Frog's Digital Design Blog » Products

Fiber Optic Tapestry

Gary Thornton — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:34:08 +0000

Inspired by the Jacquard Loom, the first computer to use punch cards, artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese are looking to “marry traditional hand-woven crafts with information technologies” with their new project: Fiber Optic Tapestry.

The tapestry is set to be a nine panel work of art, woven by fiber optic threads (instead of traditional woolen threads) connected to RGB LEDs. These LEDs are in turn connected to a computer which can control their outputs to create a wonderful array of patterns and colours.

An extremely inspirational and modern take on the conventional loom. A further digital twist on this project sees the connected computer scouring the web, in particular Twitter, for any content mentioning Josef Alber’s Homage to the Square providing a stream real time data visualisation.

“The element of the hand is a critical factor through all stages of this project: from weaving on a loom, to the way the electronics are integrated with the fiber optic threads”

Traditionally, past tapestries have been used to depict a story or an event, creating heroes, myths and legends. This project is really not too different. Threaded fiber optic information streaming data across the tapestry as light, visualising internet-based narration for a particular topic.

Patterns being tested.

The duo are still a tad shy of their target fundraising on Kickstarter to secure costs for materials, so if you like the look of their proposal, and the somewhat scaled down, prototype above then get your wallet out and back the project.

Once funding has been achieved and the artefact is complete it will be displayed at the International TECHstyle Art Biennial (ITAB) at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Now, I’ll be honest, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles isn’t somewhere on my to do list, but if this is the sort of project it is going to exhibit it definitely seems worth a look!

Close up detail of the fiber optic weave.

It’s speculative projects and ideas such as these coming to fruition that is real evidence of ever-improving technologies. We used to make tapestries out of threads or strands of wool, and now we are creating them out of light, in real time, and using global data that someone hundreds of miles away could have well just tweeted!

This could well be the stepping stone to creating not just woven patterns, but really precise images. Take each of those panels and shrink them down to represent, oh say, a pixel. Thousands of pixels side by side and you would have a pretty detailed image, with the ability to change on demand. Change the colour, the shape, or even the subject represented on it. Very exciting.

Open Streetmap

Live Quest

Gary Thornton — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:49:26 +0000

It seems only yesterday that we were getting annoyed with the vuvuzelas in the opening game as “Bufana, Bufana” announced the first African World Cup, but as we now approach the 2010 World Cup final we have become accustomed to the noise. Hearing that buzz reach my ears stimulates excitement, the association that two of the best teams in the world are about to play out 90 minutes.

Alas, we are but days away from this event coming to a close, four long years away from the next. Of course there will be replays and archived footage shown for months to come, the Blackstars’ dancing celebrations, Frank Lampard’s goal that never was, and of course Van Bronckhorst’s screamer against Uruguay. But if you want a real lasting memory of the 2010 World Cup you should get yourself over to eBay and bid on one of these absolutely incredible pieces.

Oh, and did I mention all the proceeds go the Nelson Mandela’s 46664 Foundation? – a charitable organisation that aims to build a better world for everyone. This campaign is a series of ‘Live Quest’ paintings.

Commissioned by Adidas and 180 it promotes the astonishing talents of Paul Kasemwana and Espoir Kennedy, two emerging African artists, in capturing key moments throughout the tournament, telling the story of the World Cup, traditionally as only Africa could. Given the almost life-size proportions of the art too they are remarkably good value.

“A story of 32 heroes and 32 nations battling it out for the greatest prize in football because… Every Team Needs The Quest” It just sounds epic doesn’t it.

The natural style of the paintings also mean that they lend themselves not just to being stand alone pieces, but part of Adidas’ online graphic novel too which is also well worth checking out.

Affordable Secure Backup

John Bates — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:26:58 +0000

Whether you are an IT professional or a computer novice, choosing the right backup system to use at work or home is a difficult, and frankly uninspiring use of time, and one which almost always results in making undesirable compromises. There always seem to be far too many options and the good solutions come with a price tag that almost matches the cost of the system they were designed to support. A good backup system should satisfy, at least, the following requirements:

It should be affordable.
Operation should be reasonably well automated.
It should be easy to restore to one of several points in time.
There should be some redundancy.
It should be simple to store some backups offsite.
Media should be encrypted for security.

The system described here uses an affordable drive enclosure to host two of three disk drives in a scheme that gives both disk mirroring and offsite storage all for a very affordable price of, roughly, £260. Of the three disk drives, two stay in the enclosure and the third is kept offsite and periodically exchanged with one of the two in the enclosure. Each disk drive is mounted in a drive tray (a one-off operation which requires nothing more than the use of a Philips screwdriver) which allows it to be easily inserted and removed from the enclosure. The enclosure is connected to a USB port on a computer and looks, to the computer, like a single large disk. I use 1TB capacity disks which allows me to securely store approximately 1,000 GB of data which is a lot even for a small business.

Operation

The drive enclosure is populated with two of the three SATA disk drives and attached to a computer (Mac, Windows or Unix) through a USB connection. A DIP switch configuration on the rear of the enclosure can be used to choose from a number of different configurations allowing the two drives to appear as either one big drive, two independent drives or a single drive using RAID 1 mirroring for increased protection against disk failure. This backup scheme uses the latter configuration, RAID 1, which employs disk mirroring in which the enclosure maintains an exact copy of its first disk on the second disk so that if either disk fails the remaining disk can continue operation without loss of data. If a failure occurs, the failed drive can be replace with a good drive and the system will automatically mirror the data to the new drive without any downtime. From the computer, the enclosure appears as a single USB (external) drive.

