There are more and more Blinkenlights movies trickling in for Reloaded. This is good.

Some people ask, if we will show their movie and what the parameters are that lead to the movie being actually broadcasted on the big screen. The short answer is: we are not going to show everything we receive. The movies we pick for our playlist have to go through a series of evaluation steps that are like this.

• If it is just scrolling text it is likely to be dropped. There is nothing more boring than scrolling text on a big building: it takes too long to watch and people usually do not read it anyway. If you make it scroll faster, nobody could follow.

What works a bit better is showing the text one letter at a time with the position shifted to the right one column for each letter. But still it depends on the text. All You Base Are Belong To Us is a good example, but we already have that.

• If the movie contains URLs or other ad-like stuff it gets dropped immediately.
• If the file is too fast or too slow or too long it might be put on hold for later reedit.
• Make your movies tell a short story quickly. Put a joke at the end, make it funny, make it a real movie in 30 seconds max.
• Simple rotating images, morphing patterns and other visual sugar works fine on the building and will be used to fill playlist.
• Important: make sure the movie is in BML format and does validate. This makes it easier for us.

If you think about this a bit, the chance of becoming a part of the big screen are much higher.

Because of the heavy traffic caused by media reports, download speeds were not that high for most of you when downloading from the Blinkenlights home page.

We have now made the Blinkenlights Documentation Videos – major cause of bandwidth congestion available via BitTorrent. Download speeds are a lot better when using that protocol. You find the torrent files on the web site.

nice site

Work on Blinkenlights Reloaded is making progress. The stands for the lamps have been completed and the software is about to get a minor overhaul soon. When everything goes well, we‘ll have an update for the blinkentools and the blinkensim simulator for you.

I am happy to report that blinkensim runs on Mac OS X 10.3 just fine. We have to update the blinkenthems for greyscale support, but this is not a big problem. Realtime Blinkenlights data streaming is coming to your UNIX box at home.

Maybe we‘ll be able to provide live video streaming as well. This is still an open game. Let‘s see.

So here it comes: Legal Torrents provides music via the great BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. The music is licensed under the Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial license by Creative Commons. This means it is free to copy and re-distribute the music as long as the music is not used for commercial activities and no derivative works are produced.

I wonder if this would mean if one could use the music to put it in a non-commercial video.

Oh my. Blinkenlights got slashdotted today and our little server had to cope with a lot of load. Oh yes, there it is, the Slashdot Effect. An article on the German Heise Newsticker kicked it off.

It‘s great to see the interest in the sequel of our project is certainly there. I am a bit afraid of the amount of mail we are about to receive in the coming days which already starts to trickle in. Björn‘s new BlinkenPaint program is such a beautiful little app – it grew from a simple simulator to a full-blown low-res animation editor with all the bells and whistles you expect to find and even more. It‘s going to make people even more creative.

So let‘s see how everything will develop. This weekend we are going to install the system and hopefully we are not going to run into too much trouble. When everything works, we‘ll try to hook it up with all the Blinkenlights gear about to show up at the Congress and for New Year‘s Eve we‘ll have the obvious big countdown running on the house. Big fun is it what it is meant to be. For us, for Berlin, for everyone.

If we are lucky, there will be a QuickTime stream of the installation and a web cam. We are also going to put out the real data stream the building is displaying so that you can receive and display it with our little simulator. If we are lucky…

Surprise, surprise!

Starting December 22th, 2003 until January 4th, 2004 there will be a short revival of our interactive light installation known as Blinkenlights: Blinkenlights Reloaded.

The building Haus des Lehrers – currently under reconstruction – will be operated as we did it before. A new version of BlinkenPaint lets you create movies and you can play the interactive game Pong and even activate your personal loveletters with your mobile phone.

Blinkenlights Reloaded uses the technology we have developed for Arcade in Paris last year. That means greyscales. Version 3 of BlinkenPaint supports this as well as our new movie file format BML which is based on XML.

For those unfamiliar with Blinkenlights, the Blinkenlights documentation videos should be the first stop. The videos are available in various formats and sizes and I think they are pretty impressive as well. Check them out.

Meanwhile, the Blinkenlights crew is going to be quite busy during as there is the Chaos Communication Congress taking place at the same time just next to the building. Among other things, the BlinkenArea will show a variety of Blinkenlights clone in all forms and sizes. Check our Blinkenlights Links and the BlinkenArea‘s project overview page to get a glimpse of the growing Blinkenlights universe. That stuff is so encouraging.

Since we have put out the core Blinkenlights source under the Gnu Public License, most projects have adopted our core playlist system, the Blinkenlights file formats and the Blinkenlights Protocol. Among them is MPlayer, which can read Blinkenlights Movies out of the box and send them using the Blinkenlights Protocol to any receiving station.

The whole Blinkenlights toolset can be found on Sven‘s Blinkentools page. The software should compile easily on UNIX systems, including Mac OS X (although you need glib2 installed: use fink). The blinkensim can receive Blinkenlights Protocol streams and display them in a simulator window. We try to provide you with the live data stream of Blinkenlights Reloaded so that you can display the same data at home!

In the coming days, this blog will serve as a daily update on Blinkenlights Reloaded, BlinkenArea developments and the 20C3 as well.

Steve Olechowski has a RSS Feed Reader for the Sony Ericsson P900 phone in development. It is written in Java. There is still some work to do but it looks as if it is already useful. So now you can track weblog changes with your mobile. Well, only if you have a P900 of course (I have none).

Mama has compiled a list of MPEG-7 resources. MPEG-7 is the XML-based meta data system for MPEG streams is one of the really interesting future applications.

4 law.co.il has published the presentation of general Sanchez on the details of the capture of Saddam Hussein. They also have a video stream of the general‘s press conference (Windows Media format).