Uses This

1288 interviews since 2009

A picture of Josh Nimoy

Josh Nimoy

Artist, designer, hacktivist, musician, developer

in artist, designer, developer, film, mac, musician

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Josh Nimoy, an artist, designer, hacktivist, musician, and software developer. I've done a lot of generative visuals for film and television, and my personal work has shown in legitimate galleries and museums. My open source contributions have been JMyron, a computer vision library, and various addons for the software art community.

What hardware do you use?

I'm using a 13" MacBook Pro with 2.66 GHz Intel Core Duo, and the graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce 320M. I carry a Motorola Droid 2. I sport a Radioshack 22-802 Auto-Ranging multimeter, a Weller WES51 analog soldering station, and a Leatherman Squirt E4. I program firmware with a Xeltek SuperPro 280U. I prefer shift registers over demultiplexers. I solder lead-free. I choose RoHS.

And what software?

The Mac runs OS X Snow Leopard (with MacPorts) and Windows XP SP2 (with Cygwin). When compiling on the Mac, I use a Makefile with gcc and sometimes scons. I use emacs as my IDE, splitting the editor in half and having eshell in the top window to run the Makefile. I will also compile in Xcode, Code::Blocks, and Visual Studio depending on the project.

For version control, I use git and svn. For general shell scripting, I choose Python. For server-side scripting, I choose PHP. I do software art using boilerplates like jttoolkit, OpenFrameworks, Processing, and Cinder. In C++, I prefer the GUI toolkit wxWidgets.

What would be your dream setup?

Keyboards are okay, but I'd rather have electrodes built into me. I'd like a high resolution virtual retinal display embedded inside my head so I can be using a computer and it would just look to everyone else like I'm sitting and doing nothing. I'd love to see my team members use Linux, and to see my production companies supporting open source, but they are designers and art directors with old philosophies about intellectual property, and they probably see me like xkcd Infrastructures. I also want more cell towers between Los Angeles and San Francisco.