10/25/07:

Haven't updated this page in forever, so many projects gone undocumented.... So here goes, have to start somewhere, a few pics of the new button panel I'm working on:

The idea is it's supposed to control a movie created on the fly generated from Photoboof pictures. The left joystick controls playback direction and speed (up/down is speed, left/right is playback direction), the center joystick is stretching (up/down is vertical stretch, left/right is horizontal stretch) and the right joystick is panning. And the buttons do various things like reset the speed, go into random modes, and lots of features I haven't invented yet.

Under the hood, currently all wired into an ASCII translator, meaning pressing a button translates it into a keystroke. I'm hoping to wire it into a midi translator instead since that would be so much more flexible.

I need to get a pic of all the buttons lit up, they're all super bright lurid arcade colors. Most came from a set of old peepshow booth interfaces I found in a dumpster... Yes, I washed them well.

Possibly my favorite part is the pictures printed on it. I wanted to make a grid of Photoboof pictures but couldn't find any program that did that well, so I whipped up a quick program I call Proofsheet. It takes a directory or directories of pictures and prints them in a grid, either randomly or sequentially, with a configurable border. If there's more than one page worth it makes multiple pages. Handy dandy.

I printed six 8.5" x 11" sheets and taped them together, then put a piece of plexi over them.

Justin built the stand, really nice job. It's very heavy and solid metal.

And you might notice the computer monitor in the background, that's another thing I've been working on. Radioactive, reborn as a touchscreen interface.

I got the touchscreen on ebay for $70 shipped! The ad said it's "military grade" so I didn't expect much, but the thing is great. It was made in 2000 so it must have cost a fortune when new. The color quality is still great, and it never misses a touch.

Most of the buttons tune in to college radio, and the bottom buttons do things like choose a random song from our whole network, or picks a specific song with an onscreen keyboard.

3/25/07:

The Ure-O-Matic

A little Flash gizmo I made for Ure to play his loops. Press the buttons to start and stop the loops, move the blue dot in the square to control the volume and panning.

3/23/07:

Amy shot this really cool video of Dancing Santa at the R Prod new year's party.

3/22/07:

Have the projector set up in the common space. God bless projectors. Projecting a surf flick nice and large:

It's playing from the arcade game just under the right side of the screen:

My favorite feature is the screen is actually a scrim, which is pretty translucent. My office is right behind the scrim, so I've been using the projector as my office light, which casts all sorts of cool effects...

Another view, clutter and all:

Erika and Domino being bedazzled on the couch.

It inspired me to make some handy dandy remote control software. In wrybread.com/utilities is Random Network Movie (soon to be renamed The Lobotomizer), which picks a random movie or song from the whole network; and Remotely, which lets me control the projector computer through a coolio web page.

3/5/07:

The Boxhead Photoboof is now alive... This was commissioned by a marketing company in L.A. The idea is you stick your head up through the box and then it's a regular photobooth. They're doing some sort of box-themed promotion all over the country, so this beast will be touring.

The client wanted it matte black, but we convinced them to have local artists paint the thing at each stop on the tour, which might looked darned purdy. Here's a closeup of the viewer on the outside that cycles through all the pics.

We put a semi fisheye lens on the camera since there's not much room in that box. Now it fits 2 people easily, 3 if they're very friendly. Makes a kind of cool effect with all the mirrors in there.

Assembling it in the marketing company's office. I swear this is where they filmed Office Space.

A sample strip. The lighting is much better since taking this picture. The flash is the monitor itself, which displays a random piece of art from the gallery that's hosting it.

Driving it down to L.A., note it's not the most aerodynamic thing in the world.

I love this picture. Those are all the dead flies on the leading edge of the booth. When Justin was cleaning them off he said you could smell dead fly. Yikes.

Justin took a bunch of these pictures on the drive back. So I'd wake up from that nervous passenger sleep where you always feel like you're about to drive off the road, and I'd see Justin is passing an 18-wheeler going 80 with a hand on the steering wheel, a hand on the camera, and his chin trying to change the exposure settings...

Great pics though. Especially great as desktop wallpaper.

