Because it’s Halloween season. And because it’s one of the best costumes (and films) of all time. And because it’s playing tomorrow (Friday) night at the Museum of the Moving Image (in Astoria, Queens). That’s a Japanese poster of the Alien’s perceived anatomy, and the reality of the costume as inhabited by Bolaji Badejo, a 7’2″ Nigerian design student “discovered” in a SoHo pub – who supposedly committed suicide several years after the movie’s release (can only imagine why), and whose name has largely disappeared into obscurity.

Bolaji with HR Giger:

Bolaji taking a break between shoots:

Cmon! Everybody does it. “I wonder what Google Image Search thinks looks like me?” These are my results, below, which notably include Barack Obama, an Avatar-ed Barack Obama, I think that’s Tom Cruise, some politicians, Jon Stewart, a crazy guy in a Master Chief helmet, some religious figures, and various footballers and military officers (the jacket flare can’t quite be compared to!), among others:

And there’s a fast and furious way of doing this with any web-located image (Facebook profiles anybody) of you (or anybody!) online: in Chrome, install the Search by Image extension; then edit the extension’s options to ‘Show [camera] when hovering over an image’ and it will then do exactly that, over ANY image (jpg, png, gif!? yup!). From there it’s cakewalk. And what’s extra crazy is that your search result is databased, so there’s a hypertext URI you can bookmark for your results! (I don’t know How In The Hell that works!)

So one of my personal philosophical dilemmas is sand. Not sand at the beach, but deserts. The thought of continental sand really bothers me, it’s something my mind can’t seem to resolve. It also plagues me, thinking that there are huge, vast tracks of land that we can’t do anything with. However all that sand in the desert might be useful after all, if one Abu Dhabi-based professor has his way, making bricks from bacteria that “cement” sand without heat:

I’m not saying it resolves my notions of continental sand, but maybe there’s a sustainable architecture that can at least put me at ease!

[via dvice]

Lego orerry by V&A Steamworks:

IBM is 100 years young, and unlike some high-value gadget companies they’re actually responsible for a ton of the tech we use or pass by in our daily lives – with a centennial website about their “second century”.

And no, CNN, you’re wrong, Apple in fact did not “invent” the personal computer – that’s just their monthly allowance cheque to you talking.

office killer, turn any JPG into a Commodore-64-esque image at C64yourself:

these two characters will never cease to get old. Wasn’t this like 10 years ago? Cloud vs Sephiroth, with Aeris’s cure ability thrown in for good measure:

regarding this diagram of geek culture, I disagree (or rather dis-associate) mostly with Geek Idols, and relate mostly with Geek Obsessions – what does that say about my personal geekathon?

Made you look!

For real though I’m amazed no one else has pointed this out yet. But take a look at the Ubuntu logo below, and then the logo imprinted on Zuse’s forehead (played by Michael Sheen) in TRON:Legacy, and tell me they’re not very similar. One might be quick to compare the logo to that on Dr. Manhattan’s forehead, but I think that is wrong – his is clearly an electron swirling around a nucleus, whereas this logo is clearly more of a convergence, and related to the tron “disc” and thus any computer disc – for install, backup, or otherwise. Anyways its a good film – and Zuse’s character made me want to watch A Clockwork Orange again (the similarities overtly stolen).

File this one, without a doubt, under “geekathon”.

Two weeks ago I missed out on a general True Nerd trivia session, so when I heard their next round of questions was going to be Lord of the Rings-centric, I knew it would be something… special. I had no idea I’d win some pie! I joined Team Sea Cucumber and immediately avowed my weakness: I’m no Rings-trivia slouch, but I’m definitely no expert, either. I got told it didn’t matter, because one way or another, we were going to Eat Pie! Turns out Team Sea Cucumber has been bested by Team Treebeard for some time now, but after 4 incrementally-difficult rounds including topics like “Evil”, “Movies versus Books” and “Translate This” (not to mention a final “Asshole” bonus question each round), our teams stood gridlocked at 42 points each. A lightning round would decide the winner.

Sometimes a nerd’s esoteric knowledge frightens even me: each team’s captain took to answering 10 questions in 30 seconds – they don’t call it lightning round for nothing! After that, we still stood tied, with each team answering 9 of 10! Unbelievable that after 54 questions, and I mean TOUGH questions, these NerdNYC trivia-goers answered 51 questions correctly!

