Showing posts with label spimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spimes. Show all posts
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Simon Wardley just started Amphilab to merge books with the digital world.
Very cool.
From now on, it's a step out of the mainstream and back into the brave new world of Spimes.
I couldn't be happier.
Very cool.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
BlinkM out.
I'm tempted.
The problem with this being my "year of hardware" is that this means buying stuff rather than just downloading it free off the internet ... :-(
Thursday I went out and bought a soldering iron and multi-meter (the latter amazingly cheap) 15 Reais (about 4 quid). OTOH, I didn't buy breadboard which seemed (by comparison) pretty expensive to me. Does breadboard really cost 80-120 Reais (equiv. 20 - 30 UK pounds) for a small piece? Maybe it does and I'll need to get some.
At around 13 dollars (24 Reais / 7 quid) each, the blinkM looks pretty good value.
Actually, the price of coloured LEDs and microprocessors is now very, very cheap. We bought a 3-LED table decoration from a guy selling them in a bar the other week, for 8 Reais (2 quid, 4 dollars) The materials are easy to get hold of and cannibalize.
What makes blinkM interesting is that it's "programmable" - although they've had to make use of the Arduino to help with that. That makes everything more exciting. All the cheap LED novelty lights and nick-nacks being pumped out of china are just so much more useless junk. We don't want or need this stuff cluttering up our lives and environments. (The pollution cost is huge.)
But ... they are very, very close to becoming connected to the network. (Note the novelty USB hubs.) Once wired (or wirelessed) these items are no longer brain-dead successors to christmas tree fairy-lights. They are enchanted into information appliances, tendrils of the internet that can be used to convey useful information.
They aren't things that look beautiful and impressive for a minute / hour / week and then get put back in the box and forgotten about. Once, "smart", the life-span of a little ubicomp light or other device can extend indefinitely.
This is what Bruce Sterling is hoping for when he talks about spimes. A spime is an object who's identity and history are more important to us than its physical instantiation. Because we value these, the objects become individuals. We are less likely to dispose of them so easily, and when we do, we have a wealth of knowledge about how to disposee of them well. It's an ecologically optimistic vision of where we're heading.
My cheap table decoration, however beautiful, is likely to be landfill within 6 months (actually in my case, likely to be butchered) once we're bored and the batteries die. And then its on to buying the next shiny geegaw.
A BlinkM-like LED, by contrast, that found a useful niche in my personal information-flow ecology can sit around for years. I'm likely to maintain it (at least by buying it new batteries) and care about it.
I'm tempted.
The problem with this being my "year of hardware" is that this means buying stuff rather than just downloading it free off the internet ... :-(
Thursday I went out and bought a soldering iron and multi-meter (the latter amazingly cheap) 15 Reais (about 4 quid). OTOH, I didn't buy breadboard which seemed (by comparison) pretty expensive to me. Does breadboard really cost 80-120 Reais (equiv. 20 - 30 UK pounds) for a small piece? Maybe it does and I'll need to get some.
At around 13 dollars (24 Reais / 7 quid) each, the blinkM looks pretty good value.
Actually, the price of coloured LEDs and microprocessors is now very, very cheap. We bought a 3-LED table decoration from a guy selling them in a bar the other week, for 8 Reais (2 quid, 4 dollars) The materials are easy to get hold of and cannibalize.
What makes blinkM interesting is that it's "programmable" - although they've had to make use of the Arduino to help with that. That makes everything more exciting. All the cheap LED novelty lights and nick-nacks being pumped out of china are just so much more useless junk. We don't want or need this stuff cluttering up our lives and environments. (The pollution cost is huge.)
But ... they are very, very close to becoming connected to the network. (Note the novelty USB hubs.) Once wired (or wirelessed) these items are no longer brain-dead successors to christmas tree fairy-lights. They are enchanted into information appliances, tendrils of the internet that can be used to convey useful information.
They aren't things that look beautiful and impressive for a minute / hour / week and then get put back in the box and forgotten about. Once, "smart", the life-span of a little ubicomp light or other device can extend indefinitely.
This is what Bruce Sterling is hoping for when he talks about spimes. A spime is an object who's identity and history are more important to us than its physical instantiation. Because we value these, the objects become individuals. We are less likely to dispose of them so easily, and when we do, we have a wealth of knowledge about how to disposee of them well. It's an ecologically optimistic vision of where we're heading.
My cheap table decoration, however beautiful, is likely to be landfill within 6 months (actually in my case, likely to be butchered) once we're bored and the batteries die. And then its on to buying the next shiny geegaw.
A BlinkM-like LED, by contrast, that found a useful niche in my personal information-flow ecology can sit around for years. I'm likely to maintain it (at least by buying it new batteries) and care about it.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Is it just me is there a YASNS surge going on at the moment? Yeah, I got sucked into Facebook and discovered Victoria Real, the Musical
While the Runtimers seem to be more LinkedIn kind of people. And Bebo (I hasten to add I am never going to have a MySpace account or contribute even a (whatever-the-smallest-unit-of-attention-is) to a Rupert Murdoch-owned property) has kindly given me a place to upload all my old musical meanderings. (It's time to stop pretending music comes from "bands" and people anointed by some military-dionysian complex, and recognise that heretoforthwith it's nothing but part of that glorious woven matrix known as "people messing about")
Meanwhile, I am so out of supply-chain management for the next few weeks, and so into trying to get the Wittgenstein Symposium to think seriously about right-wing flying-saucer conspiracies ... but really what I'll be ranting about if I come round your house is spimes and a daemonology where getting anything done (and I mean any-"thing") requires the blessing or patronage of the great lords Google and Yahoo and SkyPal. And where all the world is written in magic books, only by those who understand the arcane APIs of supplication.
I guess that's not so out of supply-chain management at all ... spimes get created as and where needed, except when they are mere imminences, addresses encoded into an Arphid that link to a design on some server. Are you really going to track their flickering trajectories in the cloud-chamber of psycho-history with good old-fashioned ERP? I think not, it's the great search engines and social networks that are going to reach out and embrace them : your shopping is coming by RSS ... if you say your prayers right and have been a good boy or girl.
And where the fuck is GeekWeaver? Not ready ... :-(
While the Runtimers seem to be more LinkedIn kind of people. And Bebo (I hasten to add I am never going to have a MySpace account or contribute even a (whatever-the-smallest-unit-of-attention-is) to a Rupert Murdoch-owned property) has kindly given me a place to upload all my old musical meanderings. (It's time to stop pretending music comes from "bands" and people anointed by some military-dionysian complex, and recognise that heretoforthwith it's nothing but part of that glorious woven matrix known as "people messing about")
Meanwhile, I am so out of supply-chain management for the next few weeks, and so into trying to get the Wittgenstein Symposium to think seriously about right-wing flying-saucer conspiracies ... but really what I'll be ranting about if I come round your house is spimes and a daemonology where getting anything done (and I mean any-"thing") requires the blessing or patronage of the great lords Google and Yahoo and SkyPal. And where all the world is written in magic books, only by those who understand the arcane APIs of supplication.
I guess that's not so out of supply-chain management at all ... spimes get created as and where needed, except when they are mere imminences, addresses encoded into an Arphid that link to a design on some server. Are you really going to track their flickering trajectories in the cloud-chamber of psycho-history with good old-fashioned ERP? I think not, it's the great search engines and social networks that are going to reach out and embrace them : your shopping is coming by RSS ... if you say your prayers right and have been a good boy or girl.
And where the fuck is GeekWeaver? Not ready ... :-(
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