GENOMICON

Once upon a time, a spaceship (or the earthling in it) took this photie… and apparently global consciousness evolved as a result.

I don’t know if that’s true. Could be. Could be bollocks – I would have though that with the internet now more or less available more or less everywhere, that some similar sort of thing would happen – that one to one links between people so rich and fat they can hardly move and people who’s lives are gratuitously harsh are made… because there comes a point (there must surely?) where charity goes from being a $30 punt on Karma to an utterly un-resistable human imperative. If you look someone in the eyes… if you see a picture of their mum and dad or their cat… you don’t have a choice but to… help.

Or not. People have lived alongside slaves forever, and there’s more slavery going on today than there ever has been in the past – and a million shades of grey between. In the end, all struggles are class struggles.

Anyway, back to the earth… these links kindof rotate around the earth. Kindof not.

1) Doomsday Ark

“If the human species should be destroyed on Earth, our future may reside on the Moon if plans.being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon by the European Space Agency are carried through. The Ark will contain the essentials of life and human civilization, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war. Or people just becoming stupider and stupider until they can no longer tie their own shoelaces or feed themselves any more”

Reminds me of this for some reason:

 

2) Bloke To Send Android Into Space

Android in this case being his cellphone rather than his Ken Doll… which is cool because it’s (already) funded via Kickstarter – which in turn is crap because it’s American-only… an in turn cool because the shots are not called by paranoid suits. He’s going to send it up using weather balloons I think, and it will take photographs of things when it’s up there – which is exactly what I would do, if I was up there, only I wouldn’t use a cellphone – unless that’s all I had.

3) Seedcamp goes to Africa

Which is k-for cool because I’m not that interested in eye-candy for western fan-boy jackdaws. Anything really revolutionary is probably going to arise as a response to “market forces” in places where the market doesn’t revolve around people who can afford $20,000 for a car.

Seedcamp is an EU incubator. What would be really cool would be a non-US version of Kickstarter – although it would be interesting to see if The Crowd could filter out the inevitable fraud. My guess is that it could.

Something that turned up over the Kiva Furore – they said they set the thing up and fraud set in almost immediately – so they reorganised around already-on-the-ground micro-banks… in the process deceiving the donors into thinking that their donations made the difference between a project happening or not. Actually all the “stories” in Kiva are all already funded.

4) Share Stuff with your Neighbours

And build stronger communities – although how this differs from file-sharing I don’t know. Every time you share something a kitten dies.

The basic gist of this is a list of stuff that’s kindof surplus to requirements – it reminds me a bit of that… um… um… Deviceknit in which people list stuff that they have lying about and other people list ways of cobbling it all together to do useful stuff.

This in turn reminds me of the geek-box where people send boxes of junk to each other through the post.

5) IKNOgrid

IKNOgrid from INTEGRA renewable energies on Vimeo.

“IKNOgrid è un Sistema “SMART GRID” che permette di poter monitorare a distanza e istante per istante il corretto funzionamento e la reale produzione di un qualsiasi impianto ad energia rinnovabile, segnalando in tempo reale eventuali anomalie, difficilmente rilevabili anche manualmente.”

6) Julian Assange

The Man’s a God. Every time I read something by or about him, he impresses me more. I always wanted (right from when I was a small, delinquent child) to be the next Martin Luther. It’s not going to be me – or even one person… it’s going to be a whole load of people – and one of them is Julian Assange.

The Feds have been trying to arrest him apparently. Fuck that. The forces of anti-bubbledom are abroad

Fascism is already here – it’s just diluted… this is what we’re up against… creeping, privatised authoritarianism. All Authority is inherently illegitimate, and bears the burden of proof – it must prove it’s legitimacy, to those that it would govern. If it can’t do this, then it must be dismantled.

We need to fight back, and we need to fight back hard. We’re all Spartaci now – and exposure is the one of the best weapons we have.

Lights on; Rats out.

7) Ridley Scott to crowdsource documentary via YouTube

He’s been flirting with this sort of thing for a while I think – there was that blade-runnery thing. Purefold – which could be a cynical corporate attempt to mine public ideas, or something else. I wish him luck – he’s done some excellent stuff.

Tempting though it is, I’m not sure if I’ll submit any of my own day… It’ll get ignored. It always does. Maybe I’ll make an alternative version which takes the piss. I mean the official version is going to be all “worthy” and TED-like isn’t it?

8) Deviant Globalisation. Listen to this. It’s brilliant.

9) Air Multiplier Fans

Brilliant. Nothing to do with anything.

The week cometh; the week goeth.

Crossing the radar… ripples spreading then receding…

1) Blown by unseen winds

Bet I’m the only person in the world who knows where the quote “Blown by unseen winds” comes from.

Anyway, this is not dissimilar to the wind thing from ages ago… which obviously I’m not going to be able to find, because “wind” isn’t a googlable word. It was like the 3rd or 4th thing I posted… which also doesn’t help, because there isn’t a crono… oh… hang on… there is. This.

Still. Ungooglability on account of being a straw in a haystack rather than a needle. Nick Taylor is ungooglable. There are loads of us. We grown on trees…. only I now appear to have two entries on the first page – a previous incarnation has become famous, which is a bit of a worry tbh, because I was taking the piss and have moved on a bit etc.

2) Little Expensoid Arm-bot

A snip at $24,000 – I get this vague feeling that the future of reprappery is something like this… but which can “see”. This one can’t see, so the engineering has to be really really tight.

It’s got those weird little “go in any direction” wheels, which seem like a massive piece of over-engineering to me. They were invented by the segway guy who invented a really expensive solution to “walking”, and now there’s a really expensive solution to “the wheel” – though it looks like someone’s using it. Bet you could take a couple of k off the price of this thing by using… well… wheels.

3) Water-Based Touch-Screen

Like a cross between The Abyss and a generic Sci-fi Waving-Arms-Around-Interface. One of those things that is photogenic, so put into movies about the future, so people want one in real life.

Like product-design copying sci-fi, only the actual thing got invented before the sci-fi, and it isn’t actually a product, just a thing someone’s made. Maybe dolphins could use it?

4) A bunch of software.

a) Libox.

Which is a P2P file-synching/sharing app. I wonder if it can be encrypted. I wonder if it works via blue-tooth or some non-centralised thing. Dvice seem to think it will be another blow to the copyright-cartels… I guess it could… but only in terms of swapping stuff within one-degree-of-separation – which is a little different from dialing up whatever you want – anywhere, anytime.

