mykle systems labs

Freezing Greetings from the 2011 Art Shanty Projects!

This is the first moment I’ve had in six days to pause and document stuff since I landed at MSP last Tuesday and dived immediately to work on our contribution to this biannual festival of art, architecture and strange behavior on frozen Medicine Lake in Plymouth, MN.

Despite all our long-distance planning we got a severely late start on the actual construction of our shanty. By the time I arrived Brady had organized a workspace, tools, materials and a lovely recycled platform donated by members of the 2010 Vista Shanty team. The two of us worked around the clock for three days straight, and with the aid of some very helpful volunteers our Audio Adventure Shanty just barely squeaked in under the official Friday night deadline for installation on the lake.

By then we were exhausted, sore, sleep-deprived and covered in splinters. Fortunately Kelly Peach arrived Friday night from Santa Cruz to lift our spirits. We stayed up late preparing our audio equipment and attaching the lovely pink headphone cozies that Kelly had been stitching all week.

Saturday morning we met the public on the lake. We offered them our first of many Audio Adventures: a five minute audio vacation in the sunny Caribbean. It was a big hit, possibly because it was so cold outside.

Our nutty pink tetrahedron felt right at home on this landscape, clustered among so many odd and lovely little shacks, shanties and giant robots.

Saturday was exciting, but still very harried and full of first-day stresses, and I admit I neglected to wear enough socks. But today, Sunday, was magnificently sunny and warm. At times, our transparent shanty got sweltering hot. At 1PM we debuted our second audio program: the Dance Mob! A twenty person disco on synchronized headphones.

Everything went splendidly. We’re finally starting to settle in and relax. Tomorrow is another day on the ice for us, so come join us if you’re in the area. Ours is only one of two dozen excellent art shanty experiences to choose from. (Also, the ice skating is excellent.)

In two days I fly off to my home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota for ten days of bone-chilling, back-breaking, ear-warming good times with my pals Brady Clark and Kelly Peach. Together we are making a piece for the Art Shanty Projects, a recurring winter arts fest on Medicine Lake that I’ve been wanting to see for years.
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I’ve just returned from an excellent near-death experience, courtesy of our local post-apocalyptic bicycle buccaneers known as C.H.U.N.K. 666 . We rode amphibious bicycles across the Willamette River, battled aqua-Nazi CHUDs, claimed Ross Island as our own nation, roasted weenies, amused the Coast Guard, drank whiskey and got home in time for tea.

CHUNK are the original Portland bike freaks — they put the rest to shame. I first wrote about them for the Portland Mercury way back in 2000, and they’ve only gotten worse since. The Chunkathlon, their yearly gladiatorial melee, was elevated to a higher plane of existence several years ago because they broke this one. The core team members have all grown, mutated and metastasized. Some have been raising a new generation of bicycle warlords. Others are writing books, playing the viola, doing jail time. Chunk 666 has kept such a low profile lately, some people have even dared to suggest they ride no longer.

But fuck those people. Chunk is still chunking along; they do it for themselves, not you. Last weekend’s ride was on the Willamette River. On it, not next to it. Try that on your fixie.
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Nerd bulletin! If you’re an OS X user, and you’re using the version of Postfix that came with your operating system, and you are seeing log messages similar to this one once per minute in mail.log:


Jul 21 16:08:39 snowy postfix/master[6565]: daemon started -- version 2.4.3, configuration /etc/postfix
Jul 21 16:08:39 snowy postfix/qmgr[6567]: DE1D92E78E75: from=, size=3602201, nrcpt=9 (queue active)
Jul 21 16:09:39 snowy postfix/master[6565]: master exit time has arrived


… then you’re not alone! Many people are reporting the “master exit time has arrived” messages, which seem to be just unwanted log noise. But if, between “daemon started” and “master exit,” you are seeing the same e-mail message logged over and over, then you and I are partners in digital miscommunication. Outbound e-mail is getting stuck.

Today I suffered from, investigated and solved this problem. Here’s a quick fix you can try:
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UPDATEDZ! Core77 now has a ton of photos online, some video too. Here are great pix and a play-by-play of the complete fab process (trés fab!) and here are a bunch more action shots of the float conquering Portland.

I haven’t blogged about this much, but last month I was tangentially involved in helping the good folks over at Hand-Eye Supply light up their float for the Starlight Parade with about 1000 feet of animated extra-thick electroluminescent wire.

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Hello everybody! Sorry it’s been so quiet over here … I’ve been preoccupied with unicorns.

The last three months have been rainy, indoorish months for me and Portland. Writing books is still my day job, but I’ve also be surprisingly, enjoyably, annoyingly busy with these smart lights. It’s been an educational odyssey: so far it’s required circuit-board fabrication, AVR programming in C and assembler, iPhone hacking, waterjet cutting, lamp design, bicycle maintainence, and lots and lots (lots!) of soldering. I’ve enjoyed it all, but what a time sink! (If only I could flip one of these AVR pins to source time instead of sinking it …)

Something about blinking, glowing light is still compelling to me, but I really do hope that the sun will come out soon and I’ll lose interest in this weak substitute. The goal I’ve set for myself is to have these lights mounted on my tallbike in time for Pedalpalooza, Portland’s three-week bicycling festival. I’ve always wanted ambulance lights on my tallbike, and these should provide the required traffic-shifting pep.
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Everything needs a name, deformed things moreso. “Wuholic” is what I’m calling the new theme on Gesine Kratzner’s website. It’s a fusion of Jeff Ngan’s lovely Wu-Wei theme for WordPress and the Flash-based design of her old site, courtesy of Picaholic.com . It launched today, just in time for Gesine’s big TV moment.
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Here’s one more plea for LIGHTBAR help … but you don’t even have to step away from the screen this time.

I’m going to be delivering a slideshow on the history, theory and technology of LIGHTBAR at Portland’s next Pecha Kucha night, as part of a great bit light-arts symposium at PSU called Illuminated City How cool is that?

A Pecha Kucha is a kind of slideshow-on-crack public event first invented in Japan in 2003. Presenters get to show only twenty slides and you get ONLY TWENTY SECONDS PER SLIDE! Picture it as 50% arts-n-culture, 50% used car sales. A group called Project Cityscope has been putting them on in Portland for a while now. This particular episode of it, Volume 9, has a theme of “spectrum,” so of course I had to apply … and today they gave me the green light! Color me excited.
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Paul Stoffregen, the inventor/genius who built these RGB smart-lights for this year’s LIGHTBAR, has posted in detail about the design and how you can build your own. How rad is that?

That, of course, is what DorkbotPDX is all about.

Congratulations, Portland! You have successfully summoned spring. There’s a big pink explosion of plum blossoms out my window, the same gorgeous color as the last evening of LIGHTBAR. For those of you who missed Pink Night, here are some highlights:

Just to make it official: LIGHTBAR season is over for this year. It was grand, epic, successful in so many ways. Now I just need to get on with the rest of life. Boat Night holds fantastic promise, and we will do it, definitely, next year.

If there’s any way I can possibly thank or repay all the excellent volunteers who came out to play LIGHTBAR-games with me, please suggest it here! Ross, Maitland, Dan, Gabe, Tom, Jean-Margaret, Chris, Brian, Jake, Zed, Buffalo, Gordon, Paul, Katie, Nick, and everyone I’m forgetting because it’s been a long month — you are rad! LIGHTBAR is your creation, as much as it is mine! Congratulations on a job well done!