The spirits of the highway...

Also, a friend randomly stumbled on this picture of me on Flickr. It's me at some goofy gamer party that hired Son of a Boof. I made the jacket out of a shitload of keys someone gave me. My favorite part about the Flickr page is the controversy over whether my prized Jesse Jackson pin is Landau Calrissian or Billy Dee Williams.

3/1/07:

Just a quick note about "The Nagger". It's a little program I wrote to harrass a guy in L.A. who owes me money. It sends the following text message to his cellphone obnoxiously often:

"Hi, this is a friendly reminder that you still haven't paid Alec Bennett. Since it seems you've forgotten, I'll be sending reminders to help you remember. So whenever you get a chance, paypal $200 to wrybread@gmail.com as originally agreed. I'll be increasing the frequency of reminders every day until I hear from you. Thanks!"

On day one (tomorrow) it'll send it at one random time, day two (next day) at two random times, etc. Should be interesting, especially a week from now...

Anyway the program is pretty slick, it'll send a text to whatever cellphone number you give it, no matter what their cell provider is. Maybe I shouldn't release this one publicly...

2/23/07:

We got hired to work some Barbie promotion at Bloomingdales, was pretty surreal. You can sort of see us under the Dior sign.

Another view. Note the customed out graphics and paintjob on Son of a Boof.

The Barbies were really surreal. It was funny, it was co-branded with Mac Makeup ("Barbie Loves Mac!"), and they put these really doll makeup jobs on these human Barbies. I'd have thought that wouldn't be a good thing for a makeup company, but what do I know.

Barbies in Da Boof!

More pics from my camera here, and the pics from the boof here.

2/9/07:

We did a promo party for KY Jelly at the Supper Club. Note Son of a Boof all purdy and pink.

Since the Supper Club is full of beds (it's usually a restaurant where you eat in bed), we set it up aiming at a bed.

After some futzing we got the pics looking pretty good:

The fashion show.

1/18/07:

Let there be PictureThis, a little program that scours Craigslist for pictures and makes cool little collages out of them. A coulple of colalges:

1/15/07:

Back from Mexico, posted some pics. That link has much more pics, but here's Half Moon Bay by Amacker's place:

Surfing some big waves on the other side of the point:

The Wookie at night, all lit up with LEDs:

And standing proud at Conejo:

12/20/06:

Booking the boof like crazy. We got told by the founder of Slide.com that we're "quite du jour", which is either really good or really bad, but all I know is I'm heading to Mexico.

Here's a video of youtube's xmas party. I was hoping it would get on youtube's cover page, hence the shameless plug at the end, but alas.

12/16/06:

Let there be Radioactive, the future best player of college, freeform and community radio. Very beta, but it works.

12/14/06:

The Wookie has officially been pimped. I can't wait to see the reactions as we pass through the first Federale checkpoint... (Click it for a panorama taht shows a slightly wider angle)

12/12/06:

Allison Lange, rest in peace.

11/29/06:

Started taking apart some goofy dancing santas, thought it'd be pretty snazzbo to put a bunch of them around the ol xmas tree, wire them together so one button starts them all:

Whoops, video:

And look what became of our Halloween pumpkin:

And a pic from a recent Boof gig, I like this pic:

And The Flickrizer, a little toy I made for our Halloween party. The idea is people type a keyword into the computer, it searches Flickr and Google Images for pics tagged with that word, then projects them onto the wall. Unfortunately I didn't get any pics of it in action, and the laptop died after a couple of hours for unknown reasons. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Originally it only searched Flickr, but truth be told Flickr's images are kind of boring for a party. Then I discovered google image search with "safe search" turned off... Anyway it adds the keyword to the image, making for some hilarious juxtapositions. For example, search for "ass" and get a bunch of ass pics, then you get one of a guy who's just obviously an ass:

And I like this pic of Herman hauling the cigarette machine. I swear Herman can haul more stuff than my van.

11/5/06:

Pac Pac Revolution!

