silence

2 Articles

A rough cut piece of wood sits on a workbench. A light and a tumbleweed are mounted on top so that the light shines through the tumbleweed. A woman in a ball cap and white tank top is crouched in the background smiling.

Cisco Ball Is The Tumbleweed Opposite Of A Disco Ball

August 5, 2024 by 8 Comments

Inspiration can strike a maker at any moment. For [Laura Kampf], it happened in the desert when she saw a tumbleweed.

Tumbleweeds roll through the western United States, hitting cars on the interstate and providing some background motion for westerns. [Kampf] found the plant’s intricate, prickly structure mesmerizing, and decided to turn it into a piece of contemplative kinetic art.

[Kampf] attached the tumbleweed to a piece of wood using epoxy and mounted it to what appears to be a worm drive motor nestled inside an interestingly-shaped piece of wood. As the tumbleweed turns, a light shines through it to project a changing shadow on the wall to “create silence, it creates calmness, it takes away from the noise that surrounds it.” While [Kampf] has some work to do to get the sculpture to its finished state, we can get behind her mantra, “The most important thing about the phase of execution is to get started.”

Are you looking for some projects of your own to help you find calm? How about some ambient lighting, a sand drawing table, or a music player that keeps things simple?

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The Sound Of Silence: Speed Up Your Video Consumption

June 11, 2020 by 31 Comments

There’s a lot of interesting content produced on video these days. Invariably, though, when we post something some comments will appear lamenting that a video isn’t the most efficient way to disseminate technical information. We have mixed feelings. Some things benefit from being able to see, for example, a screencast. Some people like the human connection of seeing an instructor interact with a class instead of just reading. But we will admit that sometimes a video takes longer to watch, especially if it is full of pauses. Unsilence is a tool from [labmoellertim] that can fix that. The command line tool takes a video and strips out the parts that are silent. You can also use it as a Python library if you want to build your own tools using the technique.

If you’ve ever taken a class online, it isn’t uncommon to speed up a video so you can get through class faster. This works to a point, but removing or speeding up silent gaps means you don’t have to “listen faster.” Of course, you could still speed up the video, too.

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