I read about the Dreamachine in the Times several months ago, and it sounded quite appealing. You make a cylinder with some patterns cut out of it, put it on top of a rotating base, hang a light in the middle, and sit in front of it with your eyes closed, and you have dreams while you're awake! Some guy is selling them for $400--screw that. I wanted to make one myself, but there were two obstacles: I've never quite gotten comfortable with making stuff involving motors, and I knew it wouldn't look nearly as cool without the right patterns as pictured in the article, but figuring them out from one photo seemed a dicey proposition.

A few months later, after spotting one belonging to the Brian Jonestown Massacre in DiG! I was inspired to look into it again, and both of those obstacles were quickly cleared. As for the first, the base can, even should, be a record player that rotates at 78rpm. And as for the second, several sites had versions of the exact pattern layout that looked good and probably authentic to me. Here are a few of those: noah.org, 10111.org, brainwashed.com. Warning: extremely pretentious prose ahead: ...it is a method of balancing and effecting a communication with the three bases of life itself, each then becoming more strongly connected. This allows a much more pure form of energy to pass through them, feeding and being fed by themselves.

The Dreamachine was invented by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, friends of William S. Burroughs, blah blah. Yes, they were on psychotropic drugs. But as far as I can tell the Dreamachine was sincerely meant to be used without them. It immediately made sense to me that it would work because of experiences I've had watching a low sun through trees while in a car on a highway, or while standing in front of a strobe light in a thick smoke machine-generated fog at a Flaming Lips show. The device works by the patterns cut out of the cylinder causing the light to flash against your eyelids at between 7 and 13 Hz (6 holes in each row * 1.2 rotations per second = 9.6Hz), the same frequency as so-called Alpha brain waves. Supposedly having to process the light at that frequency will cause those waves to appear, in turn causing certain effects associated with the appearance of those waves. I've been telling people without looking into it too thoroughly that Alpha waves are "the ones that happen when you're dreaming." The Skeptic's Dictionary says they are usually associated with lack of visual processing and lack of focus, but can also appear when one is not relaxed. Other sites say that Alpha waves do also appear during REM sleep.

Anyway, for my Dreamachine I glued together two pieces of oak tag--the plans specified a height of 36", but for me 28" with the top row of holes left off seemed more than adequate. I drew a 2" grid onto the oak tag and then drew on the patterns for the holes. The web sites wanted me to print out templates of the shapes, but that seemed unnecessary when they had been so nicely designed to consist entirely of straight lines and and circular arcs:

My only advice for the cutting is to start with a new blade for your X-acto knife. I switched part of the way through and it made the difference between making the cut three times and getting a slightly jagged edge, and making it once with a perfect edge.

Record players seem so ubiquitous at yard sales and the like that I was slightly embarrassed to have to seek one out. But it just wasn't happening the easy way, and I realized it was a rather narrowing requirement to want one that just spins and doesn't play records (and therefore is very cheap), so I selected one from eBay that had no discernable brand name and was estimated to be from the 1930s or 40s, for $5 + $13 shipping. When I got it I had to solder on a new AC plug for it, but after doing so I was quite relieved when it spun nicely. It even has the mechanism for stacking up multiple records on the spindle and playing them in succession, but the chances of that working seemed remote, and it was not relevant anyway.

A few days after a brief initial trial, my roommate tripped over the Dreamachine and left it slightly torn and rather warped. I repaired it several days later with some electrical tape and stabilizing barbecue skewers, and have used it happily a few times since.

