Lara Schenck

Artist, programmer, researcher

Category: 🌱 Seedling

These posts are probably a “draft in public” that may or may not make sense to people other than me. Seedling is the earliest stage of content, and if they make it through, they will graduate to the next category called “grape”.

  • Digital Placemaking logo

    Here is a logo draft for Digital Placemaking, a spin-off philosophy/blog about using digital tools in (guess what) placemaking for local communities. Read more about Digital Placemaking here.

  • What I’ve been doing the past 6 months

    It’s been a crazy few months. Working 60hrs a week at times, but I guess that comes with the territory when you’re talking about startups. The startup in question here is Scenable, the app for local communities. There is an active startup and co-working scene here in Pittsburgh, definitely loving this city. Read about Scenable’s […]

  • Book recommendation: Designing for Emotion

    I’ve been reading Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter, the lead designer for MailChimp. It’s a quick read, very engaging, and infinitely useful. I’d been in a bit of a creative slump, focusing on navigation patterns, getting inspiration from great work other people are doing, and generally avoiding the being creative part. This book has […]

  • Scenable Intro video: about animating to narration

    Introducing Scenable: A New Platform for Bringing Communities Online. Over the past week, I made an animation introducing Scenable: a new platform for local communities online (i.e. my job). This was my first experience animating to narration, so I thought I’d post some tips as well as the video. Brainstorming the script and initial storyboarding […]

  • If localhost/PhpMyAdmin is 404

    Then most likely you’ve been sloppyily setting up configurations – this was my case at least :/. First make sure phpmyadmin is installed, then include its configuration file (httpd-phpmyadmin.conf) in your apache’s httpd.conf. On a Mac, httpd-conf will probably be in /opt/local/apache2/conf, and httpd-phpmyadmin.conf in conf/extra. If that’s the case for you, add this to […]

  • Move a ball on the screen with Arduino & Processing

    Here’s what it looks like on the Arduino (with a potentiometer and two buttons): Here’s the code: And here’s what it looks like on the screen: There’s a few things to know about getting the Arduino working with Processing – here’s a link. And, with luck, later I’ll post a better image and description of […]

  • Productivity Scene in Pgh

    I went to a great talk at Assemble (art/tech gallery on Penn) the other night by author of SharePgh.com Connor Sites-Bowen. The event is was called Manifestto:DO: getting Sh*t done in Pittsburgh. Not your standard/redundant life hacks information, great, real info from real people. During the talk, everyone named good work/inspiration environments in the city. […]

  • WordPress Maintenance Mode

    Why haven’t I encountered/thought of this before?! If you noticed earlier, this site and the WPF2 demo site where giving off some 404s…embarrassing but oh well. Planning to write a post about all of that later. Anyways, maintenance mode is a setting you can turn on to let viewers know things are being changed/updated. There’s […]

  • Thumbnails in WPFolio Two

    I recently added 270x270px gallery and post thumbnails to WPFolio Two. They look damn nice in columns of three in the portfolio categories. While working on this, I found that WP’s thumbnail/image attachment functions are not so well documented, so I wanted to be sure to share what I figured out. Here I’ll go over […]

  • pgh art/tech/hacker community

    I’ve officially relocated from Boston to Pittsburgh and have researched the active artist/tech/hacker community here. OMG!PGH and Pittsburgh Art + Technology are excellent resources for local art & tech happenings, and below are a few great IRL things I hope to be involved in/investigate further: assemble “…a community space for art & technology” in the […]

  • Responsive web design – SMFA freelance project

    Working on a freelance project for an exhibition of SMFA students’ artists’ books in Turkey entitled Textual Image/Visual Text. The site includes a splash page with some basic jQuery fades and effects and pages for each artist/work. Here are the mockups: I’m using this project as an opportunity to learn responsive web design using the […]

  • mozilla firefox ‘Mark Up’

    So, the other day Firefox reinstalled itself for reasons unknown. But that’s okay! Because I found out about this cool thing called ‘Mark Up’ and ‘Mozilla’s Web O'(pen) Wonder’ (a gallery of awesome HTML5 and WebGL creations). There’s a link to all of this on the default Mozilla search home page (in Firefox, go to […]