Bascule Relief

Bascule Relief

I built a tool for determining if the Hamilton Avenue Bridge over Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal is open or closed, in real-time. You can determine for yourself if the bridge is open or closed at hamiltontraffic.com, or read on to learn all about my very unhinged obsession with this very hinged drawbridge. But first, here’s a…

The Rotary Club

The Rotary Club

For my niece’s birthday this year, I decided to give her the gift every 6-year-old secretly dreams of: an old rotary phone! This wonderful phone came from Facebook Marketplace, the new craigslist where I spend an embarrassing amount of my free time these days. Seriously. It’s incredible. I drove down to the Jersey suburbs of…

The Open Open-Gangway Gang

The Open Open-Gangway Gang

Last week, the MTA expanded its rollout of the new open-gangway train, known as the R211T, to the G line. (There are only three of these experimental trains in service; until last week there were two, exclusively running on the C line.) If you’re a railfan or just want to experience a fancy new train,…

B Sides & Rarities

B Sides & Rarities

I like a good backstory. No — I mean, I really like a good backstory. Just check my lonely little corner of the alignment chart I filled out with my students last week: I also have felt more dissociated than usual lately, in the lead-up to my 40th birthday (which is probably why I celebrated…

Track o’ Lantern

Track o’ Lantern

Happy Halloween! I turned an old CRT into a fun stoop accoutrement to amuse our trick-or-treaters. It features a 3D animation of a jack o’ lantern that follows your head motions and facial expressions, much like an animoji. It also plays spooky Halloween classics via a little speaker hidden inside. Track o’ Lantern lives inside…

The Last Waltz

The Last Waltz

I learned long ago that my capacity for nostalgia extends well beyond the limits of my own lived experiences. I have records originally owned by my dad’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. I have love letters written neither to me or by me. I have fliers my friend plastered around our college campus twenty years ago. I spent…

Bit-banging a BASIC Birthday

Bit-banging a BASIC Birthday

I spent this summer building a new app, for a machine that hasn’t been on the market since 1980 and wasn’t built to support graphics, sound, connectivity or even lowercase letters, sold by a company that went bankrupt a decade ago, tailor-made for an audience of one: my dad, who celebrated his 70th birthday this…

Six Degrees of Syncopation

Six Degrees of Syncopation

I made a Spotify remote that tweaks song recommendations across six axes, based on Spotify’s audio features: danceability, energy, acousticness, duration, valence and popularity. It uses the Spacetec Spaceball 2003, an incredible six-degrees-of-freedom CAD mouse from circa 1991. The Spaceball’s freedom of motion allows each axis of motion to tweak your music recommendations, while the…