Super-nerdy post, I know, and if you’re so inclined they’re having a two-day game-a-thon, Recess, on January 15th and 16th in Manhattan. It’s a non-profit gathering of board gamers, wargamers and card gamers – here are photos from the 2009 Recess, and the nerd in me has already put this event into my new year’s calendar!

team Treebeard:

team Sinister Six:

team Sea Cucumber:

the other teams:

Once again big ups to Astrid’s Buznik blog for the remarkable shots. For the third installment of Sci-Fi July, we watched The Brother from Another Planet, which only one other person in the audience had seen before, but it was pretty unanimous at the end that this was a big hit. Especially for its visuals and street scenes of NYC from the early 80s, but also just because it’s a very fun film, with natural dialog and almost hilarious human elements throughout. My introductory text is below.

Welcome to the third installment of Sci-Fi July, a rooftop film series of the science fiction genre.

So far we’ve seen a mid-90s film pretending to take place in the 21st century; we’ve seen an early 70s film that was no doubt about it set during the early 70s! In the 90s we were led to believe that a pair of VR gloves and wrap-around shades were all that was needed to “place a long-distance phone call” and enter the computer; in the 70s our spaceship designs were wholly believeable but everything else that we understood about space was a flop – this is understandable given that film was released 6 years prior to the launching of the Voyager I and II space probes.

But what about the 80s?

Although it was not my original plan to choose a film from each of the past 4 decades, it became a natural logical extension to focus on the 80s after reflecting on the impact of the previous two films in this series. The 80s were something of a high-tide for science fiction, immediately after the rise and popularity of space opera. It’s hard to deny the originality and influence of the 80s – movies which Hollywood is now attempting to remake as it runs out of ideas. Ideas like Predator from 1987 whose franchise was attempted to be revived just a couple weeks back, or Tron from 1982 whose game will be updated at the end of this year.

While by no means comprehensive, other notable 80s sci-fi films include:
Blade Runner
Aliens
the Ghostbusters films
Highlander
The Running Man
Brazil
The Abyss
Howard the Duck
Mad Max II
Weird Science
Dune
Gojira
Terminator
Back to the Future parts I and II
RoboCop
E.T.
Maximum Overdrive
and 4 of the original Star Trek films and 3 of the original Superman films

Other cult, anime or fantasy crossover films included:
The Dark Crystal, Repo Man, Cherry 2000, Akira, Flash Gordon, Flight of the Navigator, Tetsuo, Transformers the Movie and Spaceballs – whose tongue-in-cheek style summed up the parody-genre that was also pervasive during the 80s.

The 80s were marked by other extremes, milestones and conditions that the world hadn’t experienced before or since. Without going into details:

Reagan was elected; the first Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off; the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates 73 seconds after launch, killing 7 crew; Margaret Thatcher, the first female elected leader of a western country, ruled for the whole decade, and a year before and after; the IBM PC was released and the Commodore 64 became one of history’s best-selling computers; Solidarnosc is founded in Poland; the Berlin Wall fell, or was sledged apart rather; MTV launches; Michael Jackson introduced the Moonwalk; the Simpsons debut; the Nintendo Entertainment System launches in 1983 in Japan and then in 1985 in the US; John Lennon was assassinated; Chernobyl melted; the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the accompanying television images and magazine photos brought to popular attention our attachment to the sludge; military dictatorships fell throughout much of South America while they were consolidated in regions of southeast Asia like Burma which became Myanmar under the State Law and Order Restoration Council; and of course the recognition of a new disease, and the ensuing AIDS pandemic.

In short, the 80s were definitely an era that you either experienced or you didn’t, and I’m personally thankful for my time and place in it.

Now of course it’s hard to screen a film on a rooftop in New York City without thinking about New York City. The water towers in the distance, the subways – aboveground – rolling along nearby 31st Street, the honks horns and hollers of this city’s inhabitants. Now these words might immediately evoke images of Escape From New York – whose many scenes were shot throughout East St. Louis and St. Louis where I grew up. But I’m not interested in perceptions of future New York environments, I’m intrigued by real-world street scenes.

And while science fiction is often not employed as a genre to critique or understand the social milieu, what better way to understand the above-mentioned extremes, conditions, perceptions, realities, problems, dilemmas, and blessings of the 80s than via a mute alien who has escaped his captors, crashes in NY harbor, and eventually gets dumped in Harlem where he befriends the patrons of a local bar, thanks to his ability to fix electronics by simply touching them!

Joe Morton plays “The Brother”, who remarkably manages and makes believeable his ability to go for 108 minutes without saying a single word! It is those around him who speak for him, or rather about him and get us to first pity, then embrace the alien inside. A movie whose characters go largely un-named, some are simply social archetypes: Hispanic Man, Islamic Man, Haitian man, Korean shopkeeper, etc.

