Category Archives: information sys

Random thoughts on Steampunk

Posted on by

I told Matt M. ages ago that I’d post some thoughts on steampunk – here goes nothin’.

First, a little scope narrowing/definition – the steampunk I’m talking about is the steampunk of things – the design sensibility that takes inspiration both from Verne et al. and from the second generation of steampunk lit. It’s too bad Gaslight Romance didn’t take as an appellation for gen 2; it’s more accurate, but -punk seems to be to speculative fiction genres what -gate is to political scandals. So, across the board, punk it shall be, though the first generation – Gibson, Sterling and friends – was the true punk: a critique rather than a celebration. Steampunk things, especially now that the subject is getting some mainstream attention, can be all over the place. If pressed, I’d offer up a top hat and goggles as the essential pieces of clothing and when it comes to other ‘stuff’, I’m going to point to Jake Von Slatt’s keyboard and Morse code RSS reader as sitting firmly at the center of the Steampunk universe.

Steampunk is the child of maker culture. I’ve posted about makers before – the steampunk practice of modding, hacking and fabricating is of a piece with what many others are doing to make commodity items uniquely their own. Steammakers are well positioned: many of their favorite materials – brass, wood, leather – are relatively easy to work and they are echoing/emulating a period when the inventor in his workshop was paradigmatic (they don’t call ’em Edisonades for nothing). If you want to tinker, taking as your model a period when the tinkerer was king ain’t a bad idea. Doing it in a time when sharing ideas and information with like minded people is incredibly easy? Another good idea.

If maker kulturny is how, retrofuturism is why. Retrofuturism (or postmodern paleo-futurism, if you prefer) addresses a fundamental question: “Where’s my friggin’ flying car?” More seriously, it’s an attempt to look at past visions of the future to see what we can learn about the times the predictions were made in and figure out something about how the world works (why were the predictions so wide of the mark). For many of us, retrofuturism and disappointment go hand in hand – I was brought up on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on my tenth birthday and bought into the Star Trek “Little UN on the Bridge” vision of science and Vulcan rationality overwhelming all our petty differences (yeah, I know Kirk was white, male and a bit of a hound, but you have to start somewhere). Where are we now? It’s been 35 years since Apollo 17 left the moon – we’re dinking around in low earth orbit, going noplace fast. Further, if you take a hard look at the distances and energy budgets involved in interstellar travel you’re left with a choice between non-starter and Clarke’s 3rd law. Yes, the future will involve magic tech, but relying on the Underpants Gnomes (collect underpants, ?, a starship!) isn’t where I’ll be putting my money. The ultra-modern future predicted in the sixties is nowhere to be found and the road to Infinity and Beyond has a Darien Gap the size of the Pacific in it. Instead, what we have looks disturbingly like plain old day-to-day life.

*

I’m going to skate past the fact that the world has changed – maybe even progressed – quite a bit since ’68 and ignore the incredible stuff our metal and silicon kids are doing around the solar system. Part of it is that we tend to adapt to change when we’re in the middle of it. Cell phones? Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. GPS receivers in damn near everything? Yawn. Another piece – and the root of retrofuturist disappointment IMHO – is the tendency of sci-fi types and futurists to concentrate on extremes – Mad Max or Futurama II. Utopia or dystopia; is there a word for a -topia where baldness is an issue, where kids get frustrated with their parents, where one waits in long lines to renew a drivers license? The biggest single tech change of the last quarter century – data networking/the Internet – is used to connect people to each other and to information with unprecedented ease. It’s also used for v1agr@ spam, 419s and zombies. The problem with the future is that there are people in it – a fact that I think we’re realizing.

I know I’m veering  a bit, but I need to acknowledge the ultimate superscience sendup – The Venture Bros.

The series’ predominant homage is to Jonny Quest, as it is the basis for many of the main characters. Dr. Venture is loosely modeled on Benton Quest, Brock likewise on Race Bannon, and the Venture boys correspond to Jonny and Hadji. The comparisons, however, are taken to the level of an extreme parody by making the characters the “next generation” after an age of scientific heroism – and the next generation doesn’t always fare well.

