there, but it boasts free wi-fi (big woop) and “social networking tent.” (So that attendees can facebook chat while their sitting right next to each other?) The flier claims there will also be food and iPod Nano giveaways.
MacForce
10am-4pm
100 SE Salmon St.

Tour de Fat
New Belgium’s bike party. I went last year. It had a lot of potential to be fun. Unfortunately, it suffered under the horrid sun of last summer’s heat wave. But this year we’ve already done our penance and should have bearable weather for this Tour de Fat.
There’s beer. There are bikes. Last year there were some wonderfully silly contests, like a race to see who could bike the slowest and finish the last. And then there was the rink of dumb bikes. Powerfully dumb bikes. This was my favorite part of Tour de Fat. I got the opportunity to try a bike that had a hinge allowing the bike to double in upon itself. The bike with wheels of sneakers was much more difficult to ride than it looked. One bike had wheels with spokes of different lengths. The most useless bike didn’t go anywhere no matter how hard you pedaled. It just spun the rider around and around.
Tour de Fat
10am-5pm
Waterfront Park

Photo by Dominik Kolendo

So what’ll it be? Mac Nerds or Bike Nerds?

TechShop Opens In Portland

April 29, 2009 6:02 pm

by Mike Burnett

BoingBoing.net is reporting that Portland’s own TechShop is now open. TechShop is a membership based organization and facility where you can use a wide variety of powerful computer, electric, and industrial tools; gain instruction; and brainstorm with like minded creatives.

Check out this incredible video from BoingBoing TV shot at the original Silicon Valley TechShop location.

Membership at TechShop Portland is $125/mo., but if you’re working on a time machine money is of no concern to you.

TechShop Portland

Oregon Leads Charge To Produce Electric Cars

April 8, 2009 5:22 pm

by Mike Burnett

On the heels of a Nissan electric car press conference in Portland Monday, yesterday Norwegian electric car manufacturer Th!nk was wooed by Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski and US Senator Ron Wyden as the place to site an electric car manufacturing facility.

Th!nk’s North American CEO, Richard Canny said that the company was also considering 7 other states as potential locations for such a facility. During a ramp-up phase the factory would employ about 300 people and at full production that number would jump to 900 people.

This is the second day in a row Portland has taken the electric car limelight. In a seemingly aggressive push to make Oregon the electric car capital of the world, Governor Kulongoski has lined up three separate events this week to get Oregon solidly on the EV map. Along with Monday’s Nissan press event and yesterday’s Th!nk event, Kulongoski’s office has announced a third electric car event to be held on Thursday with an as yet undisclosed electric car manufacturer.

Story at Gas2.0

The Music Industry Is Getting It

January 15, 2009 12:05 am

by Mike Burnett

The MP3 (and file sharing) rose to ubiquity in a decade in which the music industry tried endlessly to suppress it. They even tried to block to the release of the first widely available portable MP3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP300.

For the first time I’ve seen, in an interview with Cnet.com, an executive at Universal Music Group’s eLabs, Rio Caraeff, is saying all sorts of progressive, level-headed things about digital music:

It’s clear that fans like to stream music on the Internet. We wanted to figure out how to create a business model to allow audio to be streamed on a free-to-consumer basis online. Before we had an ad supported streaming model for audio we had a subscription-based program for streaming audio and that’s basically a small amount of people who are willing to pay for that. [...] The removal of DRM on songs and albums is also a major example of how we’ve changed, [...] Basically pirates have every advantage. They have no licenses they need to take, no rules they need to abide by, no geography with which they have to be concerned about. That’s our competition. You have to compete with that in a marketplace based model. Other tactics, such as litigation or other legal remedies is something we always reserve the right to pursue, but I don’t believe that’s a definitive or long-term fix.

Link

Multi-touch Controller

December 31, 2008 4:39 pm

by Mike Burnett

One of my many audaciously hopeful New Years resolutions is to somehow get my hands on this, even if for a second. It’s a multi-touch, expressive music controller. We’ve seen similar sorts of thing before with the Kaoss Pad and Yamaha’s Tenori-on, but this interface seems to have a potential for expression that approaches traditional instruments like the guitar. It strikes me that it’s probably more closely related to the theremin than it is to other flat interfaces.

