Here’s a time lapse video of our installation in September at the Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin:

Ridiculous Love from Nicole on Vimeo.

Read about our process below the jump:

Nicole and I use a chat program that allows us to leave each other voicemails. Since we are both a) silly b) in love, some of these messages are definitely ridiculous. Nicole started a collection of these a few years ago which has just grown. We thought it would be fun to invite people to celebrate the ridiculousness that love can sometimes produce, thus Ridiculous Love was born.

The project allows up to four people to sit together on a bench, listen to some inspirational ridiculous music with ridiculous love, then provide their own notes about their experience with ridiculous love which are then pinned to the box:

The electronics:

We purchased

• two simple mp3 players
• two y splitters for 1/8″ audio cables
• 4 sets of headphones
• 2 usb power banks
• some coloured paracord to attach the headphones to the structure

We put our sound files on the mp3 players, then put each mp3 player plugged into a power bank in each side of the structure, with 2 sets of headphones attached to each. To make sure there wasn’t too much stress put on the headphone cables, we tied the headphones to the structure with paracord. This worked pretty well! We have had no headphone casualties so far.

One note: you get what you pay for with mp3 players. We bought these crazy cheap players for less than 3$ each, with cheap micro SD cards. One of them has a non-functioning battery, and when putting the SD card in the other, we managed to shove it between the case and the SD card slot. After some surgery on the player we managed to get the card in the right place, but… lesson learned.

The structure:

In developing the structure, we knew we wanted somewhere people could sit and lounge, but we also wanted to minimize the amount of storage space needed in our apartments for the project. Inspired by the seating choice of many hipster bars in the city, we chose to use beer boxes as the base for our installation. This means we just pay a deposit for the boxes when we need them, then return them to the store when we’re done!

Originally, our design required over 20 boxes though, which would have been a challenge to transport given that we don’t have a car. So we got creative and used some wooden posts to extend the tent structure into the air. This meant we needed a total of 14 boxes – which is still a lot, but much more manageable than twice that many.

To make the boxes comfortable to sit on, we put a camping mattress on top. We tied the whole thing together with ratcheting straps.

The fabric:

The best part of the project is the amazing colour of the structure. Originally we wanted to use pink fun-fur to cover the whole structure. We even ordered 10 m of pink fur from an online retailer! Unfortunately it arrived dirty and not at all the right colour:

With sadness in our hearts, we headed to modulor to see if we could find something better. And we did! We spoke with a wonderful employee in the fabric department who knew exactly what we needed: hot pink stretchy lycra. Its stretchiness makes it super forgiving, and the colour is amazing.

To make the first installation, we just safety pinned the material together, but ideally we’ll sew it all together for our 2018 installations.

The decorations:

To make the Ridiculous Love project really stand out, we added some ridiculous decorations.

• On top of the box we made some “neon lights” by attaching battery powered electroluminescent wire (from dealextreme) to some stiffer wire that we shaped into the letters LOVE.
• We made a sign that said ART. LOVE! on one side, and KUNST. LIEBE! on the other with the letters made of glitter tape on a black foamcore background.
• We pinned tiny red hearts to the structure.

The interactive part:

We asked folks to experience the sound installation, and then pick a piece of paper and crayon in a colour of their choice to write a note about their experience of ridiculous love. These notes were then pinned on to the structure for others to read and be inspired by.

The installation:

We managed to find one Späti that gave us all 14 of our beer cases at once! We thought we would need a cab, but we managed to attach all the boxes to a skateboard which worked as a hand cart to get them all to the park.

The rest of the equipment fit in my camping backpack. You can see us assembling the project in the video above!

• Selected for the 33rd Hamburg International Short Film Festival(June 2017)
• Selected for the 31st Braunschweig International Short FilmFestival (October 2017)

Read more for information about how we made the film.

Nicole and I had been talking about making a short film and submitting to a festival for a while, so when I spotted the Hamburg International Short Film Festival’s deadline coming up we decided to go for it!

Our film idea was to make a stop motion film using resistors. We built a light box by taking a cardboard box and cutting out large panels from all four sides. We then taped translucent white paper to the large sides to make the light entering the box more diffuse, and left the smaller sides open to allow us to move the resistors around. Here’s a photo showing the open side of the box with the translucent paper overlapping a bit. The lamp shown was an early test model, not one we used in the end.

We then bought four led lamps from the hardware store, and set them up so that they were shining onto the paper.

We used Nicole’s iPhone to film, with an app called OSnap. The app takes time lapse photos and turns them into videos. This worked out pretty well because we could set the camera to automatically take photos with enough time in between to move the resistors.

We’re pretty proud of the result, and had so much fun at the film festivals!

Here’s a recipe I’m using for freezer bag cooking while camping. The principle is to pack dehydrated meals in freezer bags, then at camp just boil water, let rehydrate and eat.

I don’t have a dehydrator, but I do have a convection oven which seems to work pretty well.

One of my favourite quick dinners at home is lentils, spinach, and some starch with chili oil. I wanted to reproduce this on the trail. Unfortunately it seems that dehydrating spinach is a pain, but kale works very well! It’s also the right season for kale here in north Germany, so I bought myself a 1 kg bag of kale and dehydrated it in my convection oven. It takes about half an hour with the oven set to 75 Celsius and the door propped open.

Ingredients:

• 30 g dehydrated lentils (was about 1c cooked lentils)
• Handfuls of dehydrated kale – I added about 7g
• 30g rice noodles
• 15 mL chili oil (I love this stuff and have taken to using it on everything!)
• pinch of salt

Note about the lentils: I’m not 100% sure whether they were fully dehydrated, though the weight seems reasonable. I need to do more tests to make sure that I got all the moisture I should out. Another thing I’d like to try is using raw red lentils. They only need 5-10 minutes to cook, which could mean that they’ll work just fine for freezer bag cooking without the long steps of cooking then dehydrating.

Throw the dry ingredients into a freezer bag, and pack a small bottle of chili oil:

Adding 7 grams of dehydrated kale

Adding 30 g of rice noodles

Go hiking! When you’re ready for dinner, boil up some water.

Dinner in a forest clearing

Add chili oil to taste (I like about 15 mL – 2 level large spoonfuls) and about 2 cups boiling water to the freezer bag and put it in something to keep it warm. I used my toque.

Dinner is prepared

Wait about 10 minutes and enjoy! Because it was getting late, I packed everything up and hiked on for about 20-30 minutes (while drinking cocoa ) with the rehydrating meal in my bag before I ate it.

Lentils, kale and rice noodles rehydrated

I cleverly forgot my spoon for this trip, so I poured the food into my mug and drank it like a soup. It was somewhat wet, and I can see an argument for reducing the water, but I quite liked it as it was. I’d call this a success!

Camping dinner in a mug

Neugrabener Heide – heather south of Hamburg

I used the Geofabrik package of OpenStreetMap data for Berlin as a basis for several layers in my map. Once I unpackaged the file to a simple .osm, it’s over 700 MB. I did try to open this in QGIS, but… that didn’t work so well.

Fortunately, you can filter the file before bringing it into your mapping software using osmfilter. The OSM wiki and/or the query feature on openstreetmaps.org will help you figure out how to filter for what you’re interested in.

For example: I wanted to grab all the museums that OpenStreetMap knows about. I looked on the OSM wiki for museums. This page shows that museums will be labelled with the tag “tourism=museum”. Then I ran this command:

./osmfilter berlin-latest.osm --keep="tourism=museum" -o=museums.osm

This runs the osmfilter script (located in the folder in which I’m executing the command) on the berlin-latest.osm. It exports a file museums.osm that includes only those objects with the tag “tourism=museum”.

