Last fall I was contacted by Heiko Hansen (of HeHe) regarding using the EasyLase USB on the Mac. I must say I was quite intrigued when I found out that he was working on Nuage Vert, a visualization of energy usage in Helsinki. The project uses the cloud of emissions from the Salmisaari power plant as a canvas to demonstrate how much energy is in use by the city.

photo credit HeHe

The project is going on display February 22-29 in Helsinki. I encourage you to go check it out more in depth at www.nuagevert.org.

For the project, I ended up creating a Java wrapper for the libEasyLase driver for OS X. It is now possible to get laser output on the EasyLase USB from inside a Java app on the Mac. Please contact me if you’re interested using this.

I’ve finally put together an installer for the EasyLase USB driver for Mac OS X. I am making the driver available for download today, after more than a year of use internally with the LaserLine project as well as the Laser MacMAME and iTunes visualizer projects.

The build is Universal and has been tested on PPC and x86. The installer includes libftd2xx, a necessary library from FTDI. It is working well with libftd2xx version 0.1.3; Version 0.1.0 is the current released version, and I expect FTDI to update this soon.

Please let me know if you’re using this driver to access an EasyLase USB on the Mac, I am happy to help with usage and development of laser software on Mac OS X.

Download EasyLase USB Driver v1.0 (Universal) for Mac OS X:

libEasyLase.dmg.

Subjectivity is (fortunately?) no longer needed with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Leopard’s mail client dutifully warns senders of blank subject lines before sending mail. I am, for this reason, stopping active development. This built in feature will likely be more useful as it is there by default. So with this release, I’ve fixed up the installer a bit, this time a shell script instead of an AppleScript, and prevented it from trying to install on Leopard. A bit of a farewell for this piece of software–on to bigger and better things.

Download Subjectivity v1.0.1 (Universal) for Mac OS X 10.4:

Subjectivity.dmg.

In my final project for my photography class this semester I had intended to take very wide angle pictures of spaces to evoke a feeling of emptiness and desolateness around the university. As the project progressed, I found it had turned in to something else; extremely wide angle and stitched photos. The process produced high resolution images which allowed me to print them very large. The image “beautifulcourtyard” seems to reflect the original intent most accurately.

Prints covering the entire floor of my apartment

They were put together with Adobe Photoshop CS3; Realviz stitcher provided unsatisfactory results.

The “big” versions I’ve put up for viewing in the gallery are 33% scaled versions of the originals. The originals are impressively large, which yielded the interesting prints. Well, they’re not wall sized or anything, but they’re the first time I’ve printed this large.

One more round of photos coming after I get back to school and scan the black & white film project.