An aspect of one-degree-of-separation stuff though is it kindof comes with recommendation built in.

Whatever – the Copyright Cartels have become such a threat to the democracy now, that I think we need to do whatever it takes to put them out of business.

b) Menu Search Engine Mashup

Someone’s used an app called Evernote to scan all their local menus, which they can then search. Simple enough… hang on… “search?”.

I’d never really looked at evernote before. Might have to give it a go – because from the sounds of it, it automatically OCRs anything you upload – and that could be well useful, because people keep sending me shite through the post, and this would be a really good way of indexing it. If it works. I’ll have to give it a look

c) apropos of that, another really fast book scanner.

Which as far as I can tell is a bit of software… and a really fast camera – but I’m not entirely sure that the one I just bought isn’t one of those. Well… it goes up to 60 shots a second, with a really fast shutter-speed. Might be able to do it. Dunno. Maybe you could flip slower.

5) Creepy Alien Wall Thing

There’s a video on the site, but I can’t get it to embed. Looks like alien-egg-petals opening.

Alien had the best/worst movie monster ever invented – a composite of about 8 different human phobias, including a bunch of hightly freudian ones. A perfect example of my theory about what art is – exaggerated human resonances – dancing a two-step down the line between the impossible and the-girl-next-door. There’s nothing that the Aliens monster does that doesn’t happen in the… animal kingdom, including paralysing prey so it can be later eaten by hatchlings. Crrrreeeeepppyyyyy.

The fact that this has kindof created a secondary set of phobias… egg-petals opening, is something else I think. Maybe it’s just me.

6) Musical instruments made out of paper

Can’t remember where that one came from *(yes I can) – for what it’s worth, I know I’m not really the cutting-edge any more, but I’m pretty sure that a guy wearing a jumper like that doesn’t get to decide what’s cool.

Or maybe he does. What do I know? I’m still wearing my girlfriend’s shirt from 23 years ago. This one.

Anyway, there’s another thing over here that claims to be a paper piano

although to me it looks more like a box. The interesting thing about these though is the escape of the interface into… the mundane I suppose. I have a feeling that the long-term future of this isn’t ubiquitous sensors but ultra-perceptive behaviour-recognition software connected to CCTV cameras – a bit like that new Wii-esque game from Microsoft.. All of us living in our own personal panopticons. A bubble of outsourced self-awareness.

7) A Hell of a lot of CDs

8 ) USB Typewriter

Similar sort of thing really.

Ok, another weekly round-up. Slipping further and further behind. I’ve been busy. I probably need to regroup. I need a holiday. I need more work. I need to hide under the bed surrounded by lots of little animals that I’ve made out of matchboxes, with matchstick legs. I’m a maker me. The Creator. Alpha and Omega, permanently in Beta.

1) Pick and Place Machine for making drone brains.

I didn’t know what a pick and place machine was until I saw this, and now I’m still not entirely sure. A machine for picking and placing things? I would have supposed so.

This one is special though because it comes from the the ardu-drone folk – the DIY cruise-missile-waiting-to-happen people, although personally I think the future is probably more like those hunter-seaker things of Dune… where a little quadracopter operated over the web that sits in a tree outside your house and when you come out it fires a curare dart into your neck.

I’m sortof surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen more regularly in fact – I mean there’s this guy up in Auckland, NZ who’s just built himself a 50 million dollar house – after his company went down taking with it the life-savings (and therefore old-age-pensionhood) of thousands and thousands of people. And he got away with it. The Bhopal people got away with it. Cheney got away with it. Justice is not being done – and although I’m absolutely not in favour of the death penalty, I’m Scottish – so do believe in the sanctity of personal blood-vendeta. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.

And maybe it won’t – I mean if you look at revolutions in the past – The French, The Russian – the people had to be pushed to incredible lengths before they started killing the rich – just for the sake of moral principle. Maybe we humans are a lot more docile than we imagine ourselves to be.

Violence is first and formost an act of communication though – and one that almost always backfires – you can’t perpetrate violence without legitimising and strengthening the hawk constituency on the other side.. Especially now that information is so much harder to control.

Still – watch this space. The age of assasination – an inevitable flipside to the guard-economy, and possibly one so useful that if it didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it.

2) Industrial Scale Freecycle

This is pretty cool – it’s a way for industries to offer their (massive amounts of) waste to the ether, and have it turned into something useful… probably avoiding their own disposal costs. Industrial scale-freebies offer business opportunities… and make the whole system a whole lot more efficient.

I mean with these massive cotton-reels you could make massive cotton reel tanks and invade… who’d be easy to beat? Easier than Iraq or Afghanistan? Andorra? No… to mountainy. The Vatican? Yea – it’s a soveriegn state isn’t it. Invade the vatican with massive recycled cotton-reel tanks. You’d still lose, but that seems to happen every time anyway, and this way it wouldn’t cost you a trillion dollars.

3) What If The News Was Written By Scientists?

I know journalists like to go on about how important and worthy they are, and maybe they’re right. That said, I feel an almost physical sense of relief reading the article above.

Why? Because I haven’t got some fucker trying to sell me something – I can relax and take it at face value – which you can’t with news-reporting today. News today is all about trying to grab your attention. It’s a sales job.

It would be really good to have some rationality-filter set up to de-bullshitify the news.

4) Bitcoin

This is interesting – an alternative currency, yes… one that you can’t actually buy anything with yet, granted… but the architecture sounds interesting.

Which is to say, it’s entirely decentralised P2P – and they pay you (in bitcoins) for being a host. You can buy one thing with them – VOIP phone credits… so in some ways, it’s a high-tech rendering of the African thing where they send money about the place by reading cellphone top-up codes over the phone.

That’s the thing with currency – it really helps if it’s based on some “thing” that everyone uses. Corn in the old days for example. Today it’s debt, but that isn’t sustainable because the interest keeps multiplying.

Various funding mechanisms have been creating waves etc of late as well – the obvious one is kickstarter.com… with the quite probably doomed-before-it-starts Disaspora. Another one was an open-sourced laser-cutter (more on that later). There’s one that’s turned up in the EU recently as well – private (rather than crowd-sourced) funding… from people who think they can second-guess the crowd’s earthly desires better than the crowd can. Nice diagram anyway

Because if there’s one thing geeks love, it’s flow-charts.