Interesting moments include two “Men in Black” who perceive NO stereotypes when entering an African-American bar in Harlem, perhaps because as aliens they don’t comprehend such base racisms; an eyeball used as a recording device; some extreme frame-rate arcade game-playing; those steam-pipes in the streets of New York City haven’t changed in over 25 years; encounters with graffiti; intravenous drugs and the Wall Street brokers that sell them; and a remarkable subway card game!

as the tagline of the movie goes:

Welcome to a world of crude beauty… of danger and excitement… of wonders, legend, and imagination… Welcome to Harlem

The Next HOPE is over, but as the closing article in the Android app said now we all go back to wherever we go to do whatever it is we do, but hopefully walk away with the spirit of the gathering. See you next year – I hope. The convention was incredibly impressive, and there are certain attributes to hacker culture that simply can’t be found elsewhere. Notably the approachability, you can just walk up to anyone and start talking about their project, and they’re normally incredibly inclined to talk – usually holed up in their offices, workspaces, in front of their terminals for days on end, then suddenly – finally – human contact. And a culture of trust and openness is pervasive – money was just left on tables for donations or purchase of hardware, laptop rigs were abandoned for hours on end while people went to a talk, and nothing gets stolen, nothing gets pinched. The culture trusts itself.

Highlights included Mitch Altman discussing “do what you love”; Alpha One Labs‘s sunrise party – dubbed “The Party”; the Hackerspaces Forever panel discussion; extensive discussions around IPv6; geotagging and GPS; and of course lockpicking!

a Food For Geeks workshop, this part of the workshop focused on sous vide cooking and using industrial equipment to regulate food temperatures:

the Hackerspace Village where you could set up shop, hack away, solder and do other experiments, and discuss with other hackers your projects:

the Maker Faire team had a booth; that’s Becky attempting to pick a lock and Matt coding up some mad python script:

full set of images on my Flickr

So the opening film for Sci-Fi July was important to me because it was in my formative teen-adult years, and it was at a time when net lingo was just beginning to gain awareness and usage in popular culture, or so my naive teen-adult memory recalls. But for the second installment of Sci-Fi July, I decided to turn back the dial, to 1971, to a time before time-as-I-knew-it, and screen a film with a much slower pace, virtually no plot, that was pre-Star Wars and thus before space opera – my hope was it was a movie wholly unfamiliar to the crowd (whereas Johnny Mnemonic was “known” from most peoples’ youth, but simply never seen because it was so bad). I was right, and I introduced the film with the following text (btw the screening took place inside the Flux gallery due to a consistent threat of rain – which did happen for about 5-8 minutes during the film, so I thank everyone for putting up with the humidity of the space – thus the fans!):

Welcome to the second installment of Sci-Fi July, an informal rooftop film series of the science fiction genre.

The movie you’re going to watch tonight has consistently returned a mixed bag of emotions and responses for nearly 30 years. Regarded by some as seminal influence, and by others as a complete flop, I would argue for the staying power of tonight’s film, Silent Running, and its pivot point in film history. It’s influences and its influence are far and wide.

It’s no 2001 A Space Odyssey, but it is directed and produced by Douglas Trumbull, whom some would recognize as a special effects supervisor on that 1968 blockbuster, and who would go on to supervise special effects for one of the truly greatest sci-fi films of all time, Blade Runner. However it would seem Trumbull’s trade was best put to use in the special effects department, and less in the director’s chair – nice try though.

Made on a budget nearly 1/10th of Kubrick’s space masterpiece, Trumbull did employ some genius techniques to achieve his desired shots, notably filming aboard a decommissioned NAVY aircraft carrier, the USS Valley Forge, which also happens to be the name of this film’s space freighter turned botany ark.

You heard me right, I said “botany ark”. The earth has been completely defolliated and the last remaining forests and plant life float in space inside geodesic domes while humans apparently debate over whether plant life is necessary or not for the continuation of the species. Domes whose design was influenced in part by the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Climatron, a Bucky Fuller-style facility in St. Louis housed not but a mile from where I grew up.

Oh and there’s robots! Or “drones” rather. Drones that wobble and never fall down, somehow. That’s because housed inside them were multiple amputee actors, again another genius Trumbull technique. Domes and drones which can easily be seen as influence on other sci-fi titles like 2007′s Sunshine or even Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

However the science falls short: are you seriously telling me you didn’t know light was needed to grow plants? and why are geodesic domes in orbit around Saturn anyhow – what’s wrong with an orbit around Earth? And not about science, but why is it called Silent Running anyhow? If someone from the audience figures this one out, please, enlighten us.