My experience so far is that the Dreamachine quickly produces surprisingly complex visual patterns that also change very quickly. My brain creatively fills in some details, causing me to imagine (but not really to believe) that these patterns are some object or event I am watching, or a landscape I am moving through. I haven't experienced the sensation of 360 degree view that some talk about. Usually I would not say that what I am experiencing is much like a dream. I'm watching these cool patterns go by, but I still know where I am and what's really happening. A few times though, that has changed. During one session, for a while I felt like my whole body was rotating on a horizontal axis, as if I were sitting on a giant record player (though I didn't think that was happening--it was like those virtual rides where they tip your seat around). Ian Sommerville seems to have described something similar as an early, unpleasant stage of his first Dreamachine session, but I didn't mind it. One other time I was made slightly anxious by a momentary feeling that I was hearing burbling sounds, and that I might be underwater in a large aquarium. Other times I've had dreamlike sensations that were more abstract, less memorable thoughts, like dreams I would have during a microsleep.

In general the Dreamachine is, for me, a very relaxing time. Often if I try to lie perfectly still in the dark and quiet, I am inevitably overcome within a few minutes by an itch or simply an urge to move a limb, and after that I will start fidgeting without even realizing it. The machine seems to provide enough of a stimulus that I'm distracted from those urges and have no trouble lying still at all. I seem to feel pretty serene after a session, though perhaps that will diminish with time. And the thing just looks so damn cool! Highly recommended for all non-epileptics.

This will be one of those entries where you realize how incredibly out of touch I am with the mainstream. For a while I've seen subway ads for "Trimspa," the diet product endorsed by Anna Nicole Smith. Apart from the fact that she's wearing a full wetsuit in the 'after' photos, I always noticed the ads boasting: "#1 in Hoodia Gordonii." I puzzled over how many meanings this could have. Was Hoodia Gordonii a place? A category of diet products or a contest between them? Another kind of category, like an extreme sports league? The silliness of the name contributed significantly to my fascination, because it didn't really sound like it could be any of those things without my having previously known about it. Then I passed a nutrition store yesterday and realized the answer was one I hadn't thought of: an ingredient.

* * *

A new project has occupied my researches of late. I'd like to be able to document my surroundings with photographs. The faces of the people passing by on the street, and sitting across from me on the subway, items for sale in stores, little fleeting scenes that pop up in front of me. Anything really, but most importantly things that disappear too fast to capture with my regular camera, because it takes several seconds to start up, or too sensitive for the bulky regular camera, like people.

Some photographers are skilled at capturing people candidly. They have some combination of these qualities: quickness, sneakiness, a long zoom lens, or just being very personable and therefore innocuous, not drawing attention to themselves. I seem to be the personified antithesis of these necessary qualities. Every time I merely take out my regular camera, just taking pictures of scenery, people start giving me suspicious looks. When I was in Paris and tried to get more adventurous, I pissed off a couple of people, but fortunately neither were in a position to come after me (but that's a story for another day). So I shall have to make up for my shortcomings with special equipment.

The requirements are these, in roughly descending order of importance. The camera must be concealable on my person. I must be able to aim it to some degree, in an innocuous way. It must be able to stay on for a significant period of time, without turning off automatically as many cameras do, and without killing the batteries too quickly. It must be able to operate silently (but if not, I can probably go in and rip the internal speaker out) and without any bright lights flashing (see previous). I must be able to in some way (hacking the electronics if need be) connect a remote trigger so that, for example, I can take a picture while keeping my hand in my pocket even if the camera is elsewhere on my person.

I think that's most of the must-haves. It would also be great if the camera can adapt to interior lighting (such as on the subway), if it turns on quickly and has little shutter lag, if it can have a zoom capability (that would also have to be triggered remotely), and of course the more resolution the better. But these things are tall orders for tiny cameras.

Next time I'll talk about some of the cameras I've chosen to start with and the different technical approaches one could take to various aspects of this problem.

One way in which my quest for surreptitious photography (originally laid out in the second part of this post) can be described is to say that I want a cameraphone without the phone. The cameras in cameraphones are very small, operate silently, have very small openings for the lens, perform impressively in low light conditions, and lately have been getting into pretty reasonable resolutions such as 2MP. Some can even zoom, without anything sticking out in the process. I tried to find out if I could purchase the camera components that are used for these separately, and make a primitive interface for them by which, absent of an LCD or anything like that, take pictures, zoom, etc. I could achieve great wearability by spreading out the parts, with the camera where it needs to be, the batteries in another place, the memory in another, and the trigger buttons in my pocket, with wires running all around.