IBM are offering an alternative currency as well – for buying cloud services, which they claim everyone needs.

5) Back to the Axis of Evil

Another rash of surveillance innovations from the Plucky Brits…

So they can spy on themselves even more than they already do, and… should they feel the need to co-invade and occupy some wog country with the Plucky Americans, they can spy on “insurgents”, or locals. Depending on who you talk to.

In addition to that is a thing in The Telegraph, a depressing tory rag, where it is suggested that brain scanners could (might, may) be used to “read people’s minds” – which is almost certainly an example of the sciencificaly challenged reporting that I was on about before – if you read between the lines it seems that it could be used as some sort of lie-detector, and I’m not sure that that is any great surprise.

In fact so irked was I by the number of “could”s in this article, that I made a word-cloud out of it to prove my point.

Effectively disproving my point. Ok. I was wrong. Whatever.

6) Open Source Laser Cutter

Because everyone needs a laser-cutter.

Scoff thee not… $14,500 worth of people have decided they need a laser-cutter, and have punted it at kickstarter – this includes (as far as I can gather) the possibility of punting $512 and getting a laser-kit. Is that the same thing as a $512 laser cutter*? Hard to say. $15000 is (apparently) about 1/2 what a commercial laser-cutter costs… but 50% more than what they were after.

* oh – apparently not. Extremely misleading wording there. They say further down the comments that they expect the thing to cost $2-$5k.

Even further down the comments is a link to someone who is already doing the same thing, cheaper.

This one being specifically designed to replicate itself.

It’s not always the simplest/best/most-open that win though. There’s The Skype Effect – where although there are better alternatives, one offering leaps ahead on polish, marketing and then self-propelling viral hype. It helps if your website is lime-green.

Still… there seems to be a movement underway here. Would I buy a laser-cutter for $3k. Not immediately – but at some point. Probably. I’ve probably spent that much on laser-cutting in the last 12 months or so. Freedom to experiment. That’s what it’s about.

7) Lego Printer

(via)

Makerfaire was on recently – there was also this one that could draw on lightbulbs and eggs and so on.

For all your egg-drawing needs.

8 ) Briefcase trainset

round and round they go. From Trendy clothes shop, Paul Smith, via Notcot.org

9) Telepresence Robots

10) more quadracopters

Note robot-handling glove.

and

Which are (like the wizzy thing from a few days ago) controlled by the room, rather than being autonomous.

Controlled by the cloud. Although it seems like a cop-out, I’m not sure that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. It kindof makes the robot a detached limb of a larger entity than being an autonomous object in its own right.

So there you go. The week that was.

Even further behind with everything than I was last time I got further and further behind.

I think I might need to get glasses actually. That would be weird. Mind you, it might make me look more intelligent – and I’d be able to see etc. I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything for months.

1) A thing that stands up by itself

Are we learning to walk? I think we’re learning to walk… but at least when you’re a toddler, you kindof know what you’re walking for.

Or do you? Do you just do it because everyone else does it… and we humanoids spend our entire lives copying each other. Pretty much.

So now we make robots, that also copy us… and we don’t really know why. Everything is replication. As above, so below.

2) iPad Spyblimp interface

With a dismayingly low-res video… but you get the idea.

I still think this needs to be a heads-up type display, and that iPads are a farcically crap design… because you either have to lay them flat and wreck your neck, or hold them up with one hand… which means you can only use one hand to operate your weapons systems etc. This turned up the other day… a keyboard/stand combo for an iPad – which basically turns it back into a laptop.

This thing – that I call 3rd Personism, but other people call Telepresence IS going to be a big thing I think though. It’s just too cool to be able to be somewhere where you’re not.

3) Telepresence Segway

Mmm yes, well that’s going to catch on, isn’t it. It’s a way for you to “be” at the office when you’re actually sitting on the sofa drinking beer in your underpants. This could actually be done with existing parts – a segway that’s controlled with an iPhone – although an iPad screen would be a better size… but then Apple deigned not to provide them with cameras – so when they do, with the next release, all the fanboys will have to go out and buy them again.

While I think 3rd-personism is inevitable (and fantastic), it ain’t going to be for trundling around your office in a segway. I can’t believe that someone’s actually made a product out of this. If Lawnmower Man taught us anything it’s that you don’t need to be physically embodied when you can live in the network. The driver for 3rd-Personism is entertainment.

4) Google Wave Relaunch?

The original launch caused a huge splash… and everyone including me said it was going to be a game-changer. It wasn’t. I signed up to the beta… played with it once or twice… then shelved it. Then someone invited me to a discussion using it – on a subject I’m quite interested in… to be honest, I think it killed the conversation. We would have been better using email.

Too itty bitty. Too fiddly. We don’t want more features, we want less.

5) VP8

Google on the other hand may be transforming in subtler ways… by opening up its WebM codec for video. It will be natively supported in Opera, Firefox and Chrome (which are the only browsers I use) and offers a non patent-enmired alternative to H.264 – which HTML5 has had a tanglesome and not entirely happy relationship with – on account of it being closed. Youtube videos will all be encoded (retrogressively) in WebM and there are a whole host of hardware supporters. It also gets around the Apple anti-flash video problem.

So who’da thunk it? It might just be that Internet Explorer is finally killed not by a competing browser, but by cellphones.

Trouble is, as a web dev, I know that clients will want “cross-browser-compatibility” – so as not to inconvenience the still fairly huge number if IE users. Personally I couldn’t give a toss – I’m more than happy to build web apps that IE users can’t see. Forget about making music and concentrate on creating a generation gap. That’s my motto.

6) Artificial Life Created

Holy crap, the finally did it. This is bigger news than the moon landing. This is the wildest wild card that humans have invented since fire. This is a major part of why there is a science-fiction singularity – past which it’s difficult to make linear projections.

7) Quantum Teleportation over 10 Miles

Would be even more impressive if it wasn’t measured in imperial units. What is this? The steam age? Are we Victorians? No. We’re Elizabethans.