But do look out for some incredible sets, including vector waveform monitors, American Airlines freight containers, and a truly remarkable scene with a sort of microscopic integrated circuit soldering machine – wow!

and once again some great crowd shots by Astrid Bussink’s digital diarrhea photostream

the opening of Sci-Fi July, a weekly month-long rooftop film series for friends and friends of friends, was a resounding success! Around 23 people showed up for an unknown screening of Johnny Mnemonic.

I introduced the series, or the film more-specifically rather, with the following text:

The movie you’re about to watch is based on a short story by William Gibson, regarded by some as the father of cyberpunk, who coined the word “cyberspace”, and sought a “combination of lowlife and high tech” in his often dystopian novels.

This 1995 screenplay of Gibson’s 1981 short story stars Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic, post-Bill and Ted and pre-The Matrix, whose realization of his role lies somewhere between the “duuuude” and the “whoah” of those respective films.

Set in the year 2021, Johnny is a digital data courier who stores clients’ information in a cybernetic implant in his head. It holds a whopping 80 gigabytes – which is a laugh today given our phones hold nearly this much data, and we’ve easily achieved the multi-terabyte compression level.

Johnny’s “pride in profession” rests in the security of his data-envelope, which is protected by seemingly randomly generated images, yet also reminds one today of fffffound images, delicious gif streams, and image macros: I want room service!

I won’t sugar-coat it, this is an especially bad film! A special movie to a lot of cult sci-fi fans, yet IMDB rate it at 4.9 and I think that’s being generous. Keanu’s acting is horrendous. The editing is choppy. And at 1 hour 40 minutes it can appear to go on forever. But there are some special full-minute VR scenes, some incredibly geeky one-liners, oh and performances by Udo Kier, Takeshi Kitano, and none-other than rapper Ice-T as a tattooed & dreadlocked hacker, Black Flag’s front man Henry Rollins as a saviour doctor, and Dolph Lundgren as a street preaching Jesus freak-cybernaut.

Welcome to Sci-Fi July.

the remarkable crowd shot above was taken by current Flux Factory resident from the Low Countries, Astrid Bussink.

Sci-Fi July is an informal rooftop film series curated by moi, and will happen every Tuesday in July – you will not be told what movie will be screened, but they will all be of the sci-fi genre and they will all reward you in one way or another!

Or the dome the size of a small country that could be built with the Sahara!

Or best yet a pair of those BOOTS she’s wearing:

The video is all in Italian but, you get it. This printer uses a process or is called d-shape – either way the website has plenty of English content.

Wednesday January 6 was the first Dorkbot of the second decade of the 21st millennium – it is otherwise abbreviated as the “1g6s-th” Dorkbot. Hosted at the marvelous Location One non-profit space in SoHo.

The man as he is, and the man as he should have been. Douglas Repetto is the founder of Dorkbot and wanted to show me this recent photo of him sporting a ‘stache (mid-shower) not too different than the fur on my face right now.

Now for the dorks:

The first presentation was by NYCCNC.com, a milling workshop housed in an Upper East Side apartment! Quite impressive, and the presenter John Saunders had a working sample of this target-practice machine that was fabricated entirely by his milling machine.

Next up Natalie Campbell gave a presentation about SP Weather Station, which is a collaborative project between her and Heidi Neilson; the weather station sits on the rooftop of Flux Factory where I currently maintain long-term Residency. While the weather station’s main medium is digitally-collected data, they then turn that data over to artists who interpret the data visually through printing, book arts, photographs and silkscreens, among other artistic processes.

And the final presentation: co-presented by Victor Adán and Douglas Repetto, they demonstrated an antiquated pen plotter printer and how they’ve managed to continue using these mostly serial-driven devices with modern computers using drivers they compiled at chiplotle.org – now that’s a spicy plotter library! (the ebay screen above was because Douglas was showing his ebay search string to narrow results to find specific pen plotters at bargain basement prices!) The results of their pen plotter printing can be seen on the image at the top. Pretty exciting!

go here, get this, go there, do that, beat that boss, proceed to next room, cross bridge, keep going, don’t turn, just straight. booooooooooooring!

found via some random blog pointing to a random blogspot blog with a random link to a random image… geekmap!

Soooooo ridiculous. Ridiculous operating system. Ridiculous promotion. Ridiculous diet. RIDICULOUS!

via CNN blogs

The LEDs4N00Bs workshop was a real success, and thanks everyone who attended, built toy-boxes, and to Julius for giving a really wonderful first workshop at our new space in Long Island City.

