GENOMICON

It’s got to be done doesn’t it.

There’s a war going on – currently being conducted domestically by corruption of the law-making process, and internationally waves by secret IP treaties. Each one of these is an attack. In the early 20th C, it would have been foreign battleships on the horizon. In the early 21st, it’s “delegates”… “negotiators”… meeting behind closed doors, stitching up the planet for a global aristocracy. It’s information enclosure.

At the moment, there seems to be an arms race between The Law (which has nose-diving legitimacy) and Technology. It’s a class-war, and it’s the same class war that has been waged for generations. For thousands of years. Spartacus fought it his way, we’re fighting it ours. We’ve got a head-start… provided by previous generations etc. Yesterday’s Union guys. The Suffragettes… back and back.

So with that as a backdrop… the reason the Internet is what it is (as opposed to an interactive cable-channel) is because it was created by hippies… open computers on an open network. The pipes are agnostic of their content – which is a two-edged sword, but the evils of open-systems (an aid to various types of crime, including the sick end of porn) is far far

less evil than what happens when “those on top” are allowed to have too much power.

So… apropos of that… here’s a bunch of stuff.

1) we need to P2Pify everything – I think that this is going to require an open-source “black box” with an API. Something that can handle the cryptography/mechanics allowing designers and less heavy-duty programmers (like me) to build whatever the hell they want on top.

I came across this: tent.io – which looks like it might be a step in that direction, but they have “tm” and © symbols everywhere… and talk about “owning” information… and any protocol which has the idea of “information ownership” built into its DNA, should be rejected outright. Like the W3C trying to build DRM into HTML5

Then again, they say Tent is generic and decentralized. That means anyone can build any kind of app and host their own Tent server if they want. There are no limits or central authorities to censor or intermediate communication, invade privacy, or take control.…. so they’re thinking along the right lines.

I might need to have a play with that… see how it goes.

2) we need to de-mainfraimify the cloud – this kickstarter project has promise

But they’ve adopted a rental (aka: unearned income) model for their hardware, so although they aced their kickstarter campaign, I don’t think this one has wheels.

3) BitTorrent Sync

This is pretty cool – I’m now using it instead of dropbox to share files between my (linux) laptop and (windows xp) laser-cutter laptop. I think this could be an open way of solving the same problem as above. It’s really simple, and it’s really fast.

So… new project: I’m going to get:

– a raspberry PI $35 (plus another $100 cables, wifi dongle, wireless keyboard etc)
– a 500gb hard drive (could be a lot higher, but I don’t need a lot higher)

… and that’s all I think. Connect it up to the TV, which needs to be released from the shite that is broadcast TV anyway.

Then I think I’ll start writing little apps for it. Possibly with…

3) Unhosted – which is a set of tools for writing applications that run on your local browser, pointing to databases that can live anywhere. There are a bunch of example apps… some of which are pretty impressive… given how young the tech is.

I played with this a while back… got as far as “hello world”… seemed to work well enough.

Anyhoo – a little set-top device like this could kill a whole bunch of birds with one stone… the two main ones being P2Ping the cloud, the other being eclipsing the idiocracy of broadcast TV.

4) BrCKs

Which looks quite good… what would be quite cool would be the storage thing I was on about, sitting on tip one of these… turned into a mesh network. Something with the potential to bypass ISPs altogether… not that I’ve got anything against ISPs… it’s just that they do seem to be turning into a target for the forces of old and evil.

I have a feeling that this might be another one of those “got to happen” things, that we’re going to be pushed into by the arms-race we’re currently in. Mesh Networks could well become The New P2P.

Which brings us back to Raspberry Pi…

Who’d have ever thought that this could turn out to be a giant-killer. I have a funny feeling it might be though… or something like it. The 3D printed gun guy with his “Liberator” is still trying to fight WWII… although if he’s a proper libertarian, then he’s probably got his head back in 1776 – they’re so desperate to borrow legitimacy from the (subtly rewritten) past, that they’ve started aping the language… but I think the real liberator here… the real disruptive, democratising tech, will not be a little gun, it will be a little computer. An ugly duckling.

And no one will see it coming.

from

Which is pretty cool apart from (for reasons I can’t quite fathom) having a website with an ill-advised dotted overlay, so it looks like something from the 1970s. And it costs $3000 – which is too much.

Cool though. you could project SPACE onto the outside of it… or a video game or whatever… or just leave it as is – it’s kindof like a physical version of wearing headphones – a way of telling everyone to fuck off and leave you alone etc, but you can see out – still watch TV or whatever… and you can run about without getting stuck under the sofa.

I’d get one. If it had a lawnmower-man gimble set-up 360 degree external projections.

Everyone’s been going on about this recently

It’s a little baby computerlet, with an aspirational price of about 15 quid.

