Have you ever seen inside a hummingbird's nest? I hadn't either, until I discovered this little one in our street-side tree. It's only about 2.5" across, and when the mother hummingbird sits inside she fills the whole thing. I risked the fatal dive of a needle-beak long enough to raise my aging camera phone above my head to see what was inside....

Check out how camouflaged it is! It's so tiny, you really wouldn't even know it was there. I can't even imagine what a hummingbird hatchling looks like, and I refuse to google it. Your move, springtime.

Super interesting read about some archaeoacoustic research in Serbia:

http://www.sbresearchgroup.eu/index.php/en/notizie-in-inglese/205-archaeoacoustic-analysis-in-the-imperial-palace-felix-romuliana-in-eastern-serbia

(via mediateletipos)

There's only a single sound clip available right now, but the effect is pretty mesmerizing. It's wild to imagine ancient people performing sacrificial blood rituals while bathed in this soundscape.

I found an interesting open/free circuit tonight that I wanted to price out on OSH Park. The circuit designer was awesome enough to make the design files freely available on the interwebs...but unfortunately (out of the box) they fail the OSH Park upload checker. "Ok, that's fine, you get what you pay for" I think...I'll just open the files in Eagle and save into a newer version or investigate what's missing...

I haven't installed Eagle PCB in a while (certainly not since I had to reinstall this laptop after the most recent HD failure). So I go to the download page, grab the installer and run it and.....of course, it fails.

But it fails due to missing 32-bit libs.

It's 2015! Seriously? I've suffered with Eagle for more than 15 years now, and in spite of all my persistent gripes about usability flaws and UI cruft, we still sometimes have to use it...but now there's now this problem?

Seriously CadSoft, it's 2015...

This is great. If you're interested in active listening, field recordings, soundscapes, or amibent sound/music, this is a pretty good primer and talks about the origins of the term "acoustic ecology" as a movement.

Fantastic noise show at S1 tonight. Excellent sets all around! I didn't capture much, but the MSHR set was absolutely amazing and I offer up a few clips:

I was pleased to learn that the Python Imaging Library (PIL) has a modernized fork called Pillow. From the Pillow site:

The fork authors’ goal is to foster active development of PIL through:

• Continuous integration testing via Travis CI
• Publicized development activity on GitHub
• Regular releases to the Python Package Index

This is great news for me, because there are several projects (this site included) that use PIL, and I have been worried about its future. In addition to the infrequent PIL releases, the lack of Python 3 support in PIL was starting to be a real drag...and it was the main thing that kept some of us on Python 2.7.

So yeah, it's nice to have a path forward...time to embrace the fork and move on. I will miss the PIL acronym.

Somebody is being either clever or naive -- spotted this at the checkout line:

"Childs Play" -- not a kids movie.

Such a simple and effective (yet time consuming) way to make a mask of a face out of rawhide. Soooo creepy!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Skin-Mask

(source)

This video doesn't do it justice...but I was shocked to see this terrifying child in a kabuki mask staring in the window earlier:

Spoiler: It's not actually a child...it's a mop.

The Church of Robotron has been working hard to find the mutant savior and to train members of the last human family. We had an opening on Wednesday, and my friend Zach edited together this fantastic video:

Here's a test video I shot of oscule's much improved jacob's ladder...it's terrifying:

If you have not yet been tested, please join us on First Thursday, October 2nd, 2014 at Diode Gallery for indoctrination, testing, anti-robot training, propaganda distribution, and some good old-fashioned street devival.

• More pictures/video from me.
• Pictures from Mike
• Pictures from Zach