When setting up The Flickrizer for our last party I realized at the last second that what I really need is a way for people to play Pac Man on a Dance Dance Revolution pad in front of my new projector. And thus (too late for the party) Pac Pac Revolution was born...

Here's where it stands now, functional but none too pretty. Each of the 1' square wood pieces is a pressure sensitive pad. So for example step on that top center one, and it's like pressing up on a joystick.

Here's the uber sophisticated pressure mechanism: two pieces of 28 guage sheet metal separated by a ring of rubber weatherstripping. I have to say it works almost flawlessly, and I can tune the sensitivity by moving those screws closer to the center. One of the panels is wired to ground, and the other carries the signal. Step on it and the two pieces of metal touch and you have a circuit, which is wired into a MAME controller that converts the signal to ASCII signals.

Another view. The corner panels, which will eventually represent diagnals, don't do anything yet. No big deal for PacMan, but when it eventually starts being an interface to Dig Dug and all that, it'll need diagnals.

A view of it in action, under the projector:

11/1/06:

We hosted Ghetto Gourmet at our place on Halloween, holy crap that was fun. Pretty neat organization: everyone buys a $40 ticket in advance which covers food but not drink. You byob, and your own pillows to sit on. And the food is hardcore good, like seriously good. This meal was tapas style, and here you can see the little Chinese food containers they used, brilliant:

Here's one of the chefs making beef heart skewers. Not my thing, but it was Halloween afterall. And behind him you can see the projections from Son of a Boof (the pics from the night are here).

Another pic of the boof pics looming large:

And Erika and Megan were wheeled out covered in chocolate for desert...

10/5/06:

A couple of pics of the boof at a wedding:

I was supposed to drive into the little compound, but you can see the narrow-ass door to the right of the boof. No biggie, the party always ends up at the boof, even if the boof is in the parking lot.

10/03/06:

Here's a funny one: I helped a friend with a guerilla mission putting up her fliers, and in the morning I went back to shoot some pictures, and when I looked up a woman was taking my picture. We sat there taking each others picture for awhile:

I finally asked why she's taking my picture, and she said "did you put up those fliers?" I said no but obviously she knew I was lying. Apparently you're not supposed to put up fliers, who knew.... Anyway, I had one on my car which you can see in the above pic, oops, I admit that wasn't the best idea, so they took pictures of my plate as I drove away. Whatever.

The offending flyers (the Jesus fish-bomb additions):

And hitting Clarion Alley. More pics of the night here.

9/15/06:

The stereo in the boof after it's fire. Still works! More pics here, and all the Burning Man pics here.

8/15/06:

Just got back from the Galapagos Islands. This is about the only picture I took, though I definitely wish I'd taken more. But I was trying to avoid falling into the shutterbug trap that everyone else seemed to fall into:

Me swandiving off the bow:

7/25/06:

Dave bought a cellphone on ebay, it had this text message on it:

7/19/06:

This is what happens when you skin a furby and get busy with a hot glue gun:

I should make some video of him, he still works perfectly, mouth moves, eyes blink, the whole bit.

6/5/06:

Son of a Boof at a corporate party for Blue Shields, ugh:

It was a photobooth-themed party, and there were 4 other photobooths there, and I was worried Son of a Boof was going to be outclassed. Nope, totally dominated, was almost embarassing how little attention people payed to those beautiful old photobooths. Oh well, Son of a Boof loved it. And I got some interesting pics of the insides of old film photobooths here.

5/10/06:

My bedroom door, though I've since removed the glowing R because I like the Pachinco game underneath it more:

4/26/06:

New Cushmen!

More words and pics here.

4/25/06:

According to rumors on that strange Interweb thingy, if you drop a whole pack of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, it explodes. Apparently the rumors are true, as the boys downstairs demonstrate.

Step 1: put the whole pack of Mentos into a paper tube:

Step 2, put a playing card between under the tube of Mentos and above the coke:

Step 3: pull the card out, spilling the Mentos into the coke, and yell "holy shit!":

4/23/06:

Trampoline Simon was a hit at the Maker's Faire. Wow that was fun. Story here.

4/17/06:

Bunch o new stuff.

