Just for Fun

Though we try to keep busy, it's not all work,work,work at marchingCubes.com. We like to stay sharp by playing with new toys, learning new things and stepping out of our comfort zone.

We're also 100% into supporting open source projects, and local communities and companies. Heres some nifty stuff we've been doing outside work time

Animating Tux

Tux is the cute little penguin that has been Linux's mascot for many years. Part of our work with the Green Button supercomputing service required a test project - Plus it's been a great chance to get to grips with the massively improved animation tools in the recent versions of Blender. This is very much a work in progress, and we hope to have tux featuring in more video soon.

Ponoko rotary engine model

As soon as we heard that the Ponoko laser-cutting service was launched, and they were based in Wellington, we had to try out their service. Ponoko let us progress a long way towards acheiving one of our little dreams - building a wankel rotary engine from scratch. - Currently, the design is just a working model, but its a huge step forward for the project, and everyone who has played with the model thinks its pretty neat.

Here are some photos of the model, and if you want to assemble your own, have Ponoko make you one - the design, with assembly instructions is on sale in their store for US$5

QTribe MIDI Sequencer

We like to tinker around with music here at marchingCubes, and one of our favourite noise-making toys is the Korg EM-1. This thing has a pair of realtime-tweakable monosynths, a drum machine and a step sequencer in an incredibly easy-to-use package.

Playing with the EM-1, and a desire to learn more about Linux audio programming inspired us to write something similar to the EM-1 in software. If you're interested in this kind of thing, why not email Pete to get the latest?