Category: Misc

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Maker Faire 2007

Spectacle-Tm Spent the day with Miles at Maker Faire 2007, where you can’t swing a cat without clobbering a team of reality hackers. Enjoyed the giant Mousetrap game (perfect functional replica of the original, writ large (very large)), the myriad bicycle hacks from Cyclecide, the whale blimp, Ukey Stardust (the entirety of David Bowie’s ;em>Ziggy Stardust performed on ukuleles), the Victorian mini-mansion on wheels Neverwas Haul, The Disgusting Spectacle (kids running on a hamster wheel cause giant to pick enormous gobs of snot from nose), playing with stop-motion claymation video, performance by the original Pepsi and Mentos dudes, the sonar-controlled self-balancing skateboard (which both Miles and I rode!), the endless procession of robots both sleek and gritty – some of them engaged in mortal combat, others the picture of gentility.

Flickr set posted, though I think my set from last year was better (in fact, I think Maker Faire was better last year in general, but not by much – may have been a state of mind, or creeping jadedness). But Maker Faire has already become an amazing father/son bonding tradition thing for us. Now I just need to learn to weld before he turns five.

Music: Velvet Underground :: Sweet Jane
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Spring New Media Lecture Series (May 2007)

Another big week of multimedia training for mid-career journalists coming up at the J-School, with a heaping handful of great speakers discussing the intersection of “new media” and journalism. These talks are open to the public, and will be webcast live (and archived).

Featured speakers are Tom Mallory, Chuck Scott, Alexa Capeloto, Nicole Vargas of the San Diego Tribune; Seth Gitner and Lindsey Nair of Roanoke.com; Brian Storm of MediaStorm.org; Richard Koci Hernandez of the San Jose Murcury News; Rob Curley of Washingtonpost, Newsweek Interactive, and Colin Crawford of IDG Communications.

Rob Curley’s talks are always dynamite. I’ve decided QuickTime 7 has been out long enough that it’s safe to switch to the h.264 codec. Upgrade your QuickTime if necessary, and look for a nice bump in quality this time around.

Music: Amy Winehouse :: Rehab
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Goodbye Shipyard

Sad news: Berkeley’s unique mechanical artists’ collective The Shipyard is being closed down by the city, after six years of creative construction and innovative alternative energy production. At core is The Shipyard’s use of shipping containers as storage and construction bases, and the city’s perception of them as unsafe. Shipyard is moving to Oakland, so it’s not a total write-off, but Berkeley as an alternative cultural mecca will be worse for the loss.

Clock Building
Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid

Neverwas Haul, the ‘Yard’s three-story steam-powered Victorian House, will be on display at this year’s Maker Faire (Miles and I will be there!).

Shipyard rep Jim Mason’s letter to the City of Berkeley is reproduced on their site – the crew is scrambling to meet Berkeley’s demands (which appear to be impossible).

Covered at Laughing Squid and on the O’Reilly Radar.

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Flickr Maps

Late to the party, just realized that Flickr provides an interface for “geotagging” photos — associating images or sets of images with points on the globe, overlaid on Yahoo! Maps. Here are a few of my sets in the context of their location on earth:

With more care and precision, you can get much more detailed, e.g. I could drag each of the Albany Bulb images to the exact spot on the bulb where the sculpture was found.

Music: Dave Van Ronk :: Death Letter Blues
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Collider VR

&tQuicktime VR at its finest: The Atlas target at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, near Geneva.

When I see stuff like this, I always wonder why Quicktime VR never really took off. Examples of it aren’t unheard of, but given that it’s relatively easy to create QTVR files, I’d expect to see these things everywhere. Instead, Apple’s QTVR creation software became the only OS 9 software the company never ported to OS X. I’ve heard this is mainly because stitching software now comes bundled with most digital cameras, so there was little market left for it. But if every digital camera comes with stitching software, why isn’t QTVR ubiquitous?

via David Rowland

Music: Liz Phair;/a> :: Chopsticks
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Famous Hackers

IT Security has posted its list of the Top 10 Most Famous Hackers of All Time.

Hackers are a very diverse bunch, a group simultaneously blamed with causing billions of dollars in damages as well as credited with the development of the World Wide Web and the founding of major tech companies. In this article, we test the theory that truth is better than fiction by introducing you to ten of the most famous hackers, both nefarious and heroic, to let you decide for yourself.

Looked promising, but shockingly, I didn’t make the list.

Music: Caetano Veloso :: Rai Das Cores (Array of Colors)
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Lord of the Flies

Got an inadvertent up-close view into the reality of the internet experience for millions of people today, when I received a fairly typical spam message from a smoking cessation program. But rather than the usual spam-feeding mechanisms used by spammers, they had sent their message out through a Mailman listserve, to which I and thousands of others had been subscribed against our will.