My efforts in this direction were frustrated. I found out that ST Micro Electronics is a company that makes cameraphone cameras, including pretty good modern high-res ones, and found old cached versions of Mouser catalog pages that showed that they had sold the standalone cameras and development kits to go with them! The dev kits were expensive, but still, it was more than I expected to find. Sadly, in the current catalog these pages have disappeared. I couldn't find anyone anywhere saying anything about it. I can only hope these products will soon be replaced.

Meanwhile, for Christmas I received what's probably the most readily concealable consumer digital camera on the market: L'Espion S, sold by Thinkgeek and made by Digital Dream of the UK. I'd thought of buying it a while ago, but it used to be even more unfortunately named the "James Bond Digital Camera." I guess they must have realized Bond is not a very hip association these days.

I've only used the camera a few times so far, but here are my first impressions. As I said it's very concealable, and the Zippo case it lives in is really pretty cool--it even makes the right sound when you open and close it. The resolution is not great at 640x480, but I can live with it for now. The low light performance is pretty impressive. The memory capacity is sufficient for me, though it could certainly improve. The image compression is quite detectable, and not suitable for photophiles, but fine for my purposes. My primary gripe is with the "quickshot" feature that allows you to flip it open, press one button, and take a picture without having to separately turn the camera on and off. To be honest, until tonight I hadn't gotten this to work at all. But it turned out I just wasn't holding the button down long enough. The feature is used by pressing the same button that normally turns the camera on, but holding it down for 2 seconds. I think it actually took about 3 or 4 seconds from when I first depressed the button to when the picture was taken. To me that's not a great way to take the picture surreptitiously, although if the camera were hidden I guess it would be alright. But after thinking about it, I realized this limitation is probably due to the fact that the camera still needs to turn on and initialize before it can snap the picture, rather than simply poor button programming.

I should also mention that the camera has a pretty impressive amount of configurability considering the fact that its interface consists of two buttons, an LED and a two-character display. It does make some noises that can't be disabled, but they're high-pitched tones, so I'm hoping to find that in any reasonably loud environment it won't be noticeable. Transferring to the computer is easy, it has a USB plug and appears as a removable drive the same way any camera does. Battery management seems sensible, unlike some of the other tiny digital cameras I've heard about (it takes one AAA).

A side note: the thinkgeek page says "The l'espion S uses ST Micro technology to capture highly-detailed images with incredibly small file sizes." So I think they've done pretty much exactly what I wanted to do, and much better than I could have done on my own. If they come out with a new version with higher resolution and an improved quickshot feature, it will be a really great gadget.

I've been interested for a few years, on and off, in the work of Paul Ekman. He did a lot of research into how our faces react to our emotions. He discovered that the meaning of emotional facial expressions is universal across cultures. He contends that there are facial expressions we are not conscious of and that most of us never notice in others--very subtle ones, and also very quick ones that flash across the face in a fraction of a second as a first emotional response to a situation--and that we can learn to see these and use them to tell when someone is hiding their true feelings.

There was a great New Yorker profile by Malcom Gladwell in 2002 that's available at his site. Jordan initially showed it to me that year, and I could not resist trying to learn to see microexpressions and read faces. This entails learning the muscles of the face and the combinations of their exercise that produce familiar facial expressions, of which Ekman has produced an encyclopaedia called FACS (Facial Action Coding System). It also requires learning about how the expressions and muscle movements correspond to emotions. This knowledge is not included in FACS because it is still under research, and FACS is in fact a kit for carrying out that research by laying out a system for quantifying the expressions observed by researchers. Finally it requires learning to see the microexpressions that supposedly come and go from a face within a fifth of a second or so.