8 ) HP Builds Cow Powered data-centres

There’s this sign at the side of the main road up from Wellington: “Pony Poo” it says. It’s for sale. When I lived on Niue we kids (or was it the neighbours kids?) were sent out to collect cow-dung for the garden. The trouble with shit… is that it smells, and looks like shit. If it didn’t then it would probably be worth a lot more than it is. Like Whale vomit. I’m mainly talking about low-food-chain-shit here. Higher food chain is problematic because toxins accumulate.

Still, they used to make gunpowder out of piss didn’t they?

Anyway – the obvious byproduct of using cow byproducts to power a data centre, is the technology to do it. This technology is probably (once it’s done) worth a hell of a lot more than the energy it produces.

9) Little flying butterfly thing

I expect the reason why it’s show in slow-motion is because it flew for about 2 seconds before crashing and exploding, killing the ant-pilots.

Basically deep down inside, I’m only interested in things I can eat, fight or shag – so although I am actually a programmer myself (and spend most of my time sitting in the corner, praying no one will try to talk to me), the Software-Issue won’t be this massive saga that these things usually are.

Still – a whole bunch of stuff has happened that is worthy of comment.

1) Tribler

A decentralised BitTorrent client from Holland by the looks. I think this is interesting because:

a) It comes from Holland.

b) It has been “awarded millions of euros in funding from the European Union”. Really? Cool… but I didn’t think creating MAFIAA proof file-sharing systems was what the EU was about really.

c) File-Sharing systems always seem to have that rabbit movie as a demo

Even though we all know that the killer-app of these systems is bypassing the hopelessly in need of reform copyright laws. The only people who come close to detailing how these laws need to be reformed is (need we say it) The Pirate Party.

We will give the public the following new rights:

The right to share files provided no money changes hands.
The right to format shift and time shift data.
The right of access to government funded data.
The right to compensation for government data loss.
The right to safely encrypt private data.
The right to apply to a court for compensation where data protection laws have been broken.
The right for constituents to force a by-election.
The right to pay only for the fraction of the claimed broadband speed that an ISP actually delivers.
The right to be a whistleblower.
The right for photographers and filmmakers to go about their business without persecution under anti-terror laws.
The right for disabled people to demand an unrestricted version of DRM protected content where that is necessary to allow them to access it.

We will reform outdated laws:

We will abolish drug patents, replacing them with subsidies.
We will reduce the length of copyright to 10 years.
We will provide exemptions to patent law for non-commercial use, personal study and academic research.
We will introduce system of compulsory patent licensing
We will reform libel law.
We will prohibit the abuse of RIPA powers.
We will remove loopholes in copyright and patent law.

We will protect the public from abuses of new technology:

We will forbid third parties from intercepting or monitoring communication traffic
We will introduce a mandatory warning label on products that include DRM.
We will introduce laws on the acceptable use of CCTV and DNA samples.
We will legislate in favour of net neutrality.
We will introduce stronger data protection laws
We will not allow government censorship of the internet
We will put into action the government’s Open Source Action Plan.
We will require the BBC to release all their content under a Creative Commons licence.
We will prevent the BBC from using DRM technology.
We will ensure better computing education in schools.

These I think provide a bench-mark for what is acceptable in terms of digital rights.

Back to Tribler – this is a step towards the holy grail of completely decentralised, encrypted file-sharing. These things also (alas) require critical-mass… so they only really become useful if a lot of people are using them.

2) The Pirate Bay, one year later

The legal process is still appears to be rumbling on – the operators of The Pirate Bay having been found guilty… but the site is still operating, and (probably as a result of the publicity, and sympathy for the pirate-bay guys generally), the number of users has gone from 1 million to 5 million.

The technology has now moved on, so they no longer need to operate as a tracker, and is instead using different protocols. There is also a project called iPredator which offers an encrypted internet service for a monthly fee – I’m not sure how popular monthly fees will be – but I’d almost be inclined to adopt it just to tell the Evil Empire to fuck off and die.

Anyway – the rapidly changing nature of the web in the face of the hopelessly slow and unfit for purpose law-making process is why that cunt Peter Mandelson attempted (and succeeded?) in granting himself the power to make up laws on the fly. Please, someone rid me of this turbulent priest.

3) Hitler

So many people have commented on the humourless, anally retentive and ultimately futile attempt by the “owners” of that Hitler movie to censor youtube parodies of it, that people are so sick of it, they never want to hear about it ever again.

Pretty much the only reason most people had heard of (and subsequently seen) this movie was because of these parodies, and the director himself said he found them funny and that they were a fitting extension to the films purpose… which was a type of dethroning.

Needless to say, a parody about this censorship was instantly uploaded and various sites offered instructions on how to get around the censorship.

Still – there you go. Try to censor the internet and it bites back.

4) Facebook did something or other.

Clay Shirky said that Facebook is attempting to eat the entire internet
Umair Haque said that it’s not trying to be Pagerank, it’s trying to be Digg.

The upshot appears to be a further erosion of Facebook’s already egregious regard for privacy – allowing developers to pull facebook data into their own apps, if they get users to login in using Facebook/Oauth. Facebook has 400,000,000 users. It will be hard to resist.

Still, in previous posts (2 of them) I went on about a “holy crap moment, courtesy of Google”… one was about Wave, the other… can’t remember – but they didn’t amount to much, and everybody thought they’d change the world…

… and facebook is the AOL of social apps… it is (at its core) evil. So who knows.

It’s also fundamentally dangerous and unstable having that amount of “information” going through a single company – it’s funny… the web who’s strength is (by design) based on decentralised configurations, has led to some of the biggest examples of centralisation in human history.

5) erm… that’s it. There was another thing, but danged if I can remember it now.

Still, never mind. Here’s a delta robot picking-and-placing things onto a randomly moving target

I really think that this is the future of reprappery – rather than cartesian table-based things.

The week… it came it went. They come they go.

I’ve been mainly pottering about with cameras, and sleep-deprivation induced insanity. It’s been a bad week… If the last week was a television, it would be black and white – tuned between channels, with the sound cutting in and out. Fade to black. Flicker to life. Eat something… try to do emails… Black again. It comes and goes.

Still… ok-ish now. The main thing that happened was that I went to that #publicACTA thing… which I will go on about in another post, but now… here’s a scatter-gun side-swipe at the Second Gutenberg shift, 10th of April, Year of Our Lord, Two thousand and ten.

1) Furious buzzy flying thing

“This looks cool”, quoth DIYdrones.