Just bought a new Cushman, have to go pick it up from San Luis Obispo By Wednesday, ouch. $800 online auction:

This weekend I installed two photoboofs at a Scion car promotion. Was a hoot, we had the booths projecting on a huge screen, the only way to go. I have more pics, but for now here's this one, and I posted the pics the boofs took:

Since I'm now such a corporate whore I made the "ExpreScion" logo into mosaic of all the pics from the night, click it for the full sized version:

And today I made a privacy fence for our roof shower, since the bastards in the new building have been seen peeping in:

I plan to get creeper vines, probably passion flower for the trellis. Hopefully everything will hold up in the rain. I'll fill the fish tank with dirt for the flowers:

A panorama of our building. We're the top two floors. I like the way this came out, each of the bright spots is another burst from my flash:

Couple more roof pics while we're on the subject... Sunset, with Domino making an appearance on the wall:

Same view, with things all cleaned up just before resealing the roof:

Scored a geodisic dome off craigslist for free:

The morning coffee nook faces the sun nicely:

I saw this on the street, wish I'd thought of the "no posse" angle:

4/1/06:

My new Craigslist tracker lets you see how many people click your Craigslist ad. And the emailer lets you see when someone reads your email. This one scares even me.

3/20/06:

Made a time lapse while organizing my shelves:

3/6/06:

Son of a Boof was working a party at Xian Space on Saturday night, took some great pics. The curtain wasn't up, it was just in mini mode. We set up one of the flashes to the side of all the people, created an interesting effect. Fun with light slave flashes. Pics.

Also, experimenting with Boof logos for the lightbox that'll eventually go on the roof of Son of Boof. I was thinking something along these lines:

Here's a file with a bunch of pics of other photobooths and cameras for ideas, or you can see the photobooths on this page...

3/5/06:

Son of a Boof!

I got a request to bring The Boof to a Bar Mitzvah but the venue had a flight of stairs... That's a common theme in the land of Boof rentals, "we'd love to have the boof but the door is too narrow", etc. So Justin and I built Son of Boof, here's some pics of the construction process.

We're supposed to be set up by noon on Saturday, this is 10pm Friday. If you were a shark you'd smell blood in the water:

We're probably already a bit bleary eyed, but you know us, anything for a Bar Mitzvah! Well, that and $1k:

"Yeah, this'll work":

I bought a brand new Canon IP3000 on Craigslist for $50 on the drive over, my favorite Boof printer: dirt cheap generic inks, really reliable and fast, and discontinued hence $50. Here it is stripped of all the crap, making it much easier to spot paper jams and see at a glance whether it's printing. And I can wire a remote LED that blinks when the printer needs attention so I don't have to watch for crestfallen kids:

The camera is in place, Justin testing the frame, 4am, 8 hours until showtime:

The guts are somewhat in place:

We played with that rake type structure on the roof, but thought it might be a bit too abstract for the venue:

Note the curtain rod hanging off. This is a really portable design, just the main unit, and then the steel curtain rods bolt on easily, and black curtains frame out the booth:

Uh oh, the clock on the wall says 6am:

And we havn't even put the rear door on yet, much less painted anything:

We put the door on and realized we have no paint rollers... So 7:30am and I sacked out. I woke up 9:30, more rested than I've ever been after 2 hours of sleep, and saw this:

And a surprisngly un-frazzled Justin:

Another shot because it's so damn good:

So we packed everything up, watching the clock every second, and drove out to the Bar Mitzvah about 45 minutes late but nontheless appreciated by anyone under 40. It's in the scriptures that Boof Shall Dominate Any Venue, And Thus Boof Did. We caught a bit of sniping from the woman running the goofy Polaroiod picture booth, she said "you're not much for punctuality are you", which is fair enough, but there was a note of competition in the way she said it. Within 10 minutes there was a line for the boof that pretty much never stopped all night, while Polaroid lady had plenty of time to eat more latkas.