So the question for me became what can I buy or do to learn this, preferably without spending a lot of money, but spending as much time as necessary. The complete FACS sells for $260, which I might be able to justify to myself at some point, but I really wanted to see if I could achieve my goals for less. A couple of years ago I bought two CD-ROMs that Ekman sells, called the "Micro-Expression Training Tool" and the "Subtle Expression Training Tool" for $30 each. The titles are self-explanatory, but I found them lacking. In the "METT", you're shown pictures of people with neutral faces, and then a photo of them making an expression is flashed on for some short interval, then the original picture is back, and you're tested on what emotion they were showing in the quick photo. After that initial quiz you get to look at the expression photos for a longer time, and then you take the test again. You do better, so you must be able to see micro-expressions! Not quite. One sample per emotion is really not enough to help you learn the essence of the expression. More importantly, seeing a quick photo flashed in this way is very different from how it must look when someone really makes a microexpression. Even one quick video would have been so helpful, and would be the most convincing evidence I've seen yet that the phenomenon really exists. This was like trying to learn a foreign language with a list of 10 words translated.

Since then I found this site (warning: silly music) which has a wealth of information related to FACS, including material about the facial muscles and videos of people moving those specific muscles. You can also download some sample chapters from the full FACS. With that and Ekman's book "Emotions Revealed", which I've finally started reading, I feel like I'm starting to get a better foundation for observing faces in the wild.

In the New Yorker profile, Silvan Tomkins is described as perhaps the best face reader the world has ever known. He learned the skill by watching television with the sound turned down. I don't have cable TV right now, but I do have access to DVDs through Netflix, and that's where I finally come to my point. To practice observing faces, I'd like to be able to watch DVDs with the sound off and watch the faces of people, and then if necessary go back and watch it with the sound on to see if I can correctly predict the emotions they were experiencing at that time. I can also slow the action down to try to get a better look at fleeting microexpressions. To be precise, this is what I'm looking for:

• Lots of close-up shots of people's faces that don't cut away a lot.
• The people could be expected to be experiencing some kind of emotion, and preferably a range of emotions.
• Non-fiction is preferred--since microexpressions are supposed to be subconscious, I don't know if even a good actor's expressions would correspond more to their character's situation or to how filming was going that day.

I think that about covers it. The first requirement might be the hardest to fulfill, because it goes against a very common style of documentary. But I know there must be some good stuff out there, it's just hard to get a feel for how well a DVD will meet my requirements without actually seeing it. Anyone have any ideas?

For a Christmas gift I attempted to make a creatively packaged mix CD, in the style of Adam Kempa's creations. For some reason I fixated on the idea of a cylindrical or spherical package to match the CD's shape; I enjoyed imagining the recipient trying without success to fit it neatly into his CD collection. For a while I drew a blank, but one day the idea of an Oreo cookie with the CD in the middle popped into my head.

The creamy filling is made from a DVD-R spindle case, reduced in height. This means to open the case and remove the CD, you twist the two halves first, much the way some people eat Oreos. I also thought this would be a much more reliable and satisfying mechanism than I would have been able to make myself.

The cookie pieces were made from a material called Last-A-Foam, a rigid polyurethane foam that we've been using at work recently for quick prototype construction. It forms easily and I figured it would have a good cookie texture. After forming the pieces using a bandsaw and router and sanding them, I cut a circular groove in one side for the upper half of the sliding mechanism.

I painted the pieces black and white with Plasti-Kote enamel paint before gluing the creamy filling parts onto the cookie parts with hot melt glue. I applied a label to the CD and also printed out and cut a circular paper tracklist.

The Oreo pattern came from a picture on Flickr, which was actually of a tin made to look like an Oreo, but was by far the best and highest-res image available. (One of the lessons I gleaned from this exercise is that when searching for 'oreo cookie' on Flickr, you get a lot of pictures of two distinct types: black and white cats, and one white person surrounded by two non-white people.) I was slightly disappointed by the contrast in texture between the paper and the foam, but the alternative was hand-painting the pattern, and given my skill set, that seemed unlikely to produce better results.