Oh no it doesn’t. It looks scary and chasey. It looks like it would try to shoot you in the eyes with laser-beams and get tangled up in your hair. No good will come of this. Mark my words

2) The World is My Tamagotchi

If it is what I think it is… I don’t really know because while I can kindof read Spanish a bit, I can’t understand it when it’s spoken.

I quite like the idea of Tamagotchification though – anthropomorphising things so people take more care of them… there was that pedometer thing recently… a little LED plant, which withers if you don’t exercise it (you). I’ve often thought that if I could organise my personal finances… or life generally, with the care and devotion that I play video games then I’d be a lot better off than I am now.

3) Hatstands

I like brain machines because you can use them to take over the world… and failing that, the offer a much better way of controlling remote-controlled things, and are good if you are (as I am) too lazy to even use a mouse.

But

“Despite the device’s rather humorous appearance, it’s very serious mission is to assist scientists at research institutes and help companies develop their neuro-marketing strategies”

err… the fucking what? “neuro-marketing strategies”? WTF is a neuro-marketing strategy?… because I can’t imagine it being anything other than manipulative and invasive.

How the fuck did your greed, or the “importance” of your product get to be so great that it warrants a “neuro-marketing strategy”?

Please. Fuck off before one of us dies.

4) Imaginary robots

Worth it for the photo alone, but not alas (like so much of this tech revolution) actually real. Yet.

I’m kindof enamoured of the concept that “in the future, every tree will have its own gardner” though… and there’s an echo of Huey Duey and Louie from Silent Running here as well so… ok.

It’s from a Mexican guy doing a project on Urban Parasites.

Exhibit two is this beauty

Which are imaginary robots (I’m fairly sure they haven’t been built yet) that live in a Spanish bank who’s job it is to solve the problem formerly solved by (how you say?) “signs”… replacing them with actual-reality versions of the MS Office Paper Clip.

Incredibly over-engineered over-kill and doomed to go from futuristic to retro in less than a decade. The only way these things will last more than 3 years is if their retro-chic kicks in fast enough.

But you know… nice one. Job creation innit. Getting rid of the signs and replacing it with something that needs an IT department to support.

5) DIY Tube Driven Headphone Amp

(via)

I keep telling my mate Adi he should make these. I’d buy one… basically things that take a digital signal and make it sound warmer… and if you’re really going to get it right, some sort of “Aural Exciter” (if I’ve got that right) technology that creates ultra-sonic harmonics that only dogs can hear, of the high notes.

Something to turn the square-waves back into proper sine-waves, and to introduce harmonics that digitisation doesn’t bother to save.

And they look retro and cool, and they glow in the dark. Much like Adi himself in fact.

6) Lucky Dip Video

(via)

I have no idea what this woman is talking about because the sound on my computer no longer works (I’ll get a new one today. No really, I will)

But anyway, she looks beautiful and heroic – a bit like a latter-day French Revolution propaganda poster/painting… so here she is.

I know a bit about French Revolutionary art now, on account of having seen a documentary about it the other day, and I’d have to say that the architect above is a lot better looking than any of the ones that David (Daa-veed to you) managed to paint…

… although perhaps that comparison is a little unfair on account of that actually being a painting of a bloke rather than “a lady”, and doubly unfair on the bloke, because he’s painted sans-todger… which I gather was the fashion at the time.

They also tended to go in for wack-oid haircuts in those days, and although the architect above doesn’t have one of those exactly… it does sortof hint in that direction – which is probably why I think she looks like a French Revolution propaganda poster.

I think people in general are getting to be better looking though.

6) Great vengeance and furious anger

So now it seems that Richard Dawkins intends to arrest the Pope when he visits England.

LOL… but what (I hear you cry) does this have to do with… you know, “The 2nd Gutenberg Shift and stuff”?

I’ll tell you what – the 2nd Gutenberg Shift isn’t really then 2nd Gutenberg Shift… it’s all the same shift.

The revolution that started 500 odd years ago, has just been accelerated by the internet. The trends and tendencies that found a type of coalescence in the Protestant Revolution are the same trends and tendencies encouraged by the web. The Protestant Revolution is still going on.

So ignoring for the moment, that Arresting the Pope is what Henry the Eighth probably would have wanted…

… it just so happens that when he covered up the child-rapes that happened under his watch… in deference to the “youth of the (38 year old) offender” (rather than the 11-13 year old victims)…

… it just so happens that at the time, Ratzinger was the head of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith“, otherwise known as The Inquisition

You know – the people who burned to death Book Printers. The people who gagged Galileo by showing him the instruments that he would be tortured with. The people who boiled to death a student named Pomponio Algerio.

It’s taken this long… 300 and something years… for it to come full circle. For a rotten-to-the-core institution to be exposed – because that’s something The Internet is really good at. Exposure.

That’s the knife-edge hidden under the waffly, disorganised uselessness of slactitivism. Your secrets are safe with us :)

Anyway, there’s a further irony in that pedophilia is to the Internet what witchcraft (rather than heresy) was to the printing press… a crime beyond comprehension – which acts like a (useful) political poison – just to be accused is terminally damaging, politicians are incapable of anything approaching a level-headed reaction for fear of being tarred with the same brush… and it sells the hell out of newspapers.

eg: a wikipedia rival trying to use child-porn to attack wikipedia. It’s pathetic. And it’s the same (pathetic) justification that The English used to kill Joan of Arc.

It’s the same revolution. It’s still happening.

Still, enough about that.

7) Barmy Concept #1232178

Now I hate concepts as much as the next man, but this one’s a corker – it’s a rubik’s cube with a generator in it… but it’s also Braille! So you can trick blind people into generating energy for you!

Genius.

8) Robotics Platform

I think this is interesting because it’s basically a Roomba with the vacuum cleaner taken out of it. And we’re still not entirely sure what to do with it, so we’re crowd-sourcing the innovation… in the hope that someone else will figure it out.

I’m not sure that anyone has yet have they? I mean there are a million videos on youtube with cats riding on Roombas… and those Swedish guys used one to index the stuff they’d left on the floor… people play football with them… but… but…

… as I’ve said before, there seems to be this incredible amount of creative energy pushing us in a direction that doesn’t appear to have a lot of practical applications. I think we’re doing it to recreate Sci Fi – and ultimately, to recreate ourselves. But we’ve got a long way to go… and if we did manage to recreate ourselves, would we even like ourselves? Not according to Sci Fi.