That’s cheap – I think that’s less than an arduino isn’t it? It’s got a built in camera as well, and USB ports and whatnot… and it runs a very recent version of ubuntu… the version before the one I’m using on this laptop. It runs 9.04. I’m using 9.10.

So… once upon a time Clay Shirkey said that every child knows that a tv without a mouse is broken. Things have moved on – now a computer without a web-connection is broken. Swap the camera for a wifi modem in other words.

So. My thoughts.

1) needs seperate I/O modules. An I module and an O module…

I : being camera(s), microphone(s), GPS, gyros, temperature-sensors, light-sensors… the standard USB-keyboard/mouse should be seperate things I think. This should be a little unit that contains all these in a solid lump.

O: being speakers and a screen. Maybe some sort of tactile thing.

With these modules it has all the potential of a cell-phone-as-detachable-head – but as it runs ubuntu, you can do a LOT more with it.

So… we’re on the brink of a sensors-revolution… an important part of this will be sensors.

2) what are you going to use it for (it does ask on the site)?

– it has the potential to make every TV a computer. My brother just bought a TV – that has built-in wifi, but as far as I can see, it offers a radically cut-down “choice” of websites (eg: youtube) that you’re allowed to look at… looking for all the world like the $5 option in the no-net-neutrality horror-poster

If I’ve got this right, this is already being done – built into new TVs. The banaaaaaaaal predictability of evil.

If you stick a little 15 quid computer to the side of your computer then you can concievably change the way that TV is watched… the potential of playlists (as already being done by youtube) really comes into its own – because broadcast TV as we know it is so far below adequate… it’s like cold-war USSR TV tailored to capitalism. And it’s fucking awful.

That’s the first thing I thought of.

Ok. It’s not the first thing. The first thing was to attach a wifi transmitter to it and fly it on a micro-glider into a tree in the grounds of someone who deserves to be in prison, but our govts do fuck all about it… and transmit their traffic to the world. I think about assasination a lot these days, but it has to be assasination by information. We live in the info-era afterall, and using the medium-of-communication owned by the evil-empire (violence) just gives them an excuse to do what they do really well (be violent back). The evil empire wants you to be violent so badly that it’s fairly commonplace for them to pretend to be you, being violent – to put inciters-of-violence in protests for example. Yes, even in England.

So that’s the first thing.

3) People have been going on about “smart everythings” and an internet-of-things for a long time now. This could be an easy-in. Little PHP-capable devices which every web-dev in the world could program without having to learn anything new – I mean arduino is good, but you need to learn a new language. PHP is already everywhere… and with MySQL you’re basically going from “smart-device” to “really smart-device”. The already-established base of programmers is the thing though. That’s the Intel-Outside.

If this happens then there will be a fairly huge demand for a unified-driver-layer. Plug-n-play for absolutely fucking everything in other words.

Could be interesting. I’d get one.

For when civilisation breaks down completely and your tribe makes the very sound decision to move into Ikea.

Ikea Hacking is coming along nicely, although most of the hacks are so subtle… or professional-looking, that they’re more or less indistinguishable from the actual products. I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not… it probably is – given that there’s probably a Regretsy-oid sister-site filled with Ikea mutants and abominations created by people trying to assemble things without looking at the instructions.

Oh deary me yes, check this out.

Now that, my little furry friends, is the future.

It’s like one of these on steroids

On acid.

There’s this mega proliferation of flat-bed, cartesian type robots.. this is the way all the reprap energy seems to be going. There are loads of them. Everything from gardening robots

To open-source laser-cutters, to egg-painters.

The advantage of the cartesian-approach is that you can get fairly good precision for fairly simple maths. This brings the cost of the engineering down. The advantage of arm-type machines is that they can make things bigger than themselves. And that you can have more than one of them working together. And that they take up less space. And you can get them to give you (fairly bad) hand-jobs, and stir your tea, and play ping-pong with you and so on and so on.

I think the key to this is sending feedback to the arm-motors… so the machine can recalibrate its position 1000 times a second. There have been a whole rash of balancing robots recently… segway progeny (in fact I think someone has actually made one out of lego) so I think it’s doable. I also think that the sensors could (should?) probably exist outside the robot itself – a bit like the recent bunch of precision quadracopters

So the maths is harder… but maths is a software problem, and we can do software.

The other day Shelley from Half-Land was going on about these ball and socket joints she was using for the little stop-motion figures she was using for her movie…

… so um… if I had to make these joints, this is how I would do it. This is the Kiwi version.

Looks a bit like some sort of makeshift prison weapon. This is the detail:

You could probably make bigger ones with wooden beads… but the general principle of using rubber bands to apply pressure to the join is kindof central. And adjustable.