As difficult as the packaging for me was choosing a tracklist. I'd already made a mix CD for the same person last year, and then lost the tracklist in a computer crash, so I was afraid if I stuck with my old favorites I would inevitably end up choosing some of the same songs as I did last time. But I hardly listened to any new music this year. So I frantically read mp3 blogs, and found a lot to like, with the final list leaning rather heavily on a few blogs' best-of-2006 lists:

1. Peter Bjorn and John - "Young Folks"
2. Phoenix - "Long Distance Call"
3. Arms - "Tiger Tamer"
4. Islands - "Rough Gem"
5. Yo La Tengo - "Mr. Tough"
6. The Panda Band - "Eyelashes"
7. Grizzly Bear - "Easier"
8. Belle and Sebastian - "White Collar Boy"
9. Fred Thomas - "Disappearing"
10. Regina Spektor - "Fidelity"
11. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - "Vanessa from Queens"
12. Band of Horses - "The Funeral"
13. Jeremy Enigk - "Been Here Before"

I've come to a rather indecisive decision on the problem of sharing a photo library between two computers, as discussed at the bottom of this entry. Some googling brought me to this discussion on the Adobe Forums of sharing a Lightroom library between multiple users and/or computers. What I got from it is that the software's support for this is currently limited at best, but that there is a decent chance it will improve in the future.

I also learned about NAS, or network attached storage devices. Essentially they are arrays of hard drives in a box, like a home server or 'media center' but with minimal software and hardware apart from the drives themselves. I wasn't very aware of their existence, but this is pretty much exactly what I'd been wanting for a general home backup solution that's in some ways more convenient than a Firewire or USB 2.0 external drive. It's a nice example of computing technology filtering down from industrial, scientific and business applications to home users. Pretty soon we'll probably all have servers in our closets, storing the ever-more thorough documentation of our lives and sharing it among the ever-growing number of computers in our homes. I'm not much of an early adopter however, and the current selection of NASs still looks a bit rough around the edges. So for now my canonical library will live on my PC, with its large screen and ample (and expandable) storage, and when the time is right I'll move it over to an NAS.

With my building having been built in 1915, my apartment has a fair amount of 'character.' We can see where it was divided with the apartment next door. Our bedroom used to be the dining room and had large French doors. There's no proper grounding in the electrical outlets. Some of the doors have old-fashioned keyholes. The bathtub is actually a cast iron one with feet that have been covered up by tile; there is no flat part on which to stand, and the overflow drain goes nowhere that's helpful. Looking at more recent times, our door has three locks and a chain, and a vestigial part from an alarm system.

One of the more interesting items is a square bump in the kitchen wall. My former roommate's father, a man of encyclopedic knowledge in areas that you wouldn't even know how to look up, identified it as a potato bin. Apparently it was a box built into the wall such that the lack of insulation made it a natural refrigerator in the winter. It had been sealed shut by many layers of paint, and I didn't think about it much after that, until its paint started peeling and I wanted to scrape it all off and repaint, perhaps with an accent color. I didn't know if I'd be able to get it open in the process, but it was an intriguing possibility.

Sure enough, while chipping away around the edges, I saw it budge, and it wasn't much of a struggle from there. The bin contained cobwebs, a bottle of lemon cleanser, a sponge, a rag, a spring, and a bar of soap. It had been lined with linoleum. The sponge started to crumble when I touched it. Interesting to think about the lives of those who last saw these items, and how this bin went from one use to another and then was sealed and forgotten.

In senior year of high school I took a speaker building class. For the final project, a pair of speakers, we could choose from a few sets of components depending on how much money we wanted to spend. We could also choose a custom design, though the teacher warned that his guy who supplied enclosures tended to procrastinate on these.

