I live in the Blue Mountains, about 80KM outside Sydney. Thought you might like to see the famous Three Sisters in Katoomba - one of the famous viewing points in the mountains.

The workshop, conference TODO interaction & media design : BIP 2006 - building interactive playgrounds looks like a whole lot of fun, and focuses on taking the technology out of the lab/studio and into the real-world

Great archives for Arduino fans Code: Arduino Archives on Tom Igoe and by Dan O'Sullivan's physical computing site

I was fascinated to find the MAKE: Blog: Remote weather station project today, as I setup a weather sonification project Meterosonics last year running from a weather station in my back yard and using a JSyn based app - downloadable from above - to sonify the weather data in realtime. The Meterosonics project is intended to be open - so people can add stations and JSyn algorithms and it can become a community of weather sounds. I'll check out the MAKE projecy in more detail - feel free to check out the Meterosonics Project

Some other useful links include One-wire weather – Oww Project a RISC OS or Linux interface to the Dallas Semiconductor 1-wire weather station.

The Eathernet Weather Station Based on an AVR Microcontroller.

Some more info on Wireless Weather Stations

and perhaps most interesting of all, especially in the light of my Meterosonics Project, is the Citizen Weather Station, where people are encouraged to collect meteorological data on your roof and donate it to science through the Citizen Weather Observer Program

This AVR Television » AVR TV, PODcast. is an excellent way to develop skills in microprocessors without doing an IT or engineering degree.

The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery has an excellent exhibition of robotic art - worth taking a look

I thought I'd post here that I have a new article in the SCAN Journal, titled :: Sonic Immersion: Interactive Engagement in Real-Time Immersive Environments

This Wendy Carlos interview on the American Music Societies web site makes very interesting listening.

Also on this site is an interesting interview with Annie Gosfield , whose music for acoustic instruments and samplers is driven from a classical and rock background, making for a hybridity that is unusual and pleaseing to the ear. Frank Oteri says:

I still remember the first time I heard the opening of the Bang on a Can All-Stars' recording of the second movement from Annie Gosfield's The Manufacture of Tangled Ivory. It was an extremely visceral and unsettling experience. I was listening to the CD before I looked at who was playing and what they were playing, so I wasn't exactly sure about what I was listening to or how it was done.

I thought I was hearing people smashing up a piano, but I soon learned that all those odd sounds were being generated on a keyboard sampler.

These are both very interesting interviews and illustrate the openess of the American Music Centre to the breadth of contemporary practice. It is also worth listening to their online radio station.

Isadora Software is a graphic programming environment for Macintosh (with a Windows version now in public beta) that provides interactive control over digital media, with special emphasis on the real-time manipulation of digital video.

Like Max/MSP, Isadora was designed not to be a "plug and play" program, but instead offers building blocks that can be linked together in an almost unlimited number of ways, allowing you to follow your artistic impulse.

Organic Motion Inc - Markerless Motion Capture is a real breakthrough in motion capture systems, not requiring and markers to be placed on the subject, allowing true unencumbered interaction on tracking and analysis of casual interactions, possibly outside the lab, although given there are no IR markers, daylight may cause problems.

you can see a video here

and a news week review