Tag: technology

oh mercy

via bOINGbOING:

Over at BBGadgets, our Lisa Katayama has an incredible post up about a widow in Japan who is publishing an anthology of text messages she sent to her loved one, after his death.

Her husband, Motoo, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2006, probably from the steel pipe factory he worked at. He got worker’s comp, but the disease ultimately destroyed his lungs and left him with hallucinations for the remainder of his life. Shocked, the widowed Fukuda started sending text messages to her dead husband every time she thought of something she wanted to say to him. Things like: "I couldn’t live if I didn’t think you were still beside me. I can’t live [without you]. I’m crying every day" and "I want to call you ‘Otosan’ to my heart’s content. Why do you have to be inside such a small urn?" Every time she sent a message, the phone by his home shrine vibrated (she made sure it was always charged).

Woman publishes book full of text messages sent to her dead husband’s cell phone (BBG)

Verstehen Sie?

MAKE Magazine: How to make a 1934 USB web cam.

A while ago I converted a 1934 folding camera into a USB web cam. I brought it with me to Maker Faire Austin 2008 and a lot of people seemed to like it. In fact, a lot of people wanted to know how I made one. I promised them I would do a how-to on the blog, and I always keep my promises, so let’s get started.


Yes, those are webcams. Yes, I’m seriously considering doing this to my broken antique Speedex. I think it’s the niftiest DIY I’ve seen in months. The problem that I have with a lot of oh-so-stylish DIY is that the end result isn’t generally useful. It looks neat, but it’s a dead object, art for the sake of art, like the Steampunk Space Helmet. Because these both work and look damned good they are therefore, in my estimation, about a millionty-thousand times more awesome. Yes. Now to get a webcamera. And, like, a soldering iron. And heat-shrink tubing. And a… Rosin core solder?

Doing our laundry, I feel this is a few tiny steps to being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen

It’s HACK SABBATH today!

Reminding me of Chia Pet McKenzie’s computer: (from moosl via treehugger), Lloyd Alter writes:

We have an Asus notebook, and like their modular design where you can pick your own CPU and hard drive and assemble it yourself; ours had a tragic fall last week but it was easy to swap out busted parts. Asus also tries to differentiate itself from the others by doing silly things, like a leather notebook, or very sensible things, like the new Ecobook. Its case is covered in bamboo, which I suppose is a statement, but the real show is inside. All of the plastic in it is labelled and recyclable; it is lined with cardboard; there are no paints, sprays or even electroplating used on its components. It looks like it is designed to be easily taken apart for self-service and easy upgrading of components, usually the downfall of notebooks.

The release date is still approximately a year in the future, but by then, maybe I’ll be able to afford one. At any rate, it’s just about damn time someone made something like this available to the market. A sustainable case will go miles toward reducing the staggering amount of plastic in landfills.

Remember how I was writing about the mysterious vanishing bees? It turns out it might be because of cell phones.

I feel somehow this is appropriate, except that we can’t yet blame it on Monsanto and I really want to.

I dont’ know where I’m going with this, how embarassing


lift
Originally uploaded by davenyc.

lafinjack has found vogueing vinyl ninja gangsta Michael Jackson clones. It’s bad because it’s good.

Bloody tar pit apartment. I don’t even much like it here, but yesterday I couldn’t bring myself to go. Ryan came home and that bit the edge off. Vagabond blue jello today for breakfast in a clear glass bowl. I don’t know where the rabbit is, but occasionally I hear things fall down in the living-room, so I’m taking that as a pulse positive sign. I am clearly awaiting a mental cohesion I’m not currently capable of, because the thought of a fashion photography bunny rabbit pin-up set continues to pass over me like a fast moving cloud. Place rabbit in life, begin to use as prop. It all sounds worse than it is. On the back of the motorcycle, my mother gunned us up to 120 and I let go. Leaned back against the wind and slowly raised my arms backward behind me. My wings for flying, it’s the same for everyone. I thought of taxidermy, a white winged mouse holding out its dried heart with tiny paws, the cavity in its chest apparent and stuffed with small rosebuds. The tiniest smudge of red on its hands and fur. I would hang it from a piece of ribbon, thin and shining satin. Black, because I thought of who I would send it to.

The Aristocrats (movie) Today at 8. Meet in Tinseltown up by the box office @ 7:30.

My humble pen in head has been thinking a lot about the texture of L.A. lately. I don’t know why. Something about futurism, about how Los Angeles got trapped in the bright promise of the shiny sixties, when optimism was still allowed, in a way that I’ve never encountered in Canada. I don’t know if I want to go back yet, but I consider it every time I think of getting a driver’s license. Ray sent me a film clip this week, General Motors’ view of what the world was going to be like. A woman dancing through a dream of glittering cars and enviably automatic kitchens. It ends with her and her masked man driving down a model of a freeway surrounded by rolling parks and well spaced tall buildings. All very Norman Geddes, the industrial designer who unveiled ideas of Tomorrow back in the American 30s. All very comfortable and lovely. The Future was something to look forward to.

Of course the allure of Futurama was polished with the wishful spit of GM to sell new cars to a depression laden country, but I think we’re more cynical now. It’s difficult to write any positive forecasts, which is important, in its own way, as people are entirely in love with soothsaying the Next Big Thing. Nostradamus had a surge of popularity back with September 11th, we’ve obviously not lost the bug. We still like looking backward to trace our way forward. We trail over whatever paths that look the most reasonable, metamorphing pattern recognition into a full blown precog bit of back-patting hindsight fiction.