For mysterious/bizarre reasons, the spammer had changed the default Reply-To header from “reply to sender” to “reply to list,” which meant that every screaming unsub request* was re-broadcast to thousands. Apparently not realizing it was a listserve, dozens of recipients thought the unsub requests were directed to them. The thread quickly snowballed into a cavalcade of confusion and name-calling — the blind leading the blind in a flurry of misunderstanding.

*Nevermind the fact that unsub instructions were clearly written at the bottom of each message, people tried the old stand-bys — write in all caps and scream in the message body to be released from the madness… or else!!!

Something perverse in me made me stay subbed for much of the day, just to see how this little Lord of the Flies experiment would play out. Notes: Thousands of people have no idea that responding to a listserve will broadcast your response to all recipients. Repeated “But I don’t even smoke!” messages reveal an apparently deep-seated belief that spam is somehow targeted at individuals rather than carpet-bombed. Each recipient seemed to think that each unsub demand was directed to them – which reveals how many people have never been on a listserve before, have absolutely no idea what they’re experiencing. Everyone threatens to rat the spammer out to their own ISP (“If you don’t stop, I’ll tell AOL on you!”). Even after hundreds of repetitions, people are not able to infer that all replies are being refelected to all — which made me wonder how people get through the day to begin with.

Pasted below – a dozen or so examples of today’s madness.
Continue reading “Lord of the Flies”

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Tears in Zero G

After the space shuttle Columbia burned up in the atmosphere, all media was focused on the loss. We barely heard about the three astronauts stranded on the International Space Station, who not only lost seven close friends in the disaster, but also their ride home.

… without gravity, your tears don’t fall, so these great shimmering pools of water filled his eyes and he’d have to knock them away and his tears are all around him in the weightlessness … and then immediately thereafter they begin to realize, “Well, I guess we’ve lost our ride home.”

Facing the prospect of spending two years aboard the station, they ultimately went home aboard a 40-year-old Russian Soyuz pod, which was strapped to the outside of the ISS like a lifeboat. After a harrowing voyage in which rockets misfired by half a second, throwing them hundreds of miles off course, they landed in the deep tundra of Kazhakstan (home of Borat!). Presumed dead and lost by the rest of humanity, they had hours to meditate and rejoice in the green grass of planet earth before being discovered.

The fascinating story is told by Christopher Jones, NASA’s Director for Solar System Exploration, to Moira Gunn for Tech Nation. The bit about levitating tears is about 10’30” in.

Music: Momus :: Mai Noda
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Sauced

A few blocks from my hotel in Austin, Tears of Joy hot sauce shack – literally hundreds of kinds of jalapeno/habanero-based fluids. Trying to choose a few to take home is nearly impossible – you can taste about a dozen of them in advance, but for the rest, it’s pretty much a matter of judging a sauce by its cover. And there are a lot of tantalizing covers. Ended up having eight flavahs shipped home, and dived in last night.

Hot Sauces

So far orange pulp habanero is the stand-out favorite, pumpkin chipotle running a close second. But hard to argue with good old Cholula. Now the challenge is to get through all eight bottles before next year’s south-by.

Music: Rufus Thomas :: Steal A Little
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News Flash: Biorhythms Are Bogus

Back in the 70s, you could hardly walk into a strip mall or pizza joint without encountering a “biorhythm machine.” The theory is that we all have these cyclical waves running through our lives for physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being. The waves start at birth, and, running on slightly different frequencies, go through periods of both synchronous harmony and chaotic intersection. As a 10-year-old, I was obsessed with these things, and would drop a quarter every time I saw one, walking home with a freshly minted sheet of green/white striped printer paper sporting a dot-matrix layout of my life cycles for the next few months.

Biorhythm Lately feeling like I’d reached an all-time low – exhausted, sick, stressed, imbalanced, under-excercised, just out of sorts in every way. Then it hit me – my biorhythms must be off! Haven’t seen one of those machines around for years, but knew there had to be a software version out there somewhere. Struck gold with the Bedrock BioRhythms Dashboard widget. Tapped in my birthday and was treated to – horrors! – stark evidence that biorhythms are total bull. Something is wrong – this can’t be my chart! My waveforms are peaking right now, should be top of my game. But reality is the opposite. How can I never have realized this as a child? How could I have been so naive? How could my parents have allowed me to go on wasting my money like that?

Guess this explains why you never see the machines around anymore.

Man, what a rip.

Music: Squarepusher :: Tundra