10) Oh crap, someone’s made one of these

Ok – they haven’t made it, they’ve designed it – but it’s the Festo people – the same ones who made those amazing dolphin bots, and the big jellyfish things, and tripod rep-rappers etc, so they probably will.

I am so tired I can feel my neurons unraveling, and there’s nothing I can do about it, even if I did care, which I don’t because I’m so tired and my neurons have unraveled, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

So I just sit here. Gob agape.

I bought one of these off ebay a couple of minutes ago, because that’s the kind of guy I am

Anyway, enough about me. How’s the 2nd Gutenberg shift coming along?

1) Virtual Choir

It’s all vowels. There’s a pretty blonde one etc.

2) Balancing on a Ball Robot

Because who can honestly say they’ve never needed one of those? There’s a whole load of them over here. Seems to be a “thing to do” a bit like solving a rubiks cube.

There’ this other one over here that folds tea-towels or whatever… and while you might think this is useful… To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time folding tea-towels either.

I think this whole robotics thing is incredibly cool – the amount of energy and imagination going into something that we still don’t really know… well… what it’s “for” really… because I can tell you this Possums, it’s not “for” folding tea-towels or ball-balancing

3) A bit more about repraps.

Something turned up recently where someone had 3d-printed a dremel holder for their makerbot.

Personally I think this is a fairly crucial capability of repraps – the ability to make their own tools. It’s got this nice kind of “meta” vibe, that you instinctively know is right. There was a similar (or not) thing recently as well where someone had turned their 2D printer into a drawer.

My Brother was telling me the other day that modern high-end CNC machines could probably already make themselves. They already have tool carousels – and their chucks operate by heating up the receiver so it expands… and then it cools over the drill-bit etc, holding it really tight.

But the point of repraps is for everyone to be able to afford one – they’re a physical meme. Personally I can’t see them really taking off until they can do dremeling and possibly laser-cutting as well. I would get one at that point. I like the design of this though… it just kindof “looks right”. Maybe because it isn’t all cluttered up with wires and such.

But more likely that it has transparent bits, and transparent bits are cool.

4) Contemporary Urban Living Spaces for Chickens

(via)

For people who have hipster chickens. For people who have chickens who have better taste than they have themselves.

You can also get holy places for smaller birds to hang out it

Christians, Muslims, living together.

Which is cool, but possibly not as impressive as the Seed Cathedral from the Big Picture, documenting the globalised Field of the Cloth of Gold that is 2010 World Expo

each one of those 60,000 rods is tipped with some seeds.

It would be cool if it came to life. It would be cool if it came to life and ate one of the other exhibits.

5) Isn’t Virtual Reality great? It’s just like reality, but you wear a hat

Anyway, it only goes up to 5 this week because I’m tired and lazy etc. It’s a bad combination. Worse than smoking dope. I want sushi.

Another bunch of stuff. I’m having difficulty keeping my shit together of late. I always think these things are cop-outs etc – but they generally take longer to put together than normal blog-posts, so you can stop your moaning.

Anyway, the week that was:

1) How to make glow in the dark stuff

“WARNING” It says (in a voice like a droid), “This procedure should only be performed by, or under the supervision of, an experienced chemist”.

Is that the sort of thing I should be doing? Yes, I think it is. This is exactly the sort of thing I should be doing.

Although in today’s wack-job paranoid world you’d probably find yourself trying to explain how it wasn’t a drugs lab to some spotty 14 year old policeman with a moustache. You’d get your stuff back after 6 months of hassle, but you’d be “flagged”. Put on a database, and for the rest of your life you’d hear funny clicking sounds whenever you picked up the phone.

2) Aviary have made all their stuff free

I like Aviary – never use their stuff mind, but in principle… I like them. I went on about them last year I think.

When web-companies suddenly release all their content for free, it generally means that the subscription model has failed, and that they’re going to try advertising. Aviary claims that the subscription model hasn’t failed, and that they’re just doing this because they’ve got a load of venture capital – which may be true. I mean the VC bit is almost certainly true… but… the subscription model bit? Partly true I’d say.

3) Crowd-sourced funding for stuff

Indiegogo – which is a much-needed alternative to that other one which is US-only. It seems that people mainly want movies funded.

Which is sortof interesting – because I was reading this thing the other day in which the Jumping-On-And-Off-The-Treadmills band was bitching about EMI not letting them repeat the thing that made them successful in the first place… but at the end they said that the role Record Companies used to play was as Risk Aggregators – and I can’t fault the writer on this. They did… and even though the other problems that record companies used to solve no longer exist, this one still does. We still need risk-aggregation I think… but we’ll have a far richer and more inclusive culture, if we can crowd-source this… than if we have…

… well, Daryl Hannah said it best “What’s the greatest threat to film-making today?

The same as always: the fact that there’s a bunch of guys in charge, with sometimes questionable tastes, who dictate what gets seen.”

4) Google Goggles

The most convincing (in fact possibly only convincing) description of augmented reality I’ve seen so far

The same article had a thing with real-time voice->voice language translation… which is pretty impressive.

5) Kids spied on by schools through remote-controlled webcams on their laptops

I have mixed feelings about this one…

a) What is it with hierarchy these days? Are they fucking insane? Why is it that every single time I read the internets (or even turn on the TV news) there’s some example of top-down control completely over-shooting the bounds of what any sane person would regard as acceptable?

I mean how do you get to the point where you think it’s acceptable to do this?

b) My mum and dad are teachers. Most of their friends are teachers. I spent my childhood surrounded by teachers – and I can’t imagine any of them actually having the time, let alone the will to do this.

Then again, some of the teachers that taught at schools I went to were total cunts and should never have been allowed near children at all. They weren’t child molesters… they were just violent, blinkered disciplinarians.

6) Laser-Cutting is a lot more expensive than I thought it was… and I can’t really afford to experiment with this stuff (that much) any more.

7) Bloom Boxes – Looks like Bollocks to me.

Or just incredibly bad reporting.

People seem to be falling all over themselves to sing the praises of this science-free innovation… which costs about a million dollars per unit, and still needs gas as an input.

“Gas”? Any kind of gas? Yep, Apparently any kind of gas. Well I guess that’s good but… what if you haven’t got any gas?

