When you start work at frog, you are given your choice of computer type, desk type, and a selection of useful desk items, including a nice IKEA TERTIAL desk lamp with a nice, bright, CFL bulb. These lamps are great at illuminating your desk, but they also can cause pain to any coworker who happens to be on the wrong side of the shade.
After my two recent posts discussing and sharing the things I 3D printed for the frog SXSWi opening party, frog released official videos of each of the installations. In the Electro Tennis video (embedded below) you can see my Makerbot toiling away in our workshop warehouse (it’s actually 3D printing a frog SXSW key chain, but never you mind that).
By the way, as I was being interviewed on-site, my Makerbot was in the background printing little finish-line flags I designed for the MAKE Magazine “MAKE” area at our party; there were bristlebot kits that we had routed out a race track for, but ended up not using. If you were there you may or may not have seen five of the intended six little flags laying about. I’m holding one of the flags in my gloved hands because it was cold outside and the print was warm.
You can see the rest of the frog SXSW 2012 videos here.
As I discussed in From Novelty to Necessity, I had designed and 3D printed several copies of a reed switch holder for the Y axis of our Electro Tennis rigs. I didn’t address the fact that I also printed a modified version for the X axis; I just simply didn’t have the photos and I always like to have photos of things I write about.
Due to the recent purchase of Posterous by Twitter, I’ve decided to not worry about what was going to happen with the content on My Plastic Future and pre-emptively move to a different blog host.
I decided that I’d go with WordPress.com. I could have put a WordPress implementation on one of my web hosts but I just wanted something easy and simple and not worry about maintenance (I just want to post!)
There will be some rough edges with images and previously linked-to articles, but I hope to get most things rectified as quickly as possible.
Electro Tennis at the frog SXSWi opening party
For the past 14 years, the company I work for, frog, has been hosting the SXSW Interactive opening party. For the past three of those years I’ve played a role in it: brainstorming installation ideas, and building/coding really cool experiences for our thousands of attendees.
This year the core concept was turning digital experiences into analog ones, and vice versa. Additionally, one of the consistent themes of our party is to play with scale. So one of the experiences we set out to build was “Electro Tennis” (an electro-mechanical version of the classic Pong video game). But we decided to build it on an enormous scale — two 30′ x 25′ playing “courts”, each with a 12″ cube for a ball and 4′ x 3.5′ water tank for a paddle. In other words: giant.
my plastic future 