My Multitool Review

I have collected several different Multi-tools over the years. I thought i would do a bit of a review / rundown of how they go, as there are a lot of different ones out there, and it can be hard to know what you want, and if the extra cost of a quality tool is actually worth it.

Leatherman Wave – Old Wave

Leatherman Wave

This was the first “proper” multi-tool I owned. From memory, I bought it with the first pay check from my first full time job, as an Audio Visual Technician, and for me, is the yard stick to measure all other multi-tools. This is one of the original style Waves. The outside tools, the blades, Saw, and File, all lock into place with a liner lock style system. None of the inner tools, the screwdrivers and other bits lock into place, but I don’t generally find that a problem.

EEV Blog

Here is an interesting series, that I believe if you are interested in Electronics, you might find interesting. I’ve added the latest episode at time of writing this blog on this page. If you find it interesting, I recommend going to check it out at the homepage here

David L. Jones is obviously a very experienced engineer, and I’m pretty impressed. The blog, being about electronics engineering, is going to go into things beyond the hobbyist such as myself sometime, but its a learning experience.

Hopefully he keeps up putting up episodes.

Part One:

Part Two:

Blog back on topic!!

OK, so for the best part of this year, my blog has been completely off topic. Hijacked for my Network Media Production course at university, I’ve chosen to keep the posts uni related for the period. I have since worked out how to make other blogs under the same account, which i contemplated switching my NMP stuff to, but due to a couple of reasons, mostly due to me being lazy, I never did the swap

but now the course is over, I can get back onto what I created the blog for, and that’s for posting vaguely interesting things I make and do at home.

You should see a few other blog posts appear that I’ve slowly been working on for the last little while. I probably could have come up with more, but what i’ve got will have to keep you entertained.

Windows Live Writer

I’ve also discovered a cool tool from Microsoft – Windows Live Writer. Its a blogging application, basically a wordprocessor, with blog intergration. It allows for me to write blogs in a desktop application, and post straight to the blog. Its a shame I didn’t come across this before, while Networked Media Production was still going. Nevermind though, one class finishs, but the world keeps on going.

What does that mean for the blog? not a lot really I guess. It makes posting blogs easier, integrating image uploading too, as well as even youtube integration. I’m hoping the easier it is to blog, the more motivated I will be to blog things, and hopefully, more updates for you, the readers

Enjoy.

Matt

The Big Finale

So, we have come to the end of the semester, and the end of NMP, so this will be my final blog on the topic

We’ve come a long way since the beginning. Learning a lot along the way.

In the beginning, I had my blog. It was already running when I had started the class, and I chose to use it instead of creating another blog, with a sole purpose of being for the class.

Around the time of  the first assignment I worked out that it is possible to make additional blogs with the same account. Had I known this in the beginning, I most likely would have created one just for the course, But by then, I had come too far to change, so I kept on with the original blog

I never had huge traffic to my site, but there were people coming, both other Network Media Production students, as well as people from the outside community. Most traffic came from within WordPress itself, from people searching or browsing blogs on the main site.

My most popular post was my very first post. I put this down to initial enthusiasm of my fellow classmates checking out everyone else’s blogs.

In the immediate future, I see myself continuing with my blog, redirected back to the original theme of the site, applying some of the things I’ve learnt over the past 15 weeks where I can. Its been an interesting semester, sometimes fun, sometimes a little hard, but all in all its been good. All that’s left now is the exam, and this semester is finished, just in time for the next one to start.

Nominated blog posts

And now it is time to nominate my top 3 posts of the last semester for marking:

Post one: Network Media Production

Post Two: API’s and Pipes

Post Three: Processing … and then my assignment

Assignment Two Rationale

In the beginning, I had to decide which part of the assignment to do. Initially, it was between the data visualization, and the video critique. After a short amount of time, I had pretty much decided to do the data visualisation. The only thing left to do was decide on the data set, and get to work.

I threw around a few ideas for the data, including my bank transaction history, as well as sourcing data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Eventually, I decided to go with the ABS statistics from the last census. Specifically dealing with Canberra and the population of each suburb.

The next step is HOW do I do this visualization? There are endless ways to deal with it, ranging from a really basic MSPaint effort, Photoshop, or using something like Excel or Google Charts. Then I remembered hearing about Processing in class. I had heard of it before as a matter of fact, but had never done anything with it, so I thought it would be interesting to give it a try.

After a while of playing around, I managed to come up with this. You will need Java enabled to view it. If you click on the screen, it will draw a red dot. It was a quick mock up of what I was thinking of doing for the assignment, but in the end, the assignment took a slightly different route.

A screen shot of my initial mockup of my idea

In order to put the assignment online, I was going to have to host it somewhere, so off to Google to find free web server to host it.After a bit of comparing, I came across host-ed. There are so many different ones out there, but host-ed looked ok, so I signed up.

I found it a rather interesting process working out the free hosting site I used to host the files. I’m sure there are easier ones out there, but after a few minutes, I had it worked out, and had the mock-up online to test if it was going to work online. It worked fine, so it was pretty much decided, Processing was going to be my Visualization engine.

Fairly quickly, the project evolved from the map based visualization in the mock-up above, to a layout similar to the New York Times Olympic Medals Count.

New York Times visualization of the Olympic medals count

The Ranking view is most similar to my project really. I was going to implement something similar to the year slider, but I could not find the information for other years on the Australian Bureau of Statistics site.