There are some fairly major-profile names behind it, but I have my doubts. It follows the Bullshit Template to the letter. Apart from the major-profile names.

8) Chatroulette?

Well I don’t have a webcam and I suspect that the internet is too slow in New Zealand to actually use it.

But there’s been a load of excitement and hype etc, so it would be remiss to leave it out… and according to this, it looks like fun.

I’ll ask twitter if anyone’s managed to use it.

9) Android Controlled Lego Thing

I can’t believe that Lego nearly went bust recently – and my Brother pointed out the range of toys that brought it back from the brink… and they’re kindof pre-made-transformer type things which… um… kindof seem to me as though they require (or invite) less imagination than common or garden lego.

Lego is one of those things that if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. And we would. If lego does go bust (and I sincerely hope it doesn’t) people will start making their own – if not immediately, then within the decade.

In a scatty sort of mood today. Can’t concentrate. It’s too hot. I don’t know where I am. In about 2 hours, I’m going to go down to see this band that I’ve almost starting playing with and tell them I don’t want to play guitar, and I want to make a movie instead.

In the meantime… how’s the Second Guttenburg Shift coming along?

1) Where’s all the Science Fiction I was promised?

Oh Cool! it’s a… it’s a…

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! NOT ANOTHER DISHWASHER!!!

In the future, everything will be designed so it looks like something even further into the future, even though it’s not really. The Packaging Goes Deep man, The Packaging Goes Deep.

But it’s a very… singular vision of what futuristic design is actually like. It’s all blue-LEDs and streamlined shapes and see-through bits. When was the last time you saw a (new) sci-fi movie that didn’t have transparent computer screens?

Now we’re making them, and as far as I can see, the ONLY reason for this is that they’ve appeared in so many sci-fi movies. I mean a laptop where you can see through the windows doesn’t actually make it easier or better to use. Does it? It would be quite cool though. I’d get one.

This is what Sci Fi looked like 40 years ago

They actually use slide-rules in this series… because they hadn’t thought of calculators. Ten years after this was made, I bought a calculator on a watch in Hong Kong.

I mean it’s rapid rapid rapid, although for some reason (maybe because it’s so close) it seems achingly slow… but if you look at old sci-fi, a lot of the design ethics have carried through. It’s like the technology has advanced rapidly, but our future tastes have kindof stayed the sameish.

Apple bear a lot of responsibility for this – they bought the retro see-through thing back with a bit of a bang. But never mind about that, here’s some steampunk mice

2) Dude Climbing up Wall a bit like that thing off Spider Man

3) Printing in Clay

I find this one interesting because of the historical echo – the process of 3D printing is essentially the same as coil-pot making… only with much higher resolution – and the ability to make pots was one of our earliest (and therefore most important) innovations. The ability to store food/seeds meant we could stop being nomadic. Agriculture is probably the biggest/most profound innovation that humanity has ever accomplished. Everything changes when you invent agriculture. Your gods change.

4) Robots that make robots. Completely.

Cool! We don’t have to outsource labour to the 3rd World anymore.

Is there still a 3rd World? Seems like kindof an 80s concept. There are slave-cultures, crime-cultures, islands of stability, bubbles of… cancerous excess – but I’m getting the distinct vibe that everything’s gone a bit transnational.

On TV the other night were two quite good programs – Breaking Bad, and Hung. One is about a teacher who decides to become a drug dealer, the other is about a teacher who decides to become a prostitute.

As entertainment it’s not bad… it seems… realistic. These decisions almost seem like positive steps – unusual second jobs… people self-improving etc… rather than a society that the bottom has fallen out of. All this wailing of late about rates of unemployment… unemployment isn’t the problem. Cost of living is the problem. The market has driven wages down and prices up to the point where people are only just surviving.

Still robots. Cool!

5) Verizon allows Skype on Smarphones

There isn’t an iPhone app for that.

The battle of the killer-apps begins. Wasn’t there something about Google launching its own fibre network – about 1000 times faster than current offerings – as a massive STFU to telcos who are always winging about how hard it is?

This is along side tools that Google is offering so you can test if your ISP/Telco is throttling your connection:

www.measurementlab.net (from last year)
youtube speed test

And yes, my connection is about 1/3 of the global average.

6) Dude makes Snow-Slum in parent’s front yard, earns 15 minuts of fame

7) 6 Armed Hexacopter

Mind you, if it didn’t have 6 arms it wouldn’t be a hexacopter would it? Unless one of its arms were missing I suppose.

From the same place, an 8 armed Octocopter

Which I expect you could probably convert into a hexacopter quite easily. See… that’s the advantage of the self-teaching software that I was on about a couple of days back. If your dog gets hold of your octocopter and converts it into a pentacopter, it could still learn to fly.

The remaining tricopter would be a bit fucked obviously – I mean it probably wouldn’t be a copter at all – rather a mangled mess of chewed and slobbered on plastic… but genetic algorithms are genetic algorithms. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Laptop was on the blink, so it’s catchup time again.

1) Cerberus 2010

Remember that scary robot thing (big dog) that looks like something that’s escaped from The Fly 3, and is dying for a piss?

Well the military have said “Yes, ok, make us a big one“.

What could possibly go wrong?

2) Modular Kitchen Garden

I like this one because it has a built-in compost collector, so you don’t have to keep taking the rubbish out as much. I’m not sure about the virtues of having plants in boxes that shut out so much light, but I guess they can cope.

I have a feeling that at some point down the line we’ll have some sort of algal-driven composter, that takes any household waste (including cellulose/paper etc) and enzymatically breaks it down into useful components… or at least useful component soup – which might increase the demand for organically grown stuff, because people will be confronted with the witches-brew of toxins that pass for food today.

The ideal of course would be something that can process human waste… at the household level, rather than being pumped miles into ponds to be processed. What we’d actually use the “ingredient soup” for I don’t know, but it’s got to be better to be producing ingredients than… well, shit basically.

3) Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe

This has been around for years of course, but I’ve only just started watching it… religiously. All of the episodes are on Youtube – and it’s not proper piracy if you also read the Guardian (he writes for the Guardian) and somehow get sucked into the $75,000,000 that they make in advertising every year. You’re helping, no really you are. Tell other people about it.

