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Creative Commons Salon

Creative Commons Presents

Creative Commons, the great little content licensing scheme that makes it possible for Geek Entertainment TV to be interesting, is kicking off a monthly salon here in San Francisco this Wednesday. I’ve been tapped to present GETV and our CC connection. I will focus on how fun and easy it is to find CC licensed content to spice up the geek video interviews I edit. Also presenting are Josh Kinberg, majordomo of the iTunes killer FireAnt, and Wagner James Au of Second Life. Full details.

shine
1337 Mission Street (Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)
San Francisco, California

Please join us for the first CC Salon, taking place in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 8 from 6pm-9pm at Shine. CC Salon is a casual get-together focused on conversation and community-building. It’s open to anyone interested in art, technology, education, and copyright. We look forward to seeing you there!

CC Salon – San Francisco
Wednesday, March 8
6pm-9pm
Shine (http://shinesf.com/)
1337 Mission Street (between 9th and 10th), San Francisco

Featuring presentations by:
Josh Kinberg; FireAnt (http://fireant.tv/)
Eddie Codel; Geek Entertainment TV (http://geekentertainment.tv/)
Wagner James Au; Second Life (http://secondlife.com/)

And music by:
Minus Kelvin; ccMixter (http://ccmixter.org/)

House of Cosbys

House of Cosbys
I would have never have known about this hilarious parody of the world of Cosby if it hadn’t been for Bill Cosby’s lawyers’ heavy handed attempt at killing it. You know the story: Small time artist makes parody of pop culture icon. Parody gets posted to the Internet. No one really notices for months and months, until parody author or host gets nastygram from big time lawyer of pop culture icon. Parody author or host stand their ground and gets tons of media attention. The whole world now sees parody that big time lawyers tried to kill. I *heart* the Internet.

Make your own stereo digital camera for under $25

Instructions for hacking a couple of $11 Dakota digital cameras into a stereo digital camera rig. You’ll need a couple of Dakotas, two male USB ports (salvaged from mice) and some Lego. Apparently you can get these “disposable” cameras from Wolf and Ritz Camera stores, though I haven’t tried.

read more | digg story

This site will be handy for figuring out the USB pinouts.

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Lessig at SF Wifi Media Alliance Event

If you live in SF and care about democratizing Internet access, you should attend this free event. Media Alliance is making it happen and Lawrence Lessig is gonna throw down a few words. And check out Awesometown, funny as fuck.

Lawrence Lessig on Wireless in SF: Digital City or Divided City?

When: Monday, October 10 2005 @ 07:00 PM PDT – 10:00PM
Where: 111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street
between 2nd and New Montgomery
San Francisco
Description: Join Media Alliance for this dynamic panel discussion on creating universal, affordable Internet access through municipal broadband utilities. Featuring a presentation by Professor Lawrence Lessig and a panel of local community Internet experts, the evening will include Q&A with the audience.

After years of advocacy by MA and other groups, Mayor Newsom announced earlier this year his goal of free wireless Internet access for all San Franciscans. Cities across the country are implementing municipal projects, though with varying degrees of commitment to bridging the digital divide.

This evening will explore the significant opportunities for city-run projects to expand Internet access and usage by under-served communities, and improve cost, service and consumer choice for everyone.

The talk will be followed at 9pm by music from DJ’s Kid Kameleon and Ripley.

Cost: $5, Free for Media Alliance and EFF members

7-9 pm Discussion: Lessig, Panel, Q&A
9-10pm DJ’s Kid Kameleon and Ripley

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BLF: To Serve Man

BLF: To Serve Man
Reason #74 why San Francisco rules. On the 50th anniversary of the existence of McDonald’s, the Billboard Liberation Front unwrapped a little birthday present across the street from a franchise in the Haight. A billboard graphic was revealed of a pudgy Ronald and slovenly alien created by Ron English whose work was featured in the brilliant movie Super Size Me. Soon after the unveiling of the billboard and accompanying mechanized Ronald McDonald feeding a Big Mac into a grotesque figure, a couple dozen clowns dressed as Ronald as well as a few Hamburglers showed up to pay their respects to the piece. The phrase To Serve Man comes from a disturbing Twilight Zone episode. You just don’t see this kinda shit in Tulsa, and that’s a shame cause Tulsa really needs it. Laughing Squid and SFist has a complete rundown of the craziness.

Gmapping History & Future



Washington, DC 20050
Originally uploaded by ekai.

The latest example of cool emergent technology is Google Maps rendered with satellite imagery annotated with Flickr notes. Geeks and the geekly inclined are zooming in on neighborhoods where they once lived and are tagging those screen capture images with notes describing historical moments in the geography. Flickr has a group called Memory Maps dedicated to this.

Since I grew up in the DC area, I decided to look around some internationally known locations to see what they look like from the sky. Interesting to note that the White House and the neighboring Old Executive Office Building and Department of Treasury buildings are “sanitized” from the top, for national security reasons I’m sure. Their roofs are represented as blank continuous dull colors with none of the detail you’ll find on other buildings. Some areas, such as the courtyards in the Old Executive, are grossly pixelated. On the other hand, the Pentagon, looks complete with detail. This begs the question, what does it take to get a piece of property obscured from Google’s database? Can I fill out a form and demand that my house be gzapped so no one knows that the grass hasn’t been cut in 3 years or that my meth lab exploded?

As if that wasn’t enough cool, this brilliant individual figured out how to remix Craig’s List housing ads with Google Maps. This is the kind of thing that some bubbleheaded VC would have sunk $30 million into 5 years ago. And now it’s done emergent style with an idea and a little duct tape. Imagine what can happen when there is an open API for all this.

Mashing the Beatles

Been listing to Revolved lately, a mashup of the Beatles Revolver album. I know there’s a bunch of Beatles mashups out there now, DJ Dangermouse’s Grey Album and The Beastles two name a couple. Revolved is done right, matched tempos, beats and rhythms with songs from The Cure, Madonna, Jimi Hendrix and even Glenn Miller.

That Subliminal Kid



Blackster
Originally uploaded by ekai.

DJ Spooky is friggin’ brilliant, let it be said. He kicked off Rhythm Science, a lecture last night on art history, philosophy, hiphop and remix culture, by invoking the gift economy. He handed out free mix CDs to everyone in the audience. He then proceded to pull out a personal stash of records that are obviously the tools of his trade and shared them with everyone in the audience. Not for keeps, but show and tell like, letting everyone fondle and caress each piece of vinyl before passing it on to his and her neighbor.

And then the lecture started. Here’s some notes I picked up along the way.

-the culture of copy
-information ecology
-the source code is human expression mediated by human interpretation
-the Beats of the 50’s gave birth to the beats of the 21st century
-fuckitall.com
-discourse of the nation state
-Internet inheriting the remixing from the streets (the first network)
-the artist as font, moveable to different compositions
-Spooky is a French lit and philosophy major
-dialectics of sound
-streetlights as controls of the original network, the streets
-music is liquid architecture
-copyright as it is written and as it is lived is diverging
-electronic music is the folk music of the 21st century, everyone knows and plays each other’s music
-Birth of a Nation was the first film to play in the White House

And then there was the other reason he was here. This free lecture proceeds a $40 a head gig he’s doing this weekend at Yerba Buena in San Francisco. Spooky uses the 1915 silent KKK propaganda film The Birth of a Nation as source material for video on 3 giant screens and an accompanying composition he created. Too rich for my blood right now, but I’d love to hear report backs.

UPDATE: Some pix I took. Steve Rhodes has more.