I introduced the workshop and then Julius gave a 30-odd minute presentation about his art, and a little history and science of LEDs. We followed with the art/toy making session, which lasted for around 1.5 hours!

We weren’t able to acquire some .5W solar panels like in the image above, so we were relegated to 9V batteries which can be easily replaced, and combined with a switch are able to extend the longevity of both the battery and the LEDs. Our kits required: 9V battery, a pre-fabricated clip to draw power from the battery, a switch, LED and a resistor. From this people made some pretty interesting toys!

Visitors to Flux Factory were greeted by an evil flamingo! A working example of some found objects, scrap wood and simple LED hacking.

The lecture and presentation, Julius talking about his art.

A small sample of a complete circuit powered by a AA battery.

Then the hacking begins! Bit boxes, batteries, LEDs, soldering station!

Blue ‘bots! I like the switch hack: a hole drilled into the case so no need to open/close the lid.

Another hack in the works, a modded Obama chia-pet!

If only turning on democracy was this easy!

The circuit: you can see the negative wire (red) goes to the right eye, and the wire from the switch continues to the left eye and sequences like an eyeglass bridge.

And one of my favorite aspects of any workshop or classroom environment, the mess! The aftermath is always chaotic, but evidences the activity of life:

more work by Julius can be found at his website: http://www.urgu.de/

Anyhow, now that that’s over with, here are some other visual web-laughs that have been stirring about:

Conspiracy of the school and paper conglomerates! LOL!:

Leave it up to Fenway:

the FIRST jpeg published on the internet:

click for larger version, this chart is AWESOME:

I love the “learn to speak European”:

(click image for full-size, or right-click to open in new tab)

Kissy kissy. This map, care of uncannyxmen.net, graphically shows the relationships that have taken place in the X-Men Marvel universe. Man there are some names here I haven’t heard in some time, and plenty of names I don’t know at all. Storm has had her fair share of slutty encounters; Nightcrawler ain’t doing too bad either for being the blue-skinned freak he is (probably is a foot fetishist too); what’s this between “Cody” and Rogue? or Rogue and Magneto for that matter?!; Colossus got his steel-dong in the mix; but it’s clear who’s the mack daddy of them all: Wolverine, You a Pimp!

daaaaaaamn! Hustler!

for all their lack of emotion those Vulcans sure are a pervy bunch!

re: red matter

the “instruments” include:

* Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound
* Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar
* 8 Inch Floppy Disk as Bass
* 3.5 inch Harddrive as the gong
* HP ScanJet 3C was used for all vocals.

Hopefully I can keep up the momentum but the coming weeks will be tough as I settle back in to life in the five boroughs. For now, I’m going to come out all guns-a-blazin’

SAMUS I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!

from yukicosplay – wow! hot geek chicks and make-up!

more NES geekathon:

yarn art:

I don’t think I’ve gone a week in my life without some tetris reference or thought buzzing through my brain:

Actually I amazed myself that HAL didn’t make it into the first round somehow. Equally amazed I am that neither the Predator nor any Aliens made it into the first installment…

…

…

…

…

…

BAM!

gorgeous illustration. reminds me I need to read that newest Gregory Maguire novel.

right. Right. Oh I know. RIGHT? Like WTF?!??!

Superman, X-Men and Spiderman all have near-similar rise-and-fall patterns, with the latter two being especially upsetting because you figure by the time they produced those movies they would have figured out how to do them right; Jurassic Park and Blade 2 I think could all be marked a little higher given where other movies are ranked; just to clarify the Star Wars films, here numbered 1, 2 and 3 are Episodes 4, 5 and six respectively (Episodes 1, 2 and 3 do not even deserve mention); Lord of the Rings films, all level: true; second Alien film, Aliens, is by far one of the best movies of all time, in my opinion ranked above the other full-bar films (Jaws, Terminator 2, Godfather 2, Indiana Jones, Empire Strikes Back); the second and especially the third Matrix film/s by far being the biggest disappointments from this compilation.

(by artist Orioto at Deviant Art)

and now for some geek tattoos!

