Hasta La Gadget!

NEW YORK — Howard Pavane made it through Hurricane Irene with just a few hours to spare. He’s worried Sandy will be worse.

The 62-year-old songwriter has multiple medical complications as a result of having polio in 1954. Pavane, who lives in New Hyde Park, a town on Long Island’s north shore, prefers to use an electronic wheelchair to move around, and depends on his nebulizer to breathe during asthma attacks.

“It can be an issue if we lose power for a long time,” he said. His nebulizer’s batteries are currently broken, so it only works when it’s plugged in to a power source — and asthma has hit him hard this weekend. So if the power blows, he said he might not be able to breathe.

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NEW YORK — The New York Stock Exchange will close its trading floor Monday as Hurricane Sandy barrels its way up the Northeast, but Big Board trading will continue electronically.

NYSE Euronext said Sunday it is putting in place its contingency plans beginning Monday and will announce later when the trading floor will reopen.

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If you’re hip to repurposing old tech for new inventions, Invisible is right up your alley. The Greensboro-based unit calls themselves a “mechanical music museum” and “a reverse engineered folk science daydream” when describing their elaborate set of sound-making contraptions and recycled video equipment. The outfit’s effort The New Obsolete was part of the Moogfest happenings this weekend, and our curiosity was immediately piqued. This particular performance is labeled as “an exploded view of the strange romance between humans and technology.”

Among all of the self-constructed instruments is the Selectric Piano: a typewriter that uses both computer and piano parts to control a keyboard. Each keystroke by the typist corresponds to a note added to collective soundscape and a mounted video camera allows the audience to keep tabs on the textual component. The project also showcases an object known as Elsewhere’s Roof. The device controls a set of drum and percussion tools with water dropping into a few rather hi-tech Mason jars. In addition to arsenal of noise makers, multi-channel video and library of collected audio (via tape decks and turntables, of course) rounds out the lot. We were able to catch one of the stellar showings, so hit the gallery below for a look at the wares while a snippet of the action awaits beyond the break.

Continue reading Invisible’s ‘The New Obsolete’ showcases self-constructed instruments, touts a typewriter-driven piano (video)

Filed under: Misc, Alt

Invisible’s ‘The New Obsolete’ showcases self-constructed instruments, touts a typewriter-driven piano (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Oct 2012 18:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NEW YORK — On Monday, CNN plans to kick off its end-of-the-election series, “The Final Battlegrounds,” with over two-dozen correspondents dispatched across eight pivotal states for the 2012 campaign’s eight remaining days.

But CNN executives, who have long been preparing for the election’s final frenzied days, are now grappling with simultaneously covering Hurricane Sandy — a powerful storm that could cause havoc on the East Coast and disrupt campaigns’ plans going into the home stretch — and the final week of the election.

“CNN will be in position to sustain live coverage of the storm 24 hours a day and we will maintain our reporting in the battleground states that aren’t immediately affected by the storm,” said CNN senior vice president of programming Bart Feder, in a statement to The Huffington Post. “But clearly the storm will be the priority for at least 36 hours.”

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A drop of water might seem mundane, but if you take a picture of one the right way, it can be absolutely stunning. No one knows that better than Markus Reugels, the guy who took that amazing “world in a drop of water shot.” This is how he does it. More »