Thus Dr. Venture is a pill-popping, barely-competent scientist who treats his children and those around him with overt disdain and contempt; Brock is a hyper-macho man with a (frequently used) license to kill; and the boys are nincompoops stuck in an out-of-date mindset. One newspaper critic remarked, “if filmmakers Woody Allen and Sam Peckinpah had collaborated on Jonny Quest, it would have come out a lot like this.” *

We have seen the future and it looks like a cross between the alley behind a liquor store and  a Massachusetts DMV office (with costumed supervillians!). (Also – proof blogging makes you smarter – I knew I’d seen the Venture Industries building somewhere before – now I know where.)

*

 So… recent superscience boosterism is bunk. Maybe Verne and company got it right. If not, at least their miscues aren’t within living memory (too cheap to meter, anyone?). Steampunk  goes back farther for it’s optimistic vision of the future for practical (brass), thematic (Tesla) and temporal (old enough to be malleable) reasons, but it does – in spite of it’s frequent darkness – have it’s own customized, idiosyncratic view of a possible good life.

Finally, Matt asked whether Steampunk might be the new counterculture. I responded in comments, but I want to elaborate slightly. The 60s/early 70s counterculture – as a label applied by the mainstream –  merely identified a large group of people who were not pleased with the way things were going and/or thought they had a better way. Within this population there were a million different tribes and tendencies; one could develop a taxonomy of different kinds of acidheads, let alone try to figure out what tied together SDS, jesus freaks and Merry Pranksters. I think we’re seeing similar kinds of things happening today – makers overlap Steampunks overlap (yes, clothing counts) goth and on and on – with one important exception. The center – mainstream culture – is less dominant and more easily fragmented than it was 40 years ago. It’s CBS/NBC/ABC (then) vs. The Golf Channel/Discovery/Versus/etc., etc. (now) to use an obvious example. Personally, I think this is a good thing – diversity (and tolerance) in cultural systems builds in some resilience – if you’re going to fall victim to groupthink – and you will – smaller, more amorphous groups sound good to me.

I’d like to do my part in the mash-up/creativity/fragmentation movement – allow me to point to a series of posts on Lord Whimsy’s LiveJournal. For those of us who would rather be in the woods than in the workshop – neoleatherstockingism (I gotta clean up that name). Where steampunks have brass goggles, we’ll have silver gorgets (also gunstock clubs, dogs, hawks, optics, net access)! Manifesto to follow – I’m 75% serious about this.

Jott

Posted on by

A little more about Jott, to follow up on the brief post below… Jott is, at core, a speech-to-text application. It’s the input and output options that make it – IMHO – very cool. The primary input feeder is a phone – dial Jott, tell it where you want the message to go and start talking. When you’re done, pause – Jott will say “Got it” and queue up the message to be processed into text and sent. Output options include:

  • Send an email message to yourself. This was what got me interested in Jott in the first place. I find myself having ideas or thinking of some little thing I really ought to do only to have the thought go on sabbatical (if it’s something I need to do, it usually returns as I’m trying to go to sleep – if it’s a good idea, it may never come back). Now I can make a quick phone call and jott myself a note.
  • Send an email and a text message to someone else. I used this today – sent a message to someone: “Call me once you’ve started your day.”
  • Send an update to Twitter. Very handy for those of us without qwerty keypads on our phones – at least that subset who are pathetic at numpad texting (I’m a member).
  • Add an item to a list. Jott accounts are provisioned with a To Do List already included  – I’ve added a list for blog post topics. Grocery lists, people to murther, the possibilities are endless.
  • Post to your blog. Moblog mastery!

For the coolest, most mind bending, creatively playful use of Jott ever, click here. It’s a two species blog post – bravo RKO’C!

Conspiracy, mashups and correlation

Posted on by

This weird yet well-researched book by a former science advisor to Walter Cronkite argues that NASA is an occult control system, created by Nazi SS officers and high-ranking U.S. Free Masons, that discovered alien technological artifacts on the moon. Hoagland believes the “secret government” has been reverse-engineering alien technology for decades.

  • One of the folks tapped for summer reading materials in the link above is Paul D. Miller, DJ Spooky :: That Subliminal Kid. I heard an interview with him a few days ago – I especially like his notion of “artist as search engine”. I think there’s a sense where this has always been true – part of the artist’s job is pattern recognition – pulling something (at best, something unexpected) out of the ground. An MP3 of the interview is here and you can click here to get to Miller’s Hail the Jewel in the Blue Lotus mix (Buddhist  hip hop).
  • Another dispatch from the digital edge – The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Not sure how I feel about tossing theory over the side…  Update – an example of scientific petabyte computing – the Large Hadron Collider – 2Gb of data every 10 seconds.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, a picture of Barbie finials on a miniature trebuchet.

