Digital artist Jer Thorp writes:
Holding a smoke alarm, battery installed, is somewhat like holding an unwound jack-in-the-box. While you know that it shouldn’t go off, there’s still a nagging suspicion that it might. I get a similar feeling when I check news websites in the morning – somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspect that the world might have caught on fire while I was asleep. So, it made at least some degree of sense to me to build a NewsAlarm – a device that sounds an alarm when specific new stories are detected ‘off the wire’.
He hooked a smoke alarm to a simple set of Classes in Processing which connect to the New York Times NewsWire API. He can set it up to be on the lookout for certain words/phrases that trigger the alarm when they appear over the wire. Cool. Annoying.
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