You could possibly do something with heat-shrink tubing as well – for a (much) neater fit etc. I found the little rubber washer things work quite well as well. This example (as you may have guessed) is not in fact a chopstick, but is a bit of dowel.

Rough, ready and uber-cheap.

Tiny little cameras that fit inside pens and can shoot 1.5 hours of 1,280×960 at 30fps… for $65

!!!

What’s interesting about that, is not the spying part, but the hacking part. It’s that they’re small enough to hack onto flying robots etc – and cheap enough to lose… or use as bifocals.

Can’t find any example videos to see what the quality is like. It’s a nice little unit though.You could use them for rockets or kitty cams etc

Both of which make me feel dizzy and sick. Still… Nick Drake is cool.

There’s been a fair bit of this in the last couple of months… prosthetics controlled by thought etc. There was recently a load of excitement and fuss to do with brain-to-speech synthesis… which may or may not be tempered by the fact that it only did 3 vowel sounds, and required a bit of implanted hardware that neurons grew around. Oooh. Aaaah. etc.

Still that is a bit like saying “yea, my dog plays chess but he’s not that good”. A hello-world is a hello-world. The difference between 0 and 1 is MASSIVELY different to the difference between 1 and 2.

I went on about this sort of thing in Feb last year. There’s an Open-EEG community… or was… but here’s the thing: if you don’t have a blog, no one can tell if you’re alive. I guess I could join the mailing list, but I’m already overwhelmed with mailing lists, and I’m only on about 5.

Anyway… a couple of things turned up recently that are partly related.

Waking you up when you’re sleeping lightly thing for iPhone – although according to wikipedia, there is some dispute as to whether being woken when you’re sleeping lightly is the best way to be woken… personally, I’d tend to go for something like this

But anyway, I saw the waking up watch/iphone thing a while back and had a spot of bother finding it again… and found that there are actually loads of such devices out there – the sensory bit is called an Actigraph – which sounds a bit snake-oily to me… like any advert that contains the words “scientifically proven”. As far as I can gather, all it is is a piezo, which measures movement… often filtering out everything except the 2-3 hz range… which is about the speed of a normal, common, every-day case of DTs. How that correlates to sleep, I couldn’t say, but that is apparently what’s being measured.

I think though the real value of this isn’t being woken up when you’re sleeping lightly, but the fact that it forces you to pay attention to sleep over a long period – keeping a sleep diary etc… which will probably make you aware of just how much caffeine, alcohol, stress etc are messing you about.

It would be quite cool to have something like a system-monitor for your body/mind going all the time. So rather than being pulled this way and that by laziness, gluttony and random whims, you do actually get to run yourself like a well tuned machine. Do what works, rather than what feels good in the short term.

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Off at a tangent – or something that comes in at a different level, something that also turned up recently is this pedometer that has an LED flower on the side of it.

and if you don’t do loads of walking, it dies.

Utter genius – it’s a tamagotchi that makes you do something you want to do, but can’t be arsed with.

“Captology” – capitalising on people’s amazing powers of nurturing and anthropomorphism etc. This is kindof what I was on about in my open-source energy monitor idea – setting up the interface so it’s kindof pavlovian… but this is so much better.

There are so many applications of this – turn your iPhone into a Chumby-like creature that you have to look after. Like having a familiar… or one of those daemons off Golden Compass. iPhone as pet. Brilliant.

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PS:

This has been around for a couple of days – just got around to looking at it:

It’s image-scanning using an ordinary webcam rather than some fancy thing with laser-beams. Pretty amazing. I wonder if it could be used with bi-focal cameras to map the objects in a room. Could be a good way of stopping your Roomba from eating your socks.

I can’t quite believe that someone’s used a Lego-Mindstorms brain to do OCR

from From Sweden apparently… but who? Who in Sweden? Who in Sweden would do such a thing?

I mean it’s basically cheating isn’t it. First the Pirate Bay, and now they cheat at Sudoku. Incredible. I think I might move there actually.

This leading to that…

A lego-bot painting the Mona Lisa… and it only takes 1.31 minutes. It took Leonardo (arguably the smartest human ever) several years to do the same thing. I think that says something.

That aside… I’d be quite interested to see what happens when iPhones (or the open-source variant thereof) manages to hook into some sort of modular constructor-kit type set up. I did originally think laser-cutting might be the way to go, but laser-cutting is the most expensive way of producing identical, replicated pieces… and part of the point of identical, replicated pieces is that you actually get to play with the actual physical things with your actual fingers and thumbs etc…

… and this counts for a lot. I’m doing a lot with laser cutting at the moment… and even though it looks like a simple design->execution, it’s not. What it actually is, is design->prototype->mess-about-with-fingers/thumbs->second-design->second-prototype

and it generally takes around 3 generations to get anything right… and the possibilities don’t generally spring to mind until your fingers and thumbs get involved. Thinkism is not enough.