The second disk can be removed at any point and replaced with another which will be automatically mirrored with the contents of the first disk. The process of mirroring a 1TB disk takes about 3 or 4 hours but during this period the drive can be used normally. A green LED above a drive indicates that it is functioning normally, a flashing amber LED indicates that the drive is in the process of being mirrored and a red LED is indicative of a hardware fault with the drive.

Backup software on the computer populates the USB drive as it would any externally attached drive. I use the excellent SyncBackPro for Windows to pull files in from other machines on the network and write it to the drive but any archiving software could be used as appropriate for the platform.

Archival Storage

Some operating systems provide a mechanism for maintaining historical copies of your files within the file system. Windows does this with what it calls Previous Versions, and on Mac OS X similar functionality can be achieved by using Time Machine. Both these mechanisms enable fuller use of the storage space on the drive by keeping old versions of all files, even files that have been deleted since the last backup, for as long as space remains on the backup disk. Once the disk fills up these systems will automatically begin to prune back the oldest versions of files, keeping only as many old files as the disk can hold. Both of these mechanisms, Previous Versions and TimeMachine, will allow you to view the files in any backed up folder on your system as they were at several points in the past, typically at daily or more frequent intervals.

Redundancy and Offsite Storage

The enclosure keeps two drives in sync automatically so that should one of the drives in the enclosure fail the other one will continue providing read and write functionality without any interruption of service. This gives one form of redundancy, but by swapping the mirrored disk with a spare one on a regular, say daily, basis you get to maintain as many backup copies of your complete data as you feel comfortable with. It is easy to manage a small pool of spare disks which can be used in rotation. If we then keep one or more of these disks at a different location to the enclosure we have an offsite backup.

Very cheap USB caddies can be purchased which will hold a single SATA disk drive. These can be used in an emergency to mount any of the disks on a computer if the enclosure fails or if you need to access the data that is on one of the drives from a different computer or location.

Encryption

If securing the content of your backup data is important then the free open source TrueCrypt is an excellent tool. TrueCrypt provides on-the-fly encryption of an entire disk which means that data is encrypted or decrypted just before it is saved or loaded from the disk. The operation works transparently, encrypting the entire disk volume without any user intervention. Data is copied to or read from the encrypted disk exactly as it would be to or from an unencrypted disk. No data can be read from the disk until the correct password has been provided so if one of your disks is lost or stolen you can be confident that its contents will remain safe. The documentation on the TrueCrypt web site provides a step by step guide to installing and using TrueCrypt to protect a USB drive.

The decision to encrypt is an optional one and can be delayed until a later date. TrueCrypt software is such a good tool that I would recommend experimenting with it even if you don’t decide to use it to encrypt your backups. One of the modes of operation of TrueCrypt allows you to create an encrypted file on your normal file system which can then be mounted by TrueCrypt as a drive (or volume) on your computer. To the computer this looks like a normal external disk but has the advantage that all of the files that you write to the disk are securely encrypted and cannot be read without providing the correct password. TrueCrypt is software that I would be prepared to pay quite a lot of money for but it is open source and free.

Cost

The system I describe here costs roughly £260 (including the backup media) and provides 1TB of always available RAID and offsite backed storage – this makes it a very competitively priced solution for a small business or home worker.

I purchased the enclosure and extra drive trays from Dabs.com but the enclosure is also available from Amazon. The hard drives can be purchased from anywhere but should all be of the same capacity – Good 1TB drives can currently be found for about £60. The individual component costs for the whole system were:

Component	Price
1 x USB Dual Removable SATA RAID External Hard Drive Enclosure	£70
1 x Extra Hot Swap Hard Drive Tray	£10
3 x 1TB Internal SATA Disk Drives	£60 each
TrueCrypt Open Source Disk Encryption Software	£free

With a total component cost of about £260, the benefits of this disk-based system over our old tape based solution are enormous not just in price but in flexibility and features. In short, it is a solution that I would recommend.

Celebrity Caricature Prints and Books make great gifts

Gary Hartley — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:32:09 +0000

Peter from Peopleoftheday.co.uk dropped us an email to ask if we can help publicise their range of celebrity caricature books and prints in time for Christmas. Normally we ignore these types of marketing emails but Peters request stood out when he explained it was an initiative that supported Cystic Fibrosis (CF). Personally I have never explained CF personally, nor through any family members but through reading up on the subject it’s a life-threatening inherited disease which affects over 8,000 people in the UK.

Around 1 in 25 people in the UK carry the faulty gene, that’s over two million people.

Each week five babies are born with CF and three young lives are lost to CF.

CF affects a number of internal organs, especially the lungs and digestive system, by clogging them with thick sticky mucus resulting in infections and inflammation making it hard to breathe and digest food.

There is currently no cure for Cystic Fibrosis.

A perfect gift

Whether it’s for dad for Christmas or your Grandad for his birthday, these books and limited edition prints make a fantastic gift. You’ll also be supporting Cystic Fibrosis.

People of the day, £8.99
Buy online at Amazon →

People of the day 2, £8.99
Buy online at Amazon →

People of the day 3, £7.99
Buy online at Amazon →

People of the day 4, £7.99
Buy online at Amazon →

Limited Edition prints

View the gallery of over 200 celebrity caricatures and buy the limited edition prints.

Buy online at Peopleoftheday.co.uk →

Also, any referral fees we collect will be donated to the Cystic Fibrosis charity fund.

CableDrop

Gary Hartley — Sat, 30 May 2009 23:23:21 +0000

CableDrop is a must buy product for every gadget freak! These clever little cable holders can be stuck on any surface, the side of your iMac, the side of your desk, anywhere where you want to casually grasp those loose digital camera wires or your iPod earphones. They look great and come in a variety of colours.

Buy online