That AIDS is a crises, (check this though), wars are blossoming anywhere on the globe where there’s oil, and that terrible news of any sort is available in a way that it never has been before, creates an open glimpse into 1984 bad dreams. Try to create something hopeful and the result seems slightly too soggy to be taken seriously. Social optimism is cyclical, and we are a very low swing of the pendulum. Our architecture has finally reached out into shining glass towers and we’ve found they all look the same. Expression of emotion through stone is all but a lost art form. Scenarios of happy thronging places seem wrong, out-dated and moded. Apocalypse ideas seem educated, smart and fact driven, less theoretical.

However, just because our predictions are darker than they used to be, don’t mean they will be any more accurate. Orwell gave us a place where security cameras covered our every move, yet never dreamed that we would be broadcasting from our bedrooms every day to a limitless audience of strangers. When my ex-roommate and I had a webcam in our living-room, we had upward to a thousand hits a day, and really we had no content. There’s the forever complaint of older writers, too, that there was no way to predict the cellular telephone, dating their work of the future with the stamp of Before The Technology.

hold the wheel



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I saw you and looked down. I changed the subject of conversation. You walked past like silver, as if I could touch the air you had just walked through and feel solid flesh.

I counted my lovers the other day, using myself as one unit. My body, my bended bones and muscles, an abacus bead. Click, like this, and he slipped in here and my back arched taut, hips drawing the strings of shiva’s bow. She bit me once, hard, at the bus-stop, one of the first times we kissed. I’m at twelve consensual, my friend at thirty-four. I thought about water falling, how many times I’ve held hands in rain. The contrast of skin colours, how I loved to see my white against the wood colours of tanned skin, how I loved the white of my skin matching the belly that I kissed. I would like to meet a boy this time who wants things I’ve never thought of, tells me the secret names of roses, tells me that he likes touching me in public. I would like to not be shot through with sacrifice.

There’s a girl sitting alone in a room, her music is as lonely as she is and she can’t find anything else. Her clothes are piled on the floor among too many books and papers. She’s scared.

Newly minted life, that’s another thing coming. Bill and I were talking about technology the other day after fireworks, and I felt for the first time in a long time that I was aware, like I’d been roughly shaken from a trance. He argued that new things weren’t that, only the newest illustration of an age-old idea. I pointed out that new species only come from previous iterations of animal, that everything comes from somewhere. The system self-propagating. The New finding you because you’ve put the settings that way. I know enough for two of us. The trick is in the procedure, the knowing how to act with it, the finding out what to do next. I feel distinctly unintelligent because I have so many tools, so many pieces of information, yet no ideas.

society explains? someone help me ponder please

On-line, I rant less at people about how wonderful technology is, but I’ve been coming to an odd conclusion lately that I want to share; that language just might be devolving through the internet. I don’t mean so much words like WOOT coming into parlance, but that vocabulary is homogenizing. Meeting international friends has only added credence to this idea. No matter where in the world they are from, we are all speaking the same language.

I’m talking about expression through memetics, hyperbolic emphasis.

It’s like somehow we’re managing to slim down language to something that’s almost electronic gesture based, so non-specific that we’re reaching a plateau of zen communication that’s partially worrisome. The inflections that span oceans because we read the same news stories and know each other almost purely by interest have not been complex ideas. The common denominators are almost startlingly like a severe Californian infection once they’re noticed. Berkley as patient zero. Home culture barely impacts. We all say “like” and “yeah” smattered with the occasional “I win” acknowledgment of clever. We seem to be erasing language with porous words, as meaningless as the most commonly known word in the world, “okay”.

I love the colours (from jwz)

“Takahiro Takeda, postgraduate student of Japan’s Tohoku Univ., dances with Partner Ballroom Dance Robot (PBDR) at a factory of Nomura Unison robotic venture company in Chino city, 200-km west of Toyko. The prototype dance partner robot, developped by Japan’s Tohoku Univ Professor Kazuhiro Kosuge, enables them to move in all directions with three special wheels by predicting how its partner will mobe with a sensor.”

“Robots on the market include a machine that looks like a machine dressed in bright colors programmed to converse in just enough small talk to stop the elderly from going senile and a doll that articulates the needs of a five-year-old boy.

In January, a Tokyo University engineer unveiled a humanoid that can shuffle its feet and wave its hands to preserve a traditional Japanese dance falling out of fashion among young people.”

This is what obsesses me, but very very quietly. I think I’m going to start talking about it.

I want an infusion of technology. I want my hair to have LEDs wired in. I want to snap my fingers and watch sparks fly free and blue. Tonight I’m going to go dancing. I’m going to twist and try not to break my ankle again. My shoes have snapped again, back to wandering barefoot with cardboard sandals in my pocket for that just in case and the bus-driver rules. I want a networked media pool, I want everyone in and swimming. Science fiction reaches into immortality in a way that I don’t think most other fiction does. The promise to invent the future, to weave articulation into the joints of your fingers, to preserve the other and outline the reactions required to outlive our own societal deadline. We need drama, we’re humans, we make stories out of everything. That’s what you do when you meet someone, it’s all teasing anecdotes. Reactions of instinct. Tell you what I’m like, explain my reactions through making you laugh. It’s striking. I want to dramatize the future, project a thought forward, try to give an idea to anybody who could make it real. I want my flying car and all the metaphor stands for. Could you imagine if we were the last generation to grow old? The conservative reaction wants to tie us more to the past than we need to be. The bit that’s certain isn’t that technology will progress to a point where we break that servile reaction, but that it will happen without us if we aren’t paying attention.