For some reason I decided I wanted one of the wedge-shaped stage monitors often seen at concerts. Probably I believed this would bring me close to my dreams of rockstardom. I used the skills I had acquired in drafting class to make a technical drawing showing the exact dimensions of the enclosure I wanted. I presented this to my teacher, who warned me again that his guy was probably going to screw me on it.

I then spent several weeks playing "Marathon" on computers in the classroom while everyone else assembled their speakers. With only a couple of weeks to go, my teacher finally relayed his guy's estimate: $200 for the enclosure alone. At the time this seemed to me like an astronomical sum intended to discourage me from pursuing it any further. Indeed, I had to say I couldn't afford it and would instead simply build a single speaker of normal proportions. When it was done, I tried it out once with Beck's "Mutations" on our home stereo, and then it sat in my closet for several years.

Earlier this year, with the speaker sitting mournfully in my bedroom studio, I decided to put an end to this sorry state of affairs. I would somehow acquire an amplifier that would allow me to at least use the damn speaker for rehearsals, plugging a synthesizer or even a laptop into it. I would buy one if I could, but if not, I would build it. I posted on the TapeOp message board my requirements:

• 8" x 10" or less, so it could either sit on top of or go inside the speaker
• about 50 watts, loud enough for rehearsals if not for shows
• $200 or less

The responses offered some helpful tips which eventually led me to another message board, diyAudio. I started reading all about chip amps, amplifiers based on tiny integrated circuits, which could purportedly offer excellent results at low cost and complexity. I eventually decided to order a kit based on the LM3886 chip from chipamp.com. These kits are made by Peter Daniel, an active contributor to diyAudio, and one is basically assured customer support by many very knowledgeable and helpful people, as well as a thorough existing knowledge base.

At the same time, I was pretty anxious about two things (besides figuring out what a "snubberized" power supply is):

1. No kit included a transformer, the biggest and most expensive single part of the amplifier, whose job is ironically to reduce the voltage coming in from the wall, rather than to amplify anything. The instructions had a page of text about how to choose a transformer, little of which I understood. My head was swimming with details about primaries and secondaries and bias voltages. Finally, I found a diyAudio thread containing a simple endorsement for a 22-Volt model available at Parts Express. It weighs 3.3 pounds and costs $42 (and it is possible to ruin it with improper assembly).

2. Enclosures. Many diyAudio contributors' projects use separate enclosures for the amplifier and the power supply to eliminate any chance of interference. I felt this practice probably wasn't necessary for me, since even commercial amplifiers rarely use it. But how small could the enclosure be before hum would become a real problem? I couldn't find any precise information. Most amplifiers are the standard big home theater size. Finally I decided to simply make what I wanted and see how it sounded, rather than risk unnecessary sacrifices.

The assembly process is one of repeated orders from Mouser and Parts Express and runs to Radio Shack for the inevitable items I forgot or ordered wrong, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. After a lot of mental juggling, I decided on a 5 x 7" enclosure from Hammond. Once I had everything assembled it was time for some moments of truth. One of the difficulties I've always had with electronics projects is testing incrementally and so as to avoid damage, the way I would always do with software that I create. I just don't know how to do this in hardware. The kit's creator offered the procedure of measuring the voltages on the output connectors at minimum and maximum volume, which went fine. The next test required a Variac transformer to gradually ramp up to 120 volts, but I wasn't prepared to buy one just for this. So finally I had to go ahead and turn it on and see what would happen.

Thankfully, nothing blew up, and it even made sound, without any hum! The only trouble I had was with wiring the volume knob backward, easily corrected. The maximum sound level is adequate, though I wouldn't mind if it could pump out a little more—keep in mind I did only build one half of the kit. As for the sound quality, I honestly don't think I can judge whether it's merely good or audiophile-ready, having only run a synthesizer through it, but I'm perfectly happy. My thanks to Peter Daniel for an excellent product.