If any of you are thinking of having a play with an Arduino etc – I’d highly recommend this:
Seeduino Catalyst Pack from Make… because in my experience, you’ll want most of the things there, and $79 is a bit of a bargain methinks… for the time that you’ll save finding out what you need by trial and error.
This is a classic example of what I’m always going on about… about what I find interesting about the phase we’re going into.
Theo Jansen makes these
If you haven’t seen them before, check them out on youtube.
A segway is this…
Which is an invention that came out with a load of hype, and… well, sortof fell flat on its face really. It became an instant dorkmobile, although it would be a hell of a lot of fun, on carpet, when drunk.
Again, it’s one of those things that doesn’t really become interesting until the innovation side of things is thrown to the crowds.
Apropos of nothing, this also caught my eye
What could possibly go wrong?
And by self-winding, I mean you wind it yourself.
The wind-up radio guy won all sorts of prizes (if memory serves) for bringing the possibility of radio etc to people who don’t have access to electricity – and to be fair, I’m a lot more interested in innovation for people at the bottom than people who like to think of themselves as being at the top…
… so it is with a certain wry disdain that I present to you…. The Self-Winding Cellphone, from the posh-blog “Born Rich” which is every inch an expose of the poverty of design-ideas being thrown at the wealthy. It reminds me of the crashingly tasteless Brady-Bunch era craft-fad of sticking seashells to ashtrays – except this time round you stick Swarovski crystals to things, and flog them to oligarchs… or more accurately, fill magazines with them and flog them to people addicted to envy. I mean really… don’t you people feel… “owned”?
Still…
A self-winding phone is an excellent idea. Not for people who are rich but for people who are poor.
I read a story about this back in the 70s I think. About Movie Stars who people lived through vicariously – the audience literally saw through their eyes… The main character had a pair of Zeiss eyes if memory serves… and although my dad had a Zeiss camera back in the 60s, Zeiss are alive and well and still doing optical wizardry.
They’re not doing this yet though:
from www.eyeborgblog.com : (via dvice)
Which is what the book was about… actual cameras in your eyes. Something tells me this particular variant might not catch on though
I find this absolutely fascinating to watch for some reason.
Arthur C Clarke’s laws of Prediction state:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
There is so much technology today that is to most people just that – magic. Even something as rudimentary as a vacuum tube. It’s just a “thing” that “does something”. It’s something that always bothered me… that I didn’t know how to make Coke cans. If I was transported back in time to the 14th Century, Coke cans would be just as magic to me as the dragons and wizards and so on that were alive back then. I know (at least I think I know) that aluminium is something to do with bauxite and you extract it with electricity. That’s it. How to get it that thin, how to seal it, how to rivet the ring-pull, how to get the paint to stick… the entire thing is… well, magic.
Our entire civilisation is based upon the skills and knowledge of very few people… technocrats. The rest of us are waffling fluffers.
Still, at least you know how to make a vacuum tube now.
I’m kindof stuck on the notion of trying to make 3d things from 2d things.
Pretty skilly scalpelwork required, but the genome is passed via various vector-formats, and there’s this assumption that you “might” cut it out with a laser cutter, which are still a bit on the pricey side last time I looked… although there are some pretty cool CNC paper cutters as in
“The Personal Fabrication Revolution is being led by Hockey Moms” for the princely (or princessly) sum of $399, which less face it possums, ain’t as much as it used to be.
Useful for anything? Not yet, but that’s not the point. The point is that It’s Not Watching Television.
This is an… artefact/symptom/flower… of a freeing up of brain-power, and a networking of this newly freed brain-power. We are 50% of a new symbiote, that (I read somewhere) is currently using about 5% of the planet’s energy. The benefits of this (for we paper-reading herds of haunted meat) aren’t nothing. Or merely spreadsheets and tetris. It’s tying us down, it’s freeing us up. Sucking us in, and in exchange for our every last syllable of recorded time, it’s giving us a Crowd-Sourced Renaissance.
And Junk Cogs.
But something tells me people won’t find them as useful as they think they’re going to.
This is an example of… err…. “are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet” technology. AWTY-Tech. Sorry. I can’t think of a better way of describing it.
Something that’s been predicted for what seems like an eternity, but never seems to get here. Flat-screen TVs were an example of this – it took decades for them to turn up. Some things like jet-packs, ray-guns, teleporters etc probably never will… although because they’re so warmly anticipated, any “news” that they will instantly goes to the top of the headlines.
Solar power is another one I think. It’s been heading this way for as long as I can remember – in fact see the little black dots on the rooves of these houses
Those are solar water-heaters. I used to live in one of those houses in the early 70s, and we had the same solar water heaters then.
So. Anyway. Pico Projectors… problem #1 : they don’t create very big displays… so you probably aren’t going to watch movies on them. problem #2 : they still kindof need screens to project onto… which are even more hassle to carry around than a laptop.
Then again, if they’re hackable (and it looks like they are) then anything could happen – such is the genius of hackability… and I still get the feeling that they will become as standard on cellphones as cameras now are.
These are cool because they’re fast, strong and quiet. Not sure how small they can be though – and I think that creating the compressed air in the first place might be a bit of a bastard.
It’s like instructables - but a lot simpler, with a lot of general scientific building blocks/principles turned into toys etc.
This stuff has so much more imaginative potential than the mountains of injection-moulded crap that turns up in Toysrus. It would be cool to have a similar site which has building blocks of really useful technologies – like using plastic bottles to sterilise water etc. Kindof like a Lifehacker style knowledge-sharing site for the billions of people on this planet who don’t have access to clean water etc.
from : The Clanking Replicator Blog
Which was concieved in the hope of radically reducing the number of vitamin parts required for building a reprapper. This kindof merges to of my previous things about “if people are clever enough to build robots to solve rubik’s cubes, they’ll be clever enough to make a robot that can build its own motors” and The Tyranny of Flatland… and I’m betting that this model will actually be used for something else. A solar tracker maybe.
A celebration of the inventive backwaters of the human spirit... a celebration of people who would appear to have far too much time on their hands...
A celebration of laterality.
If you come they will build it.
By knowledge shall the spheres be filled.