Two tech snippets

Posted on by

Firefox 3. It’s out, I’ve downloaded and installed it and so far I’m liking it a lot. Biggest single thumbs-up? It does seem to be significantly faster – huge win. If you’re extra cautious, you may want to give it another few days before taking the plunge, but I haven’t had any trouble yet. Extensions I’m running: Better Gmail, Delicious Bookmarks, Quickdrag and Tab Mix Plus.

Fabjects/3D printing. I’ve posted about fabbing at home; here’s an interesting perspective on the topic:

I do believe that home manufacturing will develop in the future and feel more strongly about it now than ever. People that manufacture at home, however, will serve as “providers” that sell to others, primarily on the web. Individuals will see it as a low-risk, low-overhead business opportunity to manufacture from their basement, spare room, garage, or dorm room. They will discover a niche market and serve this market from their home. A few are already doing it.

Case in point: Fabjectory is a one-person company that has been producing models from Second Life, Google SketchUp, and Nintendo Mii for some time. The price for a color model from Fabjectory is typically $50–200. The home-based operation has been written up in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, Wired, and other major publications. I am also aware of others here in the U.S. and abroad that are offering part-making services from the comfort of their homes.

via Bruce Sterling.

N810 Followup

Posted on by

I’ve been pretty pleased with my little Nokia N810 so far. It’s fit in well as a secondary/companion device – web access (almost) anywhere, navigation and media playback. Tnere’ve been a couple nagging gaps, though…

– Podcasts. I’ve yet to figure out if it’s possible to subscribe to podcasts in an iTunesish way. It looks like you can kludge your way through with RSS, but not easily or conveniently.

– Weather. There’s a nice looking weather app (omWeather) available, but I can’t get it to install. I’ve made the N810 take the red pill (Nokia-speak for loosening some of the controls) without success.

– Twitter. There’s (again,as far as I can tell) no stand-alone Twitter client for the N810. Reading tweets on my cell phone is no big deal, but I just haven’t acquired the numeric keyboard texting skills that I guess I need. I could always go to the Twitter web site, but I’d really like something more like the Twitter widget in Netvibes.

Eureka! I’d been thinking about putting a Nokia-optimized Netvibes page together, and yesterday I finally got motivated to do it.

Weather? Check. Twitter? Check.

Podcasts? Sorta-check. The small toolbar at the top of the netvibes page is the built in player. I can listen to The Onion Radio News so long as I have a net connection. It’ll do…

Now, if I can just get this self-charging hack to work, I’ll be sitting pretty.

Note – N810 + Wordpy + cell phone camera + texting-photos-to-Flickr = completely moblogged post.

Technorati Tags:

Exchange and the web

Posted on by

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about how technology – in particular, networking – has been changing ‘stuff’ and how we acquire same. First, a couple caveats. This applies only to parts of the world wealthy enough to allow big pieces of their population to stop worrying about starving or dying of malaria/diarrhea/etc. – too often, these sorts of posts ignore the fact that there are a huge number of people who don’t worry about Mac vs. PC; they’re worrying about bad water vs. civil conflict. Also, I’m going to make a few plain ol’ assertions. I’m hoping they will be uncontroversial, but if not feel free to ket me know why you think I’m off base.

First assertion – the networked world gives us more information than we could have dreamed of, say, fifteen years ago. The span is both wide and deep – especially interesting for my purposes, has been the explosion of how-to info: Make:, Instructables and various subject specific forums.

Second assertion – the networked world reduces friction when trying to exchange things – eBay, Etsy, Lulu and (importantly) all the places folks gather to collaborate (think SourceForge, for example) and swap ideas.

…And an observation. It seems that as the world becomes more info -dense (I was going to say richer – in the $$ sense – but I’m not sure that’s the case), people’s appetite for uniqueness explodes. The crap we surround ourselves with has always had, as part of it’s purpose, a role in identifying us – we signal things to the world about our identity through our clothes, cars, etc. (but not our books, dammit). There’s a lot of give and take here – people want to show they are part of a big (mainstream culture) tribe, thus NASCAR stickers/clothing/etc. while drilling down into sub-tribes (Calvin pissing on a Ford, Calvin pissing on #24). Some people may drill down until they are a tribe of one – others start there – using their own taste as a guide (for better or worse).

*

In the great internet tradition of 4-panes, I back-of-the-enveloped the diagram above; I think it plays well with unfounded speculation about modes of exchange. Before I talk about some of the panes, another assertion: markets are one way of allocating resources and exchanging stuff. They are not the only way (think reciprocity, barter, command economies, etc.) and may or may not be appropriate for every circumstance (see the use of magic market pixie dust in CPA Iraq).

Quadrant 4 – physical commodity items – was where the vast majority of post Industrial Revolution, pre 1945 activity took place and it still, I think, conditions how we think of exchange. This is the part of life where neoclassical economics got it’s start and still retains a lot of power (other things being equal). One note on the Scion xB – I moved it (right) away from the pure physical zone because there is significant software in automobiles today and included an arrow attempting to show a trend towards customization – modding xBs is part of Toyota’s marketing appeal/effort.

Looking at quadrant 2 as it edges to the upper right, it seems to me that more abstract and unique stuff lives in the world of gift exchange. As an abstract becomes less unique (drops down) , markets get involved – with differing degrees of success. The key issue, I think, is that in a society with ubiquitous digital technology, copying abstract stuff is not just trivial – it’s how things work. Extracting money from certain instances of copying (yes when I copy from the iTunes store, no when I sync my iPod, no when the song is copied from the drive to the DSP) is, empirically, problematic. Quadrant 3 is the world of the RIAA (suing our customers for a brighter tomorrow!) , the MPAA and others who are trying to maintain an analog (LPs, film) hold on a world where the copying djin has been released.

Quadrant 1 is the world of the hardware hacker, the maker, the english wheel and the torch. It’s the next big area of change IMHO (I think the revolution is well underway already – but there’s much more to come). As the xB shows, it’s where a lot of people want to do business. To be successful in this space, connection to the designer/maker, uniqueness and elegance are key. There are livings to be made here by people who are good at what they do. Simply having an idea and milking it won’t do though – the design/idea behind a physical object will be increasingly digitized and in a world of fabbers, a knockoff is just a 3D scan away. We may end up in a world of feedstocks, commodities (including unique/custom items knocked off in a fabber, based on a common software template), and craft – craft items being those things with a tie back to a human being that you as a consumer have developed some kind of real relationship with.

To put some of this in context, let me cite the example of a webcomic artist that I’m sorta familiar with. rtevens writes diesel sweeties. The core of his vast empire is a gift – he makes the 1s and 0s that comprise a strip available w/o charge to anyone who wants to look. He sells ad space on the site – converting eyeballs/clicks into revenue. He sells t-shirts – physical instantiation of POV and in-jokes from the strip – both niche-y and tribal (also socks). I’m sure he’d be unhappy is someone knocked his shirts off, but he churns them – some drop into the void; others are created. He’s definitely working in the top half of the chart – using (2) and (3) to drive each other. Not surprisingly, he’s got a very active web presence – encouraging that feeling of connection with the artist/maker.

So there it is. For non-commodity items: connection, uniqueness, gifts, standing against the fact that anything can be copied. For commodity items, the desire to move above the horizontal line – to differentiate. I’m sure there’s a lot to disagree with above – feel free – just an interim stab at figuring out the lay of the land; one that’s particularly important to me since both my chillun are artist/designer/craftsperson types.

Nokia N810 nav functions

Posted on by

The N810 I recently purchased has a built in GPS receiver. I had a drive to do this morning and figured I’d put it to the route-finding test. There was very little route to find – directions were about as easy as can be imagined – a perfect first outing. Call me conservative, but I prefer to shake things down before I’m in desperate need of them (when possible). There are two options, as far as I can tell, on the N810:

  • Wayfinder comes preloaded on the N810 with a big caveat – to get route finding, you need to spend $$ to upgrade to the ‘full’ version. At this point it looks like a 36 month subscription is about $140 – too rich for my blood.
  • Maemo Mappper is a free open source app that’s a one-click install, To get voice directions you also need to install flite, so maybe I should characterize it as a two-clicker.