I have already mentioned the Australian Bureau of Statistics in this blog. The ABS was my source of data for the assignment. I chose the ABS due to the open nature of the data, requiring citing the ABS as the source, as laid out by this page.

Programming in Processing was fairly straight forward. Having some experience with java made things a easier, as Processing is really an extension of java, which takes care of a lot of things for you.

This doesn’t mean the programming was easy however. There were a few sticky moments for me, one being sorting the list of suburbs. I managed to get the sort by population to work first, using a Bubble Sort algorithm. I understand a Bubble Sort is not very efficient, but when dealing with a small number items, as I was, it was more then sufficient.

When it came to sorting by Alphabet, I ran into the issue of not being able to use less then (<) to do the comparison on a string. Instead I had to do a little more research, and came across a handy way java has of sorting objects, by creating a class that tells Java’s Array.sort() how to deal with your own objects. This made sorting the array of objects even easier. I contemplated changing my sort by population to use Java’s Array.sort(), but chose to leave it, as I could use the time to work on other areas of the project.

In conclusion, I enjoyed the experience of using Processing in making visualizations, and look forward investigating more of its possibilities. The art of data visualization is a large one, and while this assignment has taught me a lot, there is still much to learn out there, and I look forward to learning it.

You can find the link to my assignment HERE

a screenshot of my assignment

Scientists Colour by Number

Crayon rendition of the Mars Landscape

While sifting thru the 200 or so blog posts in my rss reader, I came across this interesting little article on Gismodo about the first pictures from the surface of Mars in 1965

“people at the JPL were so excited to receive the images that they couldn’t wait for them to be processed by the lab’s imager. As the first picture was beamed down as a stream of 8-bit numbers—each point indicating a brightness point—they thought of a quick way to get an image straight away: Print the numbers indicating brightness in paper strips, put them together, and colour them with pastel crayons.”

Its a amazing that crayons needed to be used to get a “fast” graphical representation, contrasted by today’s real time processing. We are however, talking about a time when computers where huge room filling machines, with processing speeds a fraction of what can be found in most peoples pockets these days.

Now, I keep coming back to data visualisation, but that is mostly due to visualisation being the topic of choice for the assignment. I have the assignment partially underway at the time being, with my idea fairly solid in my head, and starting to form in real life

All this talk of crayons got my want to do my assignment in old school kindergarten style, and so this is my assignment:

My bank balance over 2 weeks

LOL, just kidding. it is a rough approximation of my bank account over the last 2 weeks. really, it should be shown with my other bank accounts for an accurate picture, as the spikes in the middle are due to me transferring money from them to this one, not some extra covert payments or anything.

Am I crazy for going to the shops and spending $3.60 for a pack of pencils to do this? quite possibly, yes. for some reason I envisioned something more impressive, but alas, here we are.

Right now, I’m looking for a convenient way of converting images to a numbered grid to make my own mars style crayon pictures. I’m also interested in checking out a few different things, like rendering items in Lego bricks and the likes.

Anyway, that’s enough crazy for the time being, to I’ll leave you to it.

Matt

Processing ….. And then my assignment

So, a couple of weeks ago I heard mention of Processing in class, from memory, it was in relation to data visualisation, or possibly multiplicity

This wasn’t the first time I had heard of Processing, I had read a little on it in the past, and had even downloaded it at home. I had never really done anything with it though.

For those of you who don’t know what Processing is, It is a programming language which is based around graphics and visualisation. Technically, I’m pretty sure it is just an extension of the Java programming language, but it takes care of all the messy coding, and makes things a lot easier.

I wonder how easy it is for someone with no programming experience. I’ve done a bit of java in the past, so i’m kinda familiar with how things work, even if I’m fairly rusty, having not done anything substantial for a few years

Today I decided I would have a look and see what i could make happen, and surprisingly, within an hour, I could make a rudimentary line graph of meaningless numbers. Below is an output from processing of the graph

about an hour of playing with processing yealded this

Data Visualisation

So this week is all about Data Visualisation, which is fairly important, seemings that is what I am planning on doing for my second assignment

When I first think of Data Visualisation, I think of Graphs and pie charts. Nothing overly interesting.

But what I am finding out, there is a lot more to data visualisation.

Multiplicity

This weeks class was all about multiplicity, and I’m not talking about the movie staring Michael Keaton and Andy Mcdowell. I’ve seen that movie, and its not a proud moment in viewing history.

I guess if you are looking for other examples in movies, the first one that comes to mind is the scene in The Matrix Reloaded, where the main character Neo fights Agent Smith, but Agent Smith keeps duplicating himself over and over and over, until there is hundreds of him.

Most of the examples we have seen were primarily artistic in nature, such as Peter Funch’s photographic series, which are created from many individual photos taken with the camera in the same position for all of them.

It is also to use the concept of Multiplicity to visualize data in a visually representative way, such as Aron Koblin’s visualizations of the flight paths of over North America.

I thought the following video fitted rather well with some of the examples they were showing in class. A video almost 5 minutes long, made from over 6000 paintings. I thougth it was a rather breathtaking concept, which was fantastically executed.

Assignment One

So, now my assignment grade is back, I thought I would put up a link to my reference page up for you all to have a look at.

Having made a related blog post in the past, I woun’t go into much details on my thoughts, so with no further delays, here it is