3D printing is pretty common at the Digital Whimsy Lab. I’ve always wanted to have one at home if for no other reason than to just mess around. I found the Jakks Pacific 3D Character Creator at Target for $11.99 (down from ~$40) and thought it would be fun. The product is a hot wax mold injector that works with a plastic skeleton system. You place the skeleton pieces in the mold, place the mold on the melter and then inject the hot wax into the mold. After it cools, you pop it open and have a tiny action figure. ...

Thanks to a recent sale at Walmart, my family is now the proud owner of all the Star Wars Disney Infinity Figures. I know what you’re thinking, “Wow, congrats… that is a big accomplishment!” Ok, you may not be thinking that but Disney Infinity was the best video game system on the market. Why do I keep referring to it as a system? Because it was really an Operating System for video game hardware. Sure, you could buy it for the PlayStations, the XBoxes, and Wii family of systems but it was a uniform experience across all of them. Each version of Infinity allowed for playets which were small self contained games that keep my young kids (and me) entertained. With the release of Disney Infinity 3, the developers released other kinds of games that use the characters in new ways (fighting, racing) and really extended what the game could do. In fact, we haven’t taken out the Infinity Game discs since they first came out. This game OS has been all we’ve needed for video game fun. ...

Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Stonehenge. Due to my work in design research, I have a hard time not seeing the world through the lens of artifact analysis. Stonehenge itself is one giant artifact of something we know little about. Researchers have a pretty good sense of what Stonehenge was used for but are not too sure as to why it exisied. In other words, we have the thing, but, we don’t have the context to know why the thing existed. ...

I moved hosts today. I was tired of paying $20/month so I switched to Go Daddy. I’m not sure if it is better, but, it is certainly cheaper.

In an ongoing attempt to use Linux as my regular OS, I just bought an older Lenovo X201 laptop/tablet to run Ubuntu on. The first version I installed was the Gnome version, followed by the full version. Edited: 08/23/2016 Besides having to buy a better battery, everything has been working well. The keyboard is a bit small comapred to the T500 series but I like it overall.

That feeling of panic struck me as I realized I had no wallet. “I must have put it down somewhere,” I thought. I kept looking and looking around my office for it. Just to be clear, my office is a mess as I’m waiting to move to a new office so I keep thinking “Why bother?” I walked out into the hallway and back in the room to find it. I noticed that I had left the hallway door and my door open to walk down the hall to talk to my colleagues. My stomach sank as I realized it must have been stolen. ...

I often receive e-mails from people who want to know how to get a job in the UX field. This is usually preceded with “I saw your post on X about the your students who got a job at Y.” It’s true that UBalt’s MS in IDIA places graduates at some really interesting places, like Google or eBay or Federal work. But our success hasn’t been magical in any way. We follow a simple model to help students get the kinds of jobs they want: Skills, experience, and portfolios. I’m going to explain these three elements and why each one is important to potential employers. ...

This is an email message I wrote to Rhett Allain about his excellent article in Wired this morning titled “Science Fairs Have Lost Their Way. Let’s Make Them Cool Again”. Dr. Allain, My name is Greg Walsh and Im a professor at the University of Baltimore. I saw your article about Science Fairs in Wired this morning and was very excited to see it. I have a 7 year old and have judged several science fairs. At best, participants follow the formula you bemoaned and my least favorite is when students build something without asking any questions about why or how…they can only tell you they saw it on the internet. ...

[You think] they’re saving the seat on the rocket ship just for you? Youve been manipulated to feel like youre part of something - like you’re special. But you’re not. Frank Walker, Tomorrowland I watched Tomorrowland with my family this weekend. I’ve been a big fan of Brad Bird’s work since The Iron Giant and then again with The Incredibles. I’m also a huge fan of the Disney Theme Parks (especially EPCOT) having cited them as the main reason I’ve gone into interaction design and user experience. When I heard that he was directing a movie based on an area of the Magic Kingdom, I was terrified that this would be another awful piece of Disney Shovelware like Eddie Murphy’s The Haunted Mansion. The trailer was intriguing and who wouldn’t want to see a movie with jetpacks and wheat. ...

Why GREs Our IDIA program requires the GREs. When people ask me about the admission requirements, they either sigh at the mention of the test or try to negotiate not taking them. As a program director, I find them valuable for reasons that were not necessarily intended by the test makers. First, I understand no one wants to take an extra test in their life. Plenty of controversy has surrounded the test since 1993. I did not want to take them way back in November of 1996 and again in summer of 2007 when I applied to my master’s program and PhD program, respectively. They can be stressful because someone is testing you on at least one topic you don’t feel you are good at. ...