I spent 10 minutes or so yesterday with Maemo Mapper – figuring out how to ask for directions, download maps along the route, etc. First thing this morning, I fired up Mapper and set out. A note on the N810’s GPS performance – every review you read says the same thing – it takes forever for the receiver to find satellites. True fact. I think my ancient Garmin 12XL comes up faster. However, once it’s up the N810 does a great job staying connected. I drove with the little beastie on the passenger seat (the Garmin would have lost signal for sure) and it knew where I was throughout the trip. No tunnels – it would be interesting to see how quickly it re-composed itself once above ground again – but as I said, baby steps. The voice directions were just fine; standard syntho-voice, something I prefer – don’t startle me with a “who the heck is in the car?” moment. All in all, a positive experience – encouraging for the first time out.

Mapper generates a track as you move – I saved the ‘going away’ track and loaded it to my server. Right-click here, choose save link as and it’ll load into Google Earth like a charm. Some pics from the ride:

Local point of interest

*

Navigator/radio operator’s station

*

Got the radio on

I’m like the roadrunner

Alright

I’m in love with modern moonlight

128 when it’s dark outside

*

(I’ll bet a million bucks Steve knows exactly where these antennae are.)

New category

Posted on by

I’m throwing a new category up in the right margin: Etsy. For those who haven’t encountered it, Etsy is a way for craftspeople, artists, makers, etc. to bring stuff to market. The category ties to some thinking I’ve been doing about markets and what’s getting bought and sold in a networked world – long tails, bespoke vs. commodity, content and provenance, gift/barter/cash economies – I’m still sorting through my thoughts and have had a draft post in various stages of disarray for months. Recent conversations with A Certain Design Student (he’s looking at fixy/single-speed bicycle options) have moved this particular pot closer to the front of the stove; perhaps I can wrap up something post-worthy relatively soon. In the meantime, read 1000 True Fans over at Kung Fu Monkey.

Nokia N810

Posted on by

I’ve written before about the *nix vs. iPhone approach to mobile web fun. Circumstances conspired to keep me away from Apple’s little bar of techno-groove; I’ve been keeping my eye on the small internet-capable convergence device space for a year now. There are currently a bunch of choices: iPhone, Asus Eee, and 2 internet tablets (their term) from Nokia – the N800 and N810. Although I still covet an iPhone, I wanted to try an open, more modular platform – I may end up drinking the Apple kool-aid in 6 months or a year – who knows. The three open devices provide a nice spectrum – the N800 on the info consumption side to the Eee on the info production side, with the N810 in the middle. I wanted Bluetooth, so I could tether to my cell and get on the net wherever I got cell signal (not an out-of-the-box option w/ the Eee) and I wanted the device to be pocketable. Survey says? N810 – especially since there was a really good deal available a week ago (someone trying to make February numbers?). Some early impressions:

  • I knew this going in, but it bears repeating – not a PDA. This little box is fully into the ‘the network is the computer’ space. There is a local email app – I haven’t tried it yet.
  • Some nice subtle touches. When you unplug the tablet from the charger (standard Nokia charger and replaceable battery BTW) a message box pops up momentarily, suggesting you unplug the wall wart as well. If you’ve locked the screen, sliding the keyboard out automatically unlocks, and if the keyboard is out for a short time (don’t know what a ‘short time’ is yet), the screen will re-lock when the keyboard is stowed.
  • You can install Doom.
  • As delivered, the N810 doesn’t have much local storage. I’m waiting for 8 Gb mini-SDHC cards to come back into stock at my favorite supplier. In the meantime, I’m experimenting with universal plug-n-pray media streaming from my desktop (using TVersity) to the media player on the n810. Audio seems to work nicely – I can stream files that are FLAC-encoded, and since it’s decoded on the desktop, no fuss or muss at the Nokia end. Video is – no surprise- more problematic. I’ve streamed some video files successfully and failed with others – time to learn about TVersity and how it does its on-the-fly transcoding.
  • The ease of connection has come in handy already. I was in Best Buy yesterday, burning a gift certificate on upgraded ear-buds. Shocking, I know, but the salesperson I snagged could not answer any of my questions about my first choice. Wait – I have the internet available! Less than 5 minutes later – questions answered. While I’m on the subject of customer service – when I added a data plan to my cell phone service, I wanted to get my iBook connected (via cellphone/bluetooth) to the net as a proof of concept. AT&T tech support – worse than useless (no information is better than incorrect information) – a quick google, and I was connected (should have done that first, but the iBook told me to get log on info from the cell carrier).
  • Thanks – again – to Lex10 for the wallpaper I’m using on the N810.

Some shots of the N810 doing various things:


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.