I <3 also. via Flickr user: skampy

via Flickr user: shizhao

via Flickr user: f_mafra

open Love. close Hate. (don’t know where from)

thanks for stopping by! I’d like to go out by saying

Anyhow the Boston Globe recently published online some photos of NASA’s Constellation program which essentially will replace the Space Shuttle program with rocket-launched flights. While the pictures above aren’t your typical space-pr0n, part of my fascination (with the world in general!) is seeing what goes on behind the scenes, in the labs, out on the test-fields. These images excite me because they show the transition of a space – from one containing hardware, dismantled, to the installation of the Launch Control Center. The amount of labor that goes on inside NASA must be intense; this is merely the transition of one facility, now imagine the work needed to handle, transport, fabricate and study everything from rocket propulsion to robots operating off-world, etc etc. It’s a shame the comments at the Boston Globe are riddled with cries about taxpayers’ dollars. Even in this economic downturn I wouldn’t opt for a cut in spending towards programs like NASA, which accounts for only just over half of one percent of all federal funding (see Wikipedia article). Clearly NASA is not the problem; and what they offer us in return cannot be measured by any financial ruler.

Now here’s some real pr0n for you:

Heat shield baby! Because while it’s cold in space re-entry is HOT HOT HOT!

it’s 3am and I need my OpenOffice fix! I’m such a FIIIIEEEND!!!!!!

with the passing and signing of the recent Stimulus Bill, Recovery.Gov is online – alongside the recently relaunched whitehouse.gov site – with the intention of making the question about where the money is going as transparent as possible. How to manage all of this information, tracking, spending… data? Use an open-source content manager:

spotted in the source code near the closing body tag: Drupal.

You might not agree with the bill, or with how the money is spent, but for the first time ever you can’t say you didn’t have access to information about where the money is allocated, what it is actually spent on, and most-importantly your actual ability to access the access of information.

soooooooo desperate!

love the nintendo controller tee!

less geek and more yes, I recognize that scene!

NOM NOM NOM!

I <3 Futurama

Filed under GEEKATHON!

The ‘Bee’ is a computer that was presented at October’s Dorkbot hosted at Location One, a NYC area non-profit.

The Bee’s homepage of sorts describes the machine as thus:

The ‘Bee’ is a mobile communication system developed by the Innovations Unit in UNICEF’s Division of Communication. The Bee will allow communication, connectivity and data access in field conditions where such technologies are often difficult or impossible to use.

Essentially a computer built into a weather-proofed case that can be taken to areas around the world otherwise lacking information access points or which have recently been devestated by natural or man-made disasters. Further into layman’s terms, basically a bunch of dorks being really innovative and inspiring, building computers for purposes and conditions often overlooked or not understood by most Western countries. An example given was compiling a localized version of the English-language Wikipedia – sans images – for deployment into regions of Africa that lack books and other educational tools. I forget the voltage and power consumption of the unit, but I think it was said it could run off of 4 AA batteries (6 volts) for approximately 2 hours. So a kiosk with the computer installed, and an accompanying solar panel could theoretically power the unit indefinitely.

The “ecosystem” refers to not only the operating system – running Ubuntu Linux – but also the physical construction of the unit, which was designed to be able to be constructed from off-the-shelf hardware elements, so that no matter where the “Bee” was located in the world, one should be able to replace or upgrade a physical component without the need to order from a specific proprietary hardware source

The Unicef dorks in action. The Bee is currently powered up, running off of its internal battery, and the Ubuntu desktop (Hardy Heron) can be recognized.

The keyboard layout and mouse interface. (no F-keys, something they were going to hope to upgrade with future prototypes)

someone pretend-typing, to demonstrate a sense of scale.

The Unicef dork about to fold the Bee into a piece of luggage.

All that remains is the lid.

Keep a lookout for this thing making headlines in the coming months, as while it is definitely not a direct competitor to the OLPC XO-1 laptop and its mission, it is capable of overtaking it in other capacities.

give it a couple days time to take effect. it works, trust me.

It’s unfortunate I don’t not know English, else this looks like it would be a lot of fun to play. However I do still have and treasure my copy of Typing of the Dead (bought at a GAME store in London for $1!), which like other users I rate easily above an 8.0. This game was especially instrumental in getting me to memorize my keyboard’s special character layout, type “%@!!#” or get cut in the face by some sickle thrown at you by a flying lizard, or full sentences “No finance charges will be incurred” or get chainsawed to pieces, those kinds of moments.

And I love Japanese sensibilities towards commercials, they’re fast-layered environments with lots of color, sound effects, speech, and text, and they rarely manage to “sell” you, but you find yourself hooked, even for 3:45 minutes! You’ll see:

However I admit I haven’t tried Typing of the Dead on my DVORAK layout TypeMatrix 2030. Perhaps some zombie hunting is in order!

perhaps top on my list at the moment of things to deal with is I need a new phone plan. The Verizon account I’ve had for 3 1/2 years now expires in 8 days. I’m sick of Verizon. I’m sick of their $40/month-is-the-cheapest-we-offer plan that doesn’t even come with a basic text service – you pay extra for that or a premium (10c/text) just to type 30 characters! I’m sick of their automated billing that sometimes works, most times doesn’t – then I get stuck with a $15 reactivation fee, which they normally wipe once I talk to them on the phone and they investigate, but which then takes time away from my other more-pressing concerns. I’m sick of a company that in the month before my account expires calls my house landline three times a day instead of my mobile phone which still works, to press me to renew my service.