I couldn't take pics since the only camera I had was running the boof, but here's a couple of quick ones I took afterwards:

What you see inside the boof:

The Bar Mitzvah itself, believe it or not, was pretty fun. The hired MC was a serious pro of the Bar Mitzvah circuit, he brought a stage, a DJ, a boom mic so he could be out on the floor while showing the kids dances, and he brought 3 cyborg super kids who would mingle with the regular kids and do the dances. Absolutely incredible dancers, here's them in The Boof, of course they instantly did one of the best strips of the night:

It was hilarious watching them flirt with the regular kids, and then of course right when the party ended they didn't want anything to do with them. And then I found out they had another Bar Mitzvah to go to after this one. Oy.

Here's the rest of the pics the Boof took at "Around The World With Daniel".

And then transporting the Boof back home, on the back of Jackie's pickup:

3/1/06:

Useless Keys is born!

2/27/06:

I posted some more programs to the Wrybread's Utilities section.

2/20/06:

I put up some shelves made from wine crates next to my desk, hallelujia, more places to store the mess. Thanks to Erika for the idea, she's the wizard of wine crates. Here's a pano (click it to see it larger):

A detail I like, this is where all those little gizmos go that plug into my computer and clog up my desk, like my Palm Pilot, camera card reader, battery charger, jukebox, etc. And of course my police scanner, for when I hear a high speed chase zipping by at 2am, which happens about once every three days:

A shot of just the wine crate shelves. I ran out of wine crates, I'll probably go the whole distance, though I really like having someplace to put up prints of stuff I'm working on:

2/15/06:

I dove deep into the Python programming language to give commercial photobooth software a shot and photoboof.com is born.

2/2/06:

Movie night at the R last night. Paul brought home his work projector, we hung this gigantic white fabric up which was a bit gauzy so we got a double image on the wall behind it, but still it worked great. Stayed up till 6am watching movies. We've really got to get a projector in-house. Here's a shot with the flash blowing everything out, but gives a nice idea of what's going on. For scale, those are stand-up video games to the right:

Here's the same shot without the flash:

I love this guy, it's The Brain from the Santa Cruz Boardwalk:

Start with a little Breaking Bonaduce (very little Breaking Bonaduce):

Then some giant penguins:

More Brain (and note the Trampoline Simon in the foreground, good for intermissions):

And some Southpark of course:

2/1/06:

New incense burner on the toilet, an old non working fountain I found at the thriftshop, drilled a bunch of holes for incense:

Hopefully someday I'll turn it into a Flush Fountain. Here's some pics of the last Flush Fountain I made (when you flush, it pipes the water through the fountain on it's way to refill the toilet reservoir):

1/31/06:

I set up a load test on my snazzbo new-&-improved Photoboof script, my pet robot ran the script over and over for hours to make sure it wouldn't crap out under the load. No crapping, but more interestingly the pics came out really cool. That thing in the foreground is a stripped down old clock radio.

Also, I set up a page that lets you easily record the shoutcast from the SF pirate radio station Radio Kult (89.9fm in Soma): http://wrybread.com/kult

1/26/06:

The Saga Of Brian

Someone posted this message on the E's Surf Report blog, might be the funniest post I've ever read on the internet:

"I had a fucking awesome day. FUCK YEAH im so STOKED. Get in the water, get a fuckin nose-ride right, takes forever and it was BEA-FUCKING-UTIFUL!!!! and then i got a shotgun left and another fuckin right. a couple big ol drops but the waves closed out and i got stuck in whitewash, oh well. fucking so after that i come home, plop my ass in the hot tub and smoke a fat cigar. and after THAT my parents have cooked me up a fatty london broil and i fuckin pig out on prime ass juicy steak and salad and potatoes, and finish it all of with some grub ass chocolate cookies and FROSTING AND MILK!!!!! OH YEAH im feeling fucking good. best day ive had surfin for a long time. MEGA STOKE

So of course people started bagging on Brian. The funniest bag:

"..okay Brian, get off the computer now-- lights out and into beddie or someone's not getting poptarts for breakfast!