I separated the transit information I wanted to import into stations and lines. It’s also divided by operator and type (S-Bahn, U-Bahn, tram, etc). To get the U-Bahn stations, for example, I ran

./osmfilter berlin-latest.osm --keep"railway=station AND station=subway" -o=ubahnstations.osm

For the tram lines, I ran commands like this:

./osmfilter berlin-latest.osm --keep"route=tram AND operator=BVG" -o=trams/TramWays.osm

./osmfilter trams/TramWays.osm --keep"ref=M1" -o=trams/M1.osm

I could definitely also have left the tram routes all as one file and done filtering in QGIS to change the colour, but this way seemed easier.

Here’s how it looks after I import some layers this way:

I’ve had the Moleskine City Notebooks before, but they have the persistent habit of walking off. This is a paaaain, especially after I’ve entered all kinds of information into the book by hand. Also, I always make mistakes when writing in the books – apartment on the wrong side of the street, wrong labels on the pages, tram lines going the wrong place – and there’s no eraser for my felt tipped pens.

Modern technology means I shouldn’t have to do this! I will make a little booklet out of A4 folded once to give to guests. This way they can write in it and take it home and I can generate custom maps if I want.

Project plan:

• make maps including index overlay in QGIS
• generate text pages in LaTeX
• use LaTeX or some other plugin to generate a pdf for printing and binding (proper page ordering)

What I’d eventually like to do is:

• write a script so I can have a booklet be generated automatically (query QGIS, export to image, concatenate to pdf)
• have map layers be selectable in the script (some people don’t like coffee, some people are really into transit history, etc)

Some problems I’ve already encountered:

• QGIS isn’t the most stable program. I have some paths and nodes imported from OSM, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable amount? Anyway, being patient and saving often seems to be enough to keep me from losing too much data.
• The OpenLayers plugin acts a little strange when exporting maps. The resolution of the exported maps is usually pretty crap, and sometimes the maps are offset from where they should be. I’d like to solve this one by using a georeferenced image / images at useful resolutions.
• I don’t seem to understand how the scale bars in the exported images work. They seem to be wrong most of the time, which suggests I’m doing something wrong.

Ingredients

• 200 g small lentils
• 500 g potatoes
• 3 carrots
• 1 zucchini
• 2 medium onions
• 3 pickles
• 2 T capers
• 1 pickled pepper
• a bunch of dill
• red wine vinegar
• olive oil
• mustard

Cook Lentils

Boil lentils and halved onion in 800 mL water. It should take 25-30 minutes. Drain and discard the onion.

Sauté Onions

Sauté onions in olive oil. This part can probably be skipped. I don’t think it added that much to the salad.

Boil veggies

Chop potatoes and put them on to boil. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Chop the carrots and add them after 5-7 minutes. Chop the zucchini and add them in the last three minutes. Drain when cooked.

Dressing

Throw the dill, vinegar, olive oil, mustard, capers, pickled pepper, and pickles in the food processor.

Mix everything together. Fresh ground pepper would be a good addition.

I made some cookies to send to family and friends over the holidays, including some green tea shortbread. When I made shortbread (normal shortbread usually) with my family, we shaped the cookies by making balls and then pressing them with a cookie press. I don’t have a cookie press, but I do have potatoes!

This heart shaped press with a A on it worked nicely – the A was even visible in the majority of the cookies.

A ceramic cookie press usually gets covered with flour to keep the cookies from sticking, but with the potato, I just made sure to rinse it often and keep it moist. It worked pretty well!

Hackerspaces are full of people with beards. Lacking the hormones necessary to grow my own, I figured I’d make the next best thing:a ludicrous, brightly coloured, plastic goatee that hangs out of my nose. I made the first ones at thinkhaus the night before the Toronto mini Makerfaire of 2011.

Nosebeard and mustache ring (from @techknight) at Toronto Mini Makerfaire, 2011.

Neon nosebeard made at raumfahrtagentur in Berlin. Seemed like a good way to test out the laser cutter and toolchain.

Another shot of me wearing one of the nosebeards made at think|haus.

Means we ended up with this:

Laser with fire extinguisher dust.

instead of a burned down building.