I need a new plan. I’ve been watching my own mobile phone usage for several months now. At least 12 out of the 24 hours in a day I’m at work or home, and both places have WiFi networks. The idea is to pay out for a WiFi enabled phone and to cut down on monthly cellular charges. I sleep for 6 hours and eat for say 2, so that already brings us up to 20 of 24 hours a day where I either have service or don’t want to be bothered with it (i.e. digesting and REM sleep). the other 4 hours I could care less about, I’m definitely not of the persuasion that I must always be contact-able by the rest of the world. And in that case the phone would still operate like a phone!

I’ve been eyeing the openmoko project for some time now, and hoping their development would move a little faster than it has. Unfortunately the phone is really only encouraged for developers at the moment, not end-users; but when it hits I think it’ll make a big splash:

Perhaps the openmoko will one day run on Verizon, but frankly I think it’s too late to consider.

wordpress and xampp lite

I’ve been doing a fare bit of WordPress developing lately, testing new plugins, keeping them in mind, and generally toying with the software. Remotely you still have to upload (FTP), wait, talk over congested networks, etc. Installing locally however, now there’s an idea! Run everything: php, MySQL and WordPress locally using these instructions from [geeks are sexy]. Then you can test everything before launch.

sooooooo simple!

dancing ascii kitten

50 greatest fictional weapons

Old news I’m just now finding out about (don’t think there would be anything recent to re-write this top list), Wizard Entertainment Group late last year compiled a list of the 50 greatest fictional weapons. Weapons for good or evil (or both, as in lightsabers, it’s all in who you wield them at!) that have opened up my imagination for whatever reasons.

Perhaps the oldest one from my memory would be the spread gun from the NES side-and-front-scroller game Contra – and just to prove my geekdom, I’d like to point out how disappointed I am in the image Wizard chose, which shows player 1 at the end of the first level, with spread gun, and only one reserve life left! Shameful! With your first life you should nearly be able to complete the entire game! I distinctly remember achieving this at least a dozen times.

a potential tie for oldest memory fictional weapon is the Star Trek phaser, albeit for me the version from The Next Generation (with my blankets huddled over the television monitor so as to stop the light spilling through my door’s lites and into the hallway, I watched TNG from 11p-1a nearly every night, you never knew that one did ya mom!).

but definitely my personal favorite from the list is Cloud’s Sword Buster from Final Fantasy VII, more specifically the version from FF VII Advent Children when you wonder how the EFF is Cloud going to take on Sephiroth, who is obviously possessed and seemingly unstoppable, and suddenly Cloud’s sword becomes not two or even three but SIX swords:

SCHWEEET!

tea standards

and in closing perhaps something more geek-homely, ISO 3103 refers to a standard method for the brewing of tea as set forth by the International Organization for Standardization. I’ve always appreciated talking with people about their teas and the ways they brew them, their preparations, tea-as-ritual, (also the art of Bobby Baker) so I was delighted to find a standards for this (less a concern with the actual ‘rule’ as in the mere novelty of such a rule!).

I’ve never been a Macintosh user and I think it will be a long time before I ever am. I can appreciate what Apple have done in bringing advanced computing and a luscious user experience to such a large market, especially in recent years (I would go so far as to say the last decade). They’ve simplified the knowledge needed to use the computer as a tool, so that people can focus further on the content of their work. They can do this simply because they control the software as well as the hardware tied to their products. But one reason I’ve always been put-off from being a Mac user is the hardware: lack of diversity, of choices, and the absence of an ability to mod together a system that’s tailor-suited to your needs. Also money, but this stems from the lack of hardware choices, not the other way around. As Apple control the hardware used in their systems, they can charger a higher price for the product, a product which I ultimately absolutely cannot afford. I will elaborate:

I have had my current desktop machine since August 2004. I built it myself, as I have built every PC I’ve used for the last decade or so. It’s an Athlon XP 2800+ 2.0Ghz with 1Gig of DDR SDRAM. Those are the crucial stats. At the time this was a beefy machine. Everything else is pretty straightforward: a DVD ReWriter, firewire card, GeForce3 AGP video card with 256Mb of RAM, and lots internal hard drive storage. After 3 years that 1Gig of RAM is starting to be overwhelmed, and the processor just can’t handle the amount of programs I want to throw at it. An upgrade is in order.

