transitlab

07 Jul, 2009

Eclectica or What is Transitlab?

Posted by: Brian In: meta

: Image by sctv via Flickr

A friend of mine recently told me that Transitlab.org was quite random in its choice of subjects, and I agree that it is random in an eclectic way, but understandable if you think of it as this.

Transitlab can be expanded to the trans word: transitional. But if we think of a transitional space as one that is passed through bidirectionally, then it becomes a space in which exchanges are possible between genres, schools of thought, ways of life. Now, of course this site is not that wide, it bounces between the ideas of “research as art practice” “research as science” “technology as driver and follower of research” “serendipitous discoveries” “losing small but frequently(iterative learning through small failure)” and “winning big but rarely”(and yes I have just read the Black Swan).

Tags: Education, Geek, Social media

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Brian: Corrected, Cheers B
a: it's spelled NORTD.. and AWESOME photo.. !
Julián da Silva: Hi! I released today Minibloq Beta. It's free and you can download it from: http://minibloq.org The sources will be published once some key feat

About

Brian Degger is a technologist/artist, he writes, thinks and makes around themes of interactivity, biomimicracy, and collaboration

Asides

PDF import and editing in openoffice
One function I have found useful in openoffice is the ability to import pdfs. This is possible by downloading and installing the pdfimport plugin. This means that you can import a pdf, edit it then output it at a lower resolution for screen. (2)

miniFM

In the foreground is a Tetsuo Kogawa version (built during RadioCraftLab, during AVFest08) and in the back the remix by sonodrome (built last week at Sonodrome Central). Both assembled by me.

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Bioplastic
Jay Cousins and friends had a hackday around bioplastics and laser cutting. Making the bioplastic from starch and glycerin (see this link for more details) and then laser cutting them. Cool stuff, they were even making different color ones. This is important as people move from using commercially sourced plastic in their makerbots to something else. Plastic is expensive to buy for these machines, but it is all around. SO be it bio-plastic or post waste plastic, ways of reusing these provide a compelling reason to throw away less waste. It is amazing that these materials are coming out of the factories, to be used in domestic situations. Together with polymorph and sugru, there are a variety of materials to play around for wearables, for prototypes and one offs. Bring on the future, with peer production.

Maker Faire Newcastle is March 13-14, 2010 (makezine.com)
Bioplastics – the quest for Open Source material production (jaycousins.wordpress.com)

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augmented foraging - cool use of layar -

augmented foraging Originally uploaded by _foam A mobile phone guide to edible urban wild-food sources.

Amsterdam urban_ edibles is developing Augmented_Foraging, a mobile phone guide to wild-food sources using Layar. Much better use of this program than finding property in Amsterdam (unless you live there of course)!

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Eclectica or What is Transitlab?