Posted by: your parents on January 23, 2006 10:18 PM "

Anyway, the next day Brian posted a picture of himself:

And someone else posted some animated gif of a woman dancing, so I combined the two:

More Brian, all made from pics posted that day:

Saga of Brian update.... it's a day later and he just posted this, this guy's a genius:

Earlier stuff in no particular order:

I'm working on a Trampoline Simon, here's a pic, and more info and pics here:

Roofus:

Some pics from da roof of da R:

A poolhall called The Entertainer (8th & Bryant) went out of business, Razz and I brought the really long and heavy and unwieldy sign home at 4am on two skateboards. Lots of good letters in "entertainer", so I'm making this refrigerator magnet thingamabob behind the rooftop morning breakfast coffee nook that nicely faces the morning sun:

Another shot, at night:

By "refrigerator magnet" I mean the letters are rearrangeable. Here's a pic of the hook system I rigged:

Currently the letters hang on electrical conduit, but that needs to be replaced by regular pipe since the conduit bows. The letters light up, or I should say currently the R lights up, but soon if I get off my lazy rump they'll all light up. Anyway, note the little solar panel, that charges a single AA NiMH battery, which lights a bunch of blue LEDs. Works great, stays lit all night, and has that slick new-style blue LEDness. Here's a flash picture which totally blows out the new-style blue LEDness:

A picture which doesn't blow out the new-style blue LEDness but doesn't show much else:

The rest of the sign waiting to be harvested. It's brutal getting through the rusted bolts:

Da Roof Shower:

Another view:

The old roof garden, which is now a self-sustaining seasonal ecosystem whether we like it or not, and protected from the cats Safeway wagon-train style:

Our roof as seen from space via Google Earth:

And from Microsoft's Terra Server or whatever they're calling it. We're communicating with aliens by repositioning our ping pong table every now and then. And why does it give me such satisfaction that Google's picture is so much better than Microsoft's?

And click here to see our roof as seen from a crappy half-assed I'm-In-A-Rush panorama.

The R Productions Christmas Card 2005:

This came first, because everyone must Obey Erika:

Incidentally, here's the last xmas card we sent out, Xmas 2001:

I finally got around to making some stickers for The Boof (through contagiousgraphics.com, highly recommended):

Some doll lights I rigged for our Halloween party. I put those new-style flourescent lights (the ones with the standard base) inside the dolls, works great, no heat, no burning doll, and they look purdy:

And here's the world's only gumball machine that gives money back. You put a single penny in, and many pennies come out. If only they had these when I was a kid. Lit with LEDs (12v) so it could be battery powered. Thanks gigantically to Dave and Angela for giving me the gumball machine for Christmas:

A blurry group shot that doesn't convey much:

A sign I put above our sink:

Way earlier stuff:

I made this sign for the building door at the R (and note the camera below the 9...):

And of course the sign had to do double duty, so to speak, on the toilet downstairs:

Here's an interesting one, this bike is locked by nothing but this threatening gas cannister:

The chain is just dangled over the peddle, and doesn't even lock to the gas can.

I wonder if it was just an experiment?

I didn't notice it at the time, but I guess that bottle on the back of the bike might be part of the threat?

Looking into the gas can, nothing in there that I can see...

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Couple o pics of Domino and the new kitty:

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We've secretly replaced Dave's cappuccino maker...

with something a little more colorful.

And weedy.

And punk rocky.

And cigarette butty.

Lest you claim that a man's coffee is something you don't fuck with,
don't worry, we still have the original, we're just looking to cause a little moment.
We found the duplicate on the street and couldn't resist.

Besides, I have photographic proof that Shakara was responsible for the whole thing.

Update: Dave chose this morning to be the one morning ever that he doesn't make coffee.
Bastard. But we'll get him tomorrow. Here's a note I printed up to leave on his new coffee maker:

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Johnson sent this picture to the R Productions email list, must have just gotten a camera phone:

So we had to spruce it up:

(Click here to see the original ad)

We printed it on iron on tshirt transfer sheets, came out great. Here's mine:

It made our fridge (printed out in a grid on 4 x 6 paper, I like the effect):

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We found out Allison's middle name is Bruce, and had to do something. We ironed this on to her pillow case:

Behold the pillow in all its rumpled glory: