The studio is located in the heart of Gowanus, Brooklyn, on 9th Street between Smith and 2nd Ave in an artist and music centric four story converted warehouse. This is just two blocks from the R (4th Ave/9th), G and F trains (Smith/9th). We are dog and bike friendly with 24 hour access possibilities. The space is also right next to Lowe’s Hardware with access to a large freight elevator.

Some other aspects of note: 32′x5′ worktable area with wifi, whiteboards, projector and natural lighting. A variety of tools, two sewing machines, and a fairly open floor plan to accommodate a variety of wacky needs.

Leave a comment here, send an email to nathanfreitas at gmail, or contact me via @nathanfreitas on twitter, if you are interested, want a tour, or more information!

I just realized how much of a mouthful that last sentence was so let me break it down… Bre encourages and teaches people how to make the things in their head become real. I’m not talking really about aspirations, but actual, physical things. He and the NYC Resistor crew even have an amazing workshop laboratory in Brooklyn where they let anyone come over and hang out at, to learn how to make, build and fabricate pretty much anything. They also have a laser (aka “LAAAZZZOOOR”) which you can think of as an automagic thing cutter-outer!

With that, here’s what I did:

1) I drew up plans for my dream ukulele using the free, open-source Inkscape vector drawing tool. You can see my open-source Ukulele plans here.

2) With the help from a kind friend, I got this file into the proper format for printing, stuck a sheet of 1/8″ x 24″ x 12″ plywood into the laser, and then hit the “GO” button. Just before you hit that button, you are required to shout “FIRE THE LAZZZZOR”, just so people know, well, that something magic is about to happen.

3) After about twenty minutes of laazzzoor (which costs me $20… $1 per minute of laser use), out came the piece of wood, from which I could easily pop out the various parts of my new uku. From there, some simple wood glue and human hand pressure produced the outcome seen below.

Now, like the title says, this is “Proto Uno”, so I’ve got a ways until this thing is playable… first of all, it needs to be about twice as big to fit my fingers. However, purely measuring from the “random idea in my head” to “actual physical thing” perspective, this was definitely a #WIN.

Stay tuned for further adventures in on-demand musicality via lazzzzors, and who knows, I might just be able to play a song for you some day soon!

Coovents.com shows you which happy hours are going on today and shows you which ones are going on now. With one glance you can see happy hours in your hood! You can also send a text message to Coovents and we’ll send you happy hours to your phone! Bar hopping will never be the same.

Now, even if you aren’t interested in happy hours, you might be interested to know that this application was writtten using the PhoneGap Framework… in other words, while it may look like a “native” iPhone App, it is actually developed in HTML, CSS and AJAX, using Mobile Safari enhancements such as Scalable Vector Graphics, WebKit Transitions and HTML 5 Database support. The client app on the iPhone interfaces with Coovents via a JSON query interface, with all the rendering, requests and other magic shenanigans in the user interface happening via JQuery.

I’ve blogged about PhoneGap many times before here, but I have to say this is the farthest I’ve taken it both functionally and visually… perhaps it is because the app (happy hours) is an enjoyable problem to solve!

Watch the video below to see the app in action…

You can also checkout the Flickr Screenshot Set of the app…

Again, if you are interested in being a beta tester, please sign up here. Otherwise, the app will be in the iTunes store very soon!

Anyhow, enjoy this four minute peek into my Christmas day revelry….

Christmas in the Colonies from natdefreitas on Vimeo.

This was definitely the year of gadgets for me, as I also was given a Polaroid Pogo mobile printer and a ThinkGeek Wifi Finder T-Shirt! More on these awesome toys in a later post…

Many thanks to Snr. Sufjan Stevens for the tune… go buy his Christmas album if you like it!

One of the exciting aspects of this project is that the primary visionaries, architects and developers committed early on to opening up the data they are collecting, providing a variety of feeds to access the incoming reports:

Here are the various ways that you can access the data collected by Twitter Vote Report, as detailed by our Andrew Turner:

* OpenSearch – http://votereport.us/opensearch.xml
This is the OpenSearch description document that outlines all of the feeds and various filters that you can use when getting to the data.
* KML – http://votereport.us/reports.kml
Getting the reports.kml will give a Network Link – this is useful for GoogleEarth and other KML clients to automatically update every 60 seconds with new reports.
* GeoRSS-Atom – http://votereport.us/reports.atom
Just want to subscribe to the feed in your RSS reader, this feed is useful for getting updates.
* GeoJSON – http://votereport.us/reports.json
JSON is super nice for doing client-side mashups and visualization. This is what the Vote Report Map itself is using. It includes a lot of information for each report, including reporter, icon, location

I haven’t been involved in the backend development of the TVR system because a) I couldn’t fully commit to the herculean effort they’ve made and b) much of it is implemented in Ruby on Rails, a platform which I am not that familiar with. However, I had a few hours today and decided to become a consumer of the data feeds (specifically GeoJSON) they have provided to implement a service using Java/JSP. My aim was to provide an alternate system for browsing the reports and visualizing them, as well, and perhaps just act as a backup repository.

Thus, I’ve created TVR on OpenIdeals – the same data as what you’ll get on the main twittervotereport site, but with some different tools for looking through it and for sharing it on your blog.

I also wanted to provide some other options for creating widgets out of the data. Here’s an example of a dynamically updating widget you can create that displays the last 25 reports from Virginia:

Here’s a view of anyone having a bad experience at the pools:

That’s about it. Check out the site and please tomorrow make sure you 1) VOTE and 2) report how your vote went using the TVR Reporting Tools.