He’s a really entertaining writer – and every once in a while, breaks the wall (so to speak) and exposes the mechanics of TV making, and how much of it is needlessly expensive bollocks because of retarded IP law.

If you’re in the UK you’ve probably seen this before – if not, possibly not because UK TV blocks non-UK viewers… because of retarded IP law.

4) Open Source moon-shot

Yours for $500-$700 million. You could pay for it with the proceeds from Avatar. An Avatard funded moon-shot.

You could actually fund a fairly big chunk of it, by going up and retrieving the former moon-shot vehicles and selling them on ebay – especially that one that was designed (in part) by Damien Hirst… his stuff sells for arms and legs etc. He’d be like all “that’s miiiiine” but you’d just go all “Nah, fuck you Damien. Rights of Salvage, LOL. Look it up”. He doesn’t need the money anyway – he could probably pay for a moon-shot on his own. He made this thing recently – a 30ft long wall containing 30,000 lab diamonds

and a dead cow’s head with some sort of Egyptian hat etc

Which I could have probably done if I’d thought of it… but to be honest, I’d rather fund an open-source moon-mission.

Anyway, I bought a black lab-diamond of ebay once, for about $20. Looks/feels a bit like sculpted coal. They’re quite light are diamonds. A bit insubstantial. Rubbish really. If they didn’t look like bling, no one would like them. They’d just be lumps of stuff.

5) Laser-cut street-map clocks

Deceptively simple. There’s quite a lot of quite neat stuff on their site, which is alas, down right now. There’s got to be something more useful than this than making clocks though. Maybe something like a making an ant-farm in the shape of your neighbourhood. No… ok, that’s pretty useless as well. How about making a suntanning template so you can suntan a map onto your back like that little pixie thing off Waterworld? Ok. Bad idea as well.

6) iPod/iPad/iPhad

Yea, yea… the most over-examined, over-hyped bit of plastic on the planet right now… but like… if Aliens discover this blog 16 million years from now and try to use it to reconstruct what exactly did go so badly wrong in the early 21st century, it would be remiss to leave it out… even though (now I recall) I did actually go on about it myself, the day before it launched – though in terms of a wider trend.

So… iPad thoughts #2

It’s a killer app from 2 different directions/markets.

a) it’s a killer app for old-media producers (producers producers producers)…

… who want to put Glossy Magazines, or textbooks or movies out in a digital form while retaining the “work once, get paid forever” model… which is (now that physical replication/distribution are no longer required) is what they have become. They are trying to carry on charging for value that they no longer provide.

It’s a god-send for top-down control. That’s what it’s for. That’s why it doesn’t have flash or USB or whatever – these are strategic emasculating decisions.

b) it’s a killer app for couch-spuds who only want to consume content passively, without having to deal with menus and such – there’s always money to be made in reducing/eliminating a learning curve. Every manual is an opportunity.

Someone once said, “there is no such thing as fate, just demographics” – and there’s this law of the jungle that states that if a niche exists, then something will rapidly fill it.

The anti-open web… The Evilweb is a niche. There is money in it, and a fair amount of biomass in it (in fact the passive-web might be bigger than the contributing-web)… so I think that this idea that the new wave of open-source Neo-Protestantism is going to completely dissolve the old, top-down tyranny of content-popery is possibly a mistake. This war is going to go on and on. It’s an attempt at reconciling two mutually exclusive modes of human organisation, that appear to be hard-wired into us.

Two killer-apps have evolved on either side of the iPad/iPhone vs Android/Linux/Personal-Computer line – one is the ability to enforce top-down control over ideas, the other is the ability to ignore top-down control. These are the same patterns that shaped the reformation… Mary Queen of Scots granted a monopoly of printing to The Stationers (thus creating copyright), to crush dissenting protestant opinion. Our copyright laws are based on a (failed) 500 year old attempt at religious censorship.

Copyright originated in an attempt to burn books before they were even printed… and it failed, but we’re still fighting over it… or at least there are still conflicts that divide along Christian religious lines. It didn’t get resolved… although I notice that the Pope is now allowed to visit England, whipping up a load of good old fashioned homophobia, which may or may not distract from the child-molestation scandals that have wracked this venerable abomination institution so much of late.

(from)

Sorry – Forgiveness is a Christian virtue, and I’m not a Christian. Ah see you wee man.

Anyway, back to open/closed tech : These two killer-apps are at their cores, mutually exclusive – but top-down never goes away… and there’s still a lot of money in passive consumption.

So with any luck the two can exist side by side – which means the old school will need to accept that it can no longer control something that’s uncontrollable… without creating the instruments (and worldview) of police-statehood…

… and its worth noting that Apple has already waded into a mire of legal fuckups over “ownership” of “ideas” surrounding the iPad. It’s unworkable people. It’s unworkable even if you believe in it.

Intellectual property law a Self-tying Gordian Knot. In the long-run you’re upfucking yourself. This tendency towards legal convolution is getting worse.

6) Gear ring

Kinekt Design’s Gear Ring from Glen Liberman on Vimeo.

7) Underwater guns from China

Oh that’s just fucking marvelous isn’t it… not for the fact that it’s being done, or that someone would actually want to shoot scuba divers, but for the cold-war era photo-quality and styling. It’s all about paranoia people.

8) Lego Diffraction Grating

For 24 hour plastic party people.

9) Ibotz Robo-ball

It’s got a laser-beam in it for shooting other robo-balls, or for fucking up the 24 hour plastic party people.

Fortunately, it’s a kitset, so you’ll be able to put your own 1st-person POV camera inside it and fill it up with liquid binary explosives and LSD-laced glittery confetti etc. And then what? I don’t know really, but it will make you feel kindof special driving it around. Like you’re in some sort of movie where the guy has an explosive glittery acid bomb, but doesn’t really know what to do with it.

10) 3 Armed Digital Printer

YES!!!

I’ve been playing with this idea in my head for the last week or so, before this turned up… only I want to make mine out of bamboo, because I want to make everything out of bamboo… because bamboo grows on trees. Bamboo trees. There’s loads of them down by the river in my home town – I sometimes drive down in my car and sit there watching the ducks, wondering what the fuck I’m going to do with my life

BUT NOW I KNOW!

I’m going to blow up ducks with a remote controlled, LSD-laced glitter bomb. Existential crisis solved. I’ve finally found my true purpose. It’s a full moon quite soon as well. Where’s my lippy?