Here’s the video:

Multitouch Prototype 2 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.

Make Noise With Computer Chips

November 25, 2008 12:54 am

by Mike Burnett

Sure you can install any music software suite and complete a track in five minutes, but what’s the fun in that? The real glamor is in programming a circuit board and processor to make beeps and crackles.

Please let me be able to afford and not wimp out on this!

If you can’t read the text, here’s the details from the email:

As a part of the ongoing Arduino Cult Induction workshop series, this month we will be focusing on sound.

In particular I will be going over creating sound using the Arduino’s built in Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) and Direct Digital Synthesis using resistive ladders. We will investigate using the Piezo element
as both a simple speaker and an input trigger. We will review the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) from a hardware and software perspective, and look at a couple of useful integrated
circuits (the lm324 and the lm368).

The workshop will cost $25 and participants will recieve a complete midi interface board for the dorkboard/arduino and a piezo element which will be used to create a midi drum trigger.
Participants will also take with them parts for an r2r ladder, an op amp and an audio amp capable of driving small speakers or headphones.

Participants should leave the workshop with a better understanding of how micro-controllers such as the Arduino can be used to create and control sound, they should have built at least one working musical controller and they should have the foundations for several sound related projects.

Please bring your dorkboard, rbba, or other arduino compatible board, a soldering iron or breadboard, and a laptop.

The workshop will be held at PNCA (NW 12th and Johnson) in room 205 from 1-5pm on Sunday, November 30.

To reserve a space you can paypal the workshop fee to cult@tempusdictum.com and you can feel free to email me with any questions.

The Arduino Cult Induction series of workshops are Sponsored by Tempus Dictum, Inc. in support of DorkbotPDX. (graphic by Jason Plumb)

That email email is from Donald Davis. Long time readers may remember Jason Plumb, the designer of the flyer, from our interview with him last year.

Dorkbot 0×01 Event

April 8, 2008 2:58 am

by Mike Burnett

The Dorkbot PDX people have posted some videos from their last event, including a presentation called What If Bacteria Designed Computers? by Ward Cunningham, inventor of Wiki.

Dorkbot meets every other Monday at Lucky Lab NW. Events and meet-ups are viewable on Dorkbot’s public Google Calendar.

I Want One

February 14, 2008 10:52 pm

by Mike Burnett

Riding East over the Broadway bridge on my way home tonight, I noticed a reflective sign flickering at the end of the the bridge. At first I checked my headlight which has been switching settings randomly since gathering a good deal of internal moisture. It was set as I prefer it to a steady beam. I chalked it up to the headlights of commuter traffic passing intermittently through the bridge trusses.

But as I approached Williams every street sign in the intersection started flickering like the one at the end of the bridge. I thought it might be an ambulance, but there was no siren and no especially loud engine noise. Then another bicyclist passed me with the brightest blinking light I’d ever seen on a bike. It seemed more luminescent than the car headlights around us. I stopped behind him at the next red light and asked what sort of light he had. “It’s called a Knight Rider” he said. “The cool thing is you charge it with a wall charger.”

“It’s the brightest bike light I’ve ever seen” I said.

Continue… »

Essential Reality

June 28, 2007 8:26 pm

by Mike Burnett

Hardware hacking can be paradoxical in that those who practice the art often use older technology to create entirely novel effects.

Quite often the object being experimented upon is an obsolesced children’s toy. One of the most popular hacks is bending circuits on Speak & Spells to create distorted or pitch-shifted versions of the original output, and someone has even bent the circuits on a defenseless furby.

For musicians, the possibilities are exciting not only because new sounds are being generated, but because new ways of playing sound are being realised as well. Earlier this week I attended the inaugural Portland DorkBot gathering, where one such new path was demonstrated by software designer and DorkBot organizer Jason Plumb.

The device Plumb wore and played was called the Essential Reality P5 Glove, and is as Plumb describes “a glove controller that provides a human-computer interface in 11 dimensions (x, y, z, roll, pitch, yaw, and 5 individual finger bends).”

Click the image for a short video clip of Plumb demonstrating how the glove can be used to control audio, and read after the jump for a great interview with him as well.