two cool things before breakfast

Didnt make it to transmedialle this year, but with all the tweets, seems like half of Newcastle was there. However, the nice people that Transmedialle are They dont expect us all to be there, but make media available online http://www.transmediale.de/en/keynote-bruce-sterling-us-atemporality is my pick for today. The takeaway, “make the future today”, and with the US out of the Moon race for a bit…. we better hurry. A semi-related thing, again in Berlin, 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. Heard about via twitter and the shapeways blog. Its interesting and 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.

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• Bio-Plastics Could Replace Up to 90% of Plastics, But Not in Short Term (treehugger.com)
• Maker Faire Newcastle is March 13-14, 2010 (makezine.com)

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augmented foraging - cool use of layar -

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)! (0)

a strange wonderful thing

There is a park that I pass though on my way from home to town that attracts experimentation and art making. The most recent is this 1.2m tall skull snow sculpture. As with lots of the things that happen in the park, there is no authorship, although sometimes it is featured in a Art Degree show. Well whoever made this, thanks… it has brightened the gloom, and been a model for rekindling my love of photography. (0)

Peter's diddy leatherman

Jealous of this tiny leatherman the ‘Squirt E4′, has wire strippers, and scewdrivers and even tweexers for smt components. (0)

Easyware Hardware and attribution

During the Nesta/40Fires workshop on Openhardware, I tweeted a quote “Arduino makes Hardware Easywhere”  during Daniel Soltis’s talk about Arduino. Now trying to remember who said it as it gets retweeted to …. a few times Was it @rainycat, Daniel, @oomlout or @ni or someone else? Would the original author please stand up….I would like to attribute it (and thanks to oomlout for his lovely picture). ——- Update Daniel says it was the electrical engineer that had just picked up Arduino, just don’t know his name! (2)

Inter_Multi_Trans_Actions book out 2010
In July 2008, I headed to Napier University for the one day symposium  inter_multi_trans_actions. Think this was the first time I saw HeHe talking about their lazer projected on industrial smoke stack emisions. Moritz Waldemeyer talked about the light works he has made, and pneumatic dresses. More posts from the event under the inter_multi_trans_actions tag.  The procedding are to be published as Digital Blur. (0)

SuperCache WP and 404
http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=11349, is the post that explains why I (and maybe you) were getting error 404s on individual blogposts, the simple solution is to change permalinks back to the standard and then back to the ones you are using. I tried supercache, but didnt get it to work, disabled it and then got into 404 error land. (0)

Robin Price - music for a prepared radio - STEIM microjamboree talk
Taking inspiration from the heat model, Robin is working with a prepared radio that interacts with the radiosphere …. question is what is a good mapping of data to image ?

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Anniversary of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

Wired has an article on the inception of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book that brought knowledge of the damage DDT was doing to the environment.

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• Troubled waters: striped bass moms pass on harmful pollutants to babies (sciam.com)

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Auto-install of Plugins in WP2.7
Idea for fixing the blank wordpress 2.7 admin page after autoinstalling an incompatible plugin. More... (0)

non-existential angst
text reads: Mysterious OBJECT, Crisis?! hell i never even had an identity (0)

EEEpc and the removable media
I have a reoccurring trouble with the removable media,  sometimes it says that I don’t have permission to write to the internal card reader or anything removable. The problem is that the /media/ directory has disappeared, you need to go into the comand line/terminal and recreate the directory sudo mkdir /media/ should work if you are in the top directory. I also had a problem where the shortcut to the internal media was corrupted and was showing an old state. To get rid of this, take out the card, and delete the shortcut, it will get recreated when you put the card back. (0)

Eggpass
Eggpass Lo-fi social networking. Rosanne Marshack and Richard Valentin “On Augmented Reality-Enabled Social Network Traces of Pratitya-samutpada (Interdependence)” were tracing their social network with 12 black eggs. These eggs were simple to make, nice to hold, but at some point the paths stopped. The participants had become too attached, the eggs became objects of affection and didn’t go any further. (0)

ISEA - Aceti mediated virtual visions
abstract Aceti and collaborators are developing a technology that can look at how virtual reality affect emotions. It is his goal to get to an experiential idea of how to affect emotions. He is actually trying to measure the responses, eeg, perspiration, etc, the reaction. This is quite a powerful idea, but one that comes into all artworks, but I don’t think it has actually been done for art at a quantitative way. (0)

Ping
In the PING, an alternate reality of control (Eelco Wagenaar, Arjan Scherpenisse) talk (abstract  here). It was exhibited at mediamatic amongst others. Games are about fun rather than winning. They have made a simple ping game, simple in technology, but not content. The structure is two pingpong ball throwing devices and two players, two screens, and a small bit of software. (1)

12 hours and 8 time zones
Ah, Singapore, where the weather is balmy. Its my first Asian country. My fellow passenger David from www.xm-asia.com described it as Asia on Training wheels. It is certainly that. I was at the Sleepy Sams only an hour after getting off the plane, no queing for passport control, bag already on the luggage carousel,  easy to obtain travel card, and quick. Compared to the hours lost in other countries post the plane, this was great. Now to tell my body that it is not 1.30 in the afternoon. So now off to find some food…probably Malaysian. (0)

syntax highlighting of arduino code in jedit

My eeepc has a small screen which some programs don’t handle well. The arduino programming environment (the same as processing) doesn’t always handle it very well (like having the scroll bar disappear occasionally). However, it is possible to use an external editor. Personally, I like jedit and its code highlighting. Problem is that it dosen’t recognise the extension *.pde as a c-like style. More... (0)