Bre Pettis posted an amazing photoset of old Austrian illustrations of how one might die by electrocution that he discovered last week while we were checking out the Technisches museum in Vienna.
Also in the energy section of the museum was an interactive model of how to move radioactive objects around. Here’s Bre giving it a whirl.
Bre knows how to handle unstable materials from ekai on Vimeo.
So I was just turned onto Soup a week ago and in a weird twist of San Francisco-Vienna convergence, Soup is now where Pownce users are going to not die. Soup is like Tumblr but with an easier interface, also it seems to plug into just about every social network or web service out there. Try it, friend me. It’s good for your soul.
I’ve got a guest post up on Laughing Squid on what I’ve seen at Roboexotica this past week. Includes links to tons of photos and some video. Pop over and have a read.
RoboVox stands proudly in front of the Museumsquartier, greeting visitors to Roboexotica. RoboVox is no ordinary 25 foot retro deco happy robot. If you look closely, you’ll notice those two big black circles on his chest are speakers. If you send an SMS text message to +43 681 10679782, RoboVox will speak your message loudly in his best robo-synthesized voice. RoboVox was conceived by prolific Slovenian artist and all around good guy Martin Bricelj, who is also an artist-in-residence here.
I was minding my own business on Twitter when I noticed a random spam @ reply from an unknown user.
Encouraged by this user’s random drive-by direct spamming behavior, I decided to determine whether the user was a robot or human spammer. Inspired by a similar thing that recently happened to Bre Pettis over IM, I administered the Voight-Kampff Test to find out. Here’s the exchange:
It’s the day before the big opening of the main event here in Vienna, Austria, the 10th annual Roboexotica Festival for Cocktail-Robotics. Lots of preparation action going on in the Freiraum with several of Johannes’ students collaborating on a few delightfully rude drink dispensing bots. I’m happily joined here by many bot friendly pals from the States including Bre Pettis, CTP, Kal Spelletich, Al Honig and Mitch Heinrich to name just a few, all on track with their creations. Here’s some pix to whet your appetite of the madness to come.
A few weeks ago, this solar powered, GPS-enabled, picture taking purple cruiser bike showed up at my door. It’s one of 20 bikes that Yahoo! commissioned as an experiment by the fine folks at Uncommon Projects and are being sprinkled around the world. There are three here in San Francisco and I have one of them. Some others are in New York, Vermont, Sydney Australia, Copenhagen Denmark and Singapore. You can see the whole list on Yahoo’s Start Wearing Purple site.
The bike is an 8-speed Electra Townie equipped with a Nokia N95 cellphone that takes a photo every minute while the bike is moving. It geotags the photo and uploads to a dedicated Flickr account immediately over the cell network. The solar panels on the back sit on top of a control panel connected to a long life battery that charges while out and about in the sun. I could ride the bike across the country nonstop, though I admit I haven’t tried that yet. If for some reason the bike runs out of juice, there’s an AC plug in the control panel that will charge the whole thing up overnight.
It comes with the nicely designed cat friendly owner’s manual.
If you dig into Start Wearing Purple, you can follow my bike on these sweet maps that plot the photos posted to Flickr. Unfortunately, the site is all in Flash and I can’t link directly to maps section. You can also see maps directly through the bike’s Flickr account.
Here’s a set of photos and slideshow my bike took while riding on Chris Carlsson’s SF Bicycle History Tour which I highly recommend!
So the verdict? It’s fun to ride, is a great conversation piece and proves that you can voluntarily surveil yourself very easily. The plus side of that is if the bike is stolen I can easily track it down. So far, I haven’t had to do that. The battery does last a long time (several days) so charging is an afterthought. The initial rev of the custom software running on the N95 was a little buggy and the phone would just stop taking photos sometimes as well as not geotag some photos. I had to open up the camera housing and force a reboot to get it going again until Tarikh from Uncommon Projects stopped by and upgraded it. It’s been smooth sailing ever since.
UPDATE: The Associated Press did a little video news segment on the ybike featuring Amit Gupta, who also has one of the three bikes in SF. Note the Unamerican sticker on the side of his solar panel box, a little gift from me. 🙂
Scott has opened up the emerald doors of Laughing Squid to a few friends to guest blog. My first post went up today, a wrap up of my experience at Comic-Con.
Pals and Webzine alums Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders asked me to come to Comic-Con this year and shoot video for io9, the Gawker sci-fi blog they edit. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. Turns out it was a lot of bouncing around from panels to halls to press roundtables to celeb filled red carpets. Lots of A, B and Z list celebrities in need of pimping their latest action packed movies and TV shows. Yeah, not a bad alternative to sleep for a few days.
Here’s links to the video coverage I did for io9. I’ll add more as they publish.
J.J. Abrams: Creator of Lost & Alias, Producer of Cloverfield
Jamie Chung: Samurai Girl & Chi Chi in Dragonball
Dave Filoni: Director of Clone Wars
I’m in San Diego for Comic-Con through Sunday capturing video for sci-fi blog io9.com. I’ve never been before, but some say it’s the “Burning Man of comics” with some 100,000 attendees expected. Being a n00b, should I expect to be spanked on the way in? Is there anything that is a can’t miss experience? I’ll update with links to video on io9 as the weekend progresses.