I shop almost exclusively at newegg.com, with occasional purchases from tigerdirect. But newegg have great customer reviews, which I’ve always trusted and even contributed to myself. I spent about two hours researching components and reviews and have decided to upgrade the vital organs of my desktop machine: the motherboard, CPU, graphics card, power supply and RAM.

My laptop uses an Intel processor, but I’ve been more-pleased with AMD for my desktop solutions, so I settled on a Athlon 64 X2 5200+ running at 2.66Ghz frequency. This chip is dual-core, so it’s nearly tripling my computing power. The graphics card will be capable of running DirectX 10 should I ever upgrade that, and has 512Mb of Nvidia’s 8500GT chip to handle any games I might throw at it. Power supplies are more-crucial than people think, so to power these chips and the board I’m getting a full-650W PSU that can go up to a max load of over 700W. This should be more than enough energy to last me another 3 years!

All of these components are costing me just over $600, and that’s only because of shipping! After some rebates, the actual cost of the upgrade will float around $604! The comparable machine at the Apple store has two 2.66Ghz Intel Xeons and only supply the Nvidia 7300GT video card with 256Mb of graphics. Granted the processor is arguably better, but the graphics are cheaper and the rest of the hardware – firewire, DVD, wireless, etc. – is pretty standard. And that comparable Macintosh desktop? $2499!

Oh! MEMORY! I forgot about memory! (Or I planned to forget to defend my argument!)

My upgraded machine will include a whopping 8Gigs of DDR2 800 memory. 8 GIGS! 8 Gigs for an Apple Mac? Add $2099 bringing your total costs to $4598!

Fact is that all computing slows down over time, and all hardware becomes obsolete compared to the standards of the future. But if every three years I can save nearly $4000 then I don’t think Apple will make a convert out of me anytime soon. Especially not in a city like NYC where so much of my income already goes to rent and transport just so I can have the luxury of living here in the first place! I have the knowledge and the means to make this work, cheaply, and thus far my experience has been extremely rewarding. So be it!

Makes ya think, doesn’tit?

[found on the nets]

YouTube video coming soon, hopefully.

additional: this and this photo upload officially put me over the 1,000 mark on my Flickr account uploads. woot! hey, speaking of woot!, it was founded by some dudes I know.

In February 2007 the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) “B2-Test (Beta 2)machines deployed to children in launch countries”, and less than two full months later it makes an appearance at the dorkbot-nyc event (held every month at the not-for-profit arts space Location One)

Perhaps this user is a beta tester of sorts, playing a dorkbot theme song over and over and over in order to find and squash some bugs for CSound; or perhaps they’re just a DORK with ‘m4d c0nN3x’ to Nicholas Negroponte.

Either way I think this is a sign you can expect to see more of these creeping up wherever dorks gather near you. Can anyone say ‘m3s]-[ n3+//0r|<1nG!!1k!!!jk!‘?

Well, can ya?

Related websites:
full-size photo of above image on Flickr
another photo like above but with flash (better focus but no glow from laptop)
Engadget video ‘hands on with OLPC’

i bought a new mp3 player today. it should arrive mid-next week. i’m really excited with this thing. I’m in the ‘anythingbutipod‘ pool of consumers, so I settled for a Clix from iRiver.

I spend around 6-8 hours a week travelling on subways, and while most people who travel listening to mp3 players are simply listening to pop music or music in general, I’m much-more looking forward to listening to those BBC radio broadcasts, podcasts and lectures from the Walker Art Center and other podcasts from artists, art institutions, etc. and other archived audio programs that I don’t otherwise have the opportunity to listen to when I’m busy in my own studio and need to focus. I have to travel, so I figure its time to multitask my commute and my cultural excitement (of course, I am also of the belief that it’s not a good thing to be plugged in all the time, especially when walking on the streets – you can’t hear anything around you! you’re vulnerable and unaware! but when sitting on a subway seat for 40 minutes, I’ll make an exception).

Additionally, this player which only measures 2.7â€? x 1.8â€? x .6â€?, can also view basic .txt files, has a built-in FM tuner, can view standard image formats such as JPEGs, has a mic for voice-recording, and also plays movies at 320×240, and can run for 25 hours on a full charge. So we’ll see if it is simply another device to consume time, or if I can find a way to put its hardware to applicable use and create some work from its functions and capabilities.