Boris Smus

Look at the riders of any city bus. Many of them are plugged into their music players, tapping away to the beat. I propose to augment our natural love of rhythm into a ubiquitous wearable drum system. The target user of this system isn’t only the typical rhythm loving bus rider, but also an amateur drummer. Drum kits are heavy and unwieldy, making them difficult to transport to a jam session. The proposed system can also act as a stand-in for a full drum-kit for quick, impromptu jamming. read more…

My favorite class at CMU is probably Making Things Interactive. For me it is an opportunity to take my thus far casual electronics hacking to to the next level. In this article, I’ll briefly outline my submission for the “Motion” assignment. I used a servo motor to control a Nerf gun. I built it and installed it in my MHCI lab, which has a handful of Nerf pistols floating around. The idea was to have the gun automatically fire at unsuspecting visitors as they entered the room. read more…

Since starting this site, I’ve been using a lightly tweaked version of the ClockWorkAir theme. The old design featured a prominent quote in prime screen real estate and a tag cloud in the upper sidebar. A blue title bar, reminiscent of the default wordpress theme, graced the blog header. The main text was small and there was hardly enough room to place images in the left margin. As I had hoped, the design class I’m taking at CMU gave me some good ideas. read more…

In the midst of my graduate studies, I somehow found the time to write a simple prototype for a mobile Guitar Unleashed client. It’s more of a proof-of-concept for some cool new technologies that I’ve been meaning to play with. Two things led me down this path:

1. Since I’m no longer bound by corporate affiliation, I feel compelled to finally develop an interesting application for iPhone.
2. I’m very bad at remembering guitar chords and lyrics, but never bother making a cheat sheet to take to the campfire. I nearly always have my phone in my pocket, though.

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Since moving to the states, I have had nothing but grief from the .ca at the end of my all-purpose email address. Even in Canada, people would constantly confuse z3.ca for z3.com, resulting in email bounces. To resolve this problem once and for all, I decided to switch to Gmail like all the cool kids. I registered boris.smus long ago out but never used it. The first thing I did was try to link my z3.ca to the Gmail. When I couldn’t figure out how to do that, I deleted my Gmail account in order to re-create a new pre-linked account with the same name. Sounds innocent enough, right?

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