Blockhead and Eggbuster - Small Ubiquitous Gizmos and Content

It all gets small and ubiquitous.

1960 console stereo 1970-1990 Component system big knobs 1990s Smaller Bookshelf speakers and so on. Then an iPod.

 IBM PC, Compaq Luggable, Laptops, Netbooks, iPads

Deconstruction of publishing. It's a LuLu

Writing, editing, publishing, and delivery of physical or electronic product already happen across a network of individuals and organizations. With publishing on demand or with electronic delivery, writers get closer to readers and disintermediation takes out the monolith. Editors won't "go away".

They'll form a needed guild.

Writers, for that matter, could peer review other writers to drive up the quality. Readers can themselves have a sample of writing and with software like Netflix, the electronic "book" can have recommendations ("You might also like...") based upon your tastes and the tastes of other readers.The iPad and Kindle represent "first pancakes" that are tasty, prove the market and will be improved by the market by Apple, Amazon, and others. Even in these early days, Amazon sold the heck out of Kindles and ebooks this season. Wait till somebody goes Gillette on the "readers", or when the thin screens drop to < $100.

Publishing stalled on console stereo.
Remember Egghead Software Stores? On demand publishing quality keeps getting better, and in five years we'll remember the good old days of that enormous iPad or Kindle and have a few thin "electronic sheets" laying around the house. Xerox PARC looked at "pads" back in the late 80s. Mark Weiser, Scientific American, covered this in 1991. Maybe RedBox adds a printer to their kiosks if you want hard copy.

With the Internet, the inventory can be infinite and benefit from the Long Tail effect. A big publisher will veer away from "Morris Dancing: A Life" but there are enough Morris Dancers to support that kind of niche, and the "book" inventory costs next to nothing. Those shoes though...

Excellent ePub observations from Joe Shuren on DRM etc. and various impediments to Next Big Things.

In-Situ Ville, 17 Years Later

Fascinated by the potential of 3D printers.

Although CrunchGear reports the demise of Desktop Factory, I met a friend of makerbot.com an open source 3D printer project at the SIUIS4 conference.

3D printers create a solid form "layer by layer" from plastic (for now.)

These flexible gizmos would appeal to the folks back in the day of Drop City and (more likely) the New Alchemy Institute for generating one-off or pre-production prototypes.

One app that appeals to me is the idea of creating the "Shopsmith TNG" for use in extreme or isolated places (like shipboard). I'm provably not an engineer, but the tech suggests rapid lost wax casting of parts, etc.

My concept of in-situ ville came from 1992 working papers and presentations on the interaction of ubiquitous networks presented in New York in 1993 called "The Information Superhighway". Essentially, the forecasting and behaviors of people using networked communications suggested strongly the ability to support smaller-scale communities and businesses. "The arrival of new corner groceries" captured that idea. Now, much more of the future can be shaped with local manufacture and mass customization, often using open source designs and materials/feedstocks coming through a closed loop consumption-distribution-production cycle.

" Metals recirculate on a sum-total-of-all-metals-average every 22 1/2 years....
I was able to arrive at that figure of a 22 1/2-year metals recirculating cycle in 1936. I was working for Phelps Dodge Co., which had asked me to give them some prognostications about the uses of copper in the future of world industry."

R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

Cited by me in "Say watt again. SAY WATT AGAIN" on the subject of Green Computing

Mama Don't Take My Kodachrome Away

When I first got seriously into photography as a spoiled an only child, my first serious camera was a Canon FT-QL with a 50mm f1.4 lens. It was my eighth grade graduation present. I still have it.


In the meanwhile, Kodak has 86d Kodachrome.

There's a stack of slides circa 1968 with a lot of experimentation using Kodachrome. Long night exposures of backyard flowers using a small aperture and a flashlight, intentional oversaturation, some blurs on purpose.....

I want a drop in 35mm gizmo to allow me the benefit of the old, comfortable optics, but that may be a while. Of course, I might need a caddy to carry the damn thing around.

But, I did find an Adobe plug-in in a quick search at DxO FilmPack that might do the trick with my wee digital camera. All sorts of simulated films (about 50). For Open Source, GIMP offers Silicosaur PhotoFX

Memo: Ephemeralization. All kit is a lathe.

PS: A nice article at Wired on the The Cheap Russian Camera That Could: Lomo Turns 25 also contains some nice tweaks of lens and film effects.