robot porn

Sic transit gloria mundi

This semester I take a course about the different fields of work in a museum as part of my studies in History of Science and Technology. The course takes place at Berlin’s Deutsches Technikmuseum (German Museum of Technology), a really fine museum with a slight focus on transportation but always worth a visit.

Upon leaving the musem, I came across this dumpster filled with old lab equipment and computers. Lots of oscillo-whatevers with big knobs and heavy cases by German companies Siemens and Rohde und Schwarz.

In some way, this is a shame, especially when you were just given a talk about the preservation of technology going on in the musem. Sure, one must not forget that preserving something in an archival sense means first of all throwing away. You can easily fill up the biggest storage spaces with tons of stuff, but of course that becomes unaccessible quickly and is effectively the same as dumping it all in the first place.

So, letting go is definitely no sacrilege in attempts to preserve. But given the fact that museums generally are short of funding and there are enough people selling and buying weird stuff on ebay, I cannot understand why the museum opts for dumping unused stuff. They actually have to pay for the waste disposal of electronic equipment. So why not put all that in one of the unused storage building the museum definitely has and have a public sort-of garage sale once a month?

Unfortunately, I lent my car to a friend for the weekend so I couldn’t get anything of that stuff but an Atari 1040ST that is light enough to carry (it works, by the way). If you don’t mind committing theft; everything’s still there. Don’t cross your fingers anything in the dumpster could be still working, though: They clearly tossed it in there and it’s been raining today.

Seedy films

I cleaned up my parents’ garage today. There were still three boxes full of my video tapes, movies and Star Trek recorded from tv in the nineties, but also lots of tapes I shot myself, mostly at home or at school. After some years in the slighty clammy garage several tapes have started to mold. Not good. Only the cheap Kodak tapes are affected, the BASF tapes look as good as ever.

Musician kills copier

Last night I cleaned up my room, as lots of paper and stuff had started to block all my workspace. Unfortunately, I found an old broken Xerox copier someone gave me a few years ago and that was lying in a plastic bag behind my workbench ever since. I never bothered to find out the reason why it did not work anymore.

So, instead of going to bed I expanded the copier from one single piece to about 200 (see before and after picture). Some nice stuff inside, lots of cogs and gears, two solenoids, a motor and the light source which seems to run from 240 V directly. Maybe I’ll use it as some kind of photo lamp if it still works. Something else I didn’t know: The heat source in the copier seems to be a pretty standard 25 cm Halogen lamp inside a metal tube. Good idea actually, as these lamps usually waste a lot of energy on heat instead of light.

I reassembled the case so it looks like a stock copier again. I guess I’ll use it as a housing for some kind of something later. Another idea would be to use it as a weird photo frame or put in a mirror inside instead of the glass pane and hang it on the wall. Or use it as a backlit table to view slides or film strips.

Tiger Tunes

My 1970 EKO Tiger Organ fortunately worked after a little cleaning, but it was still out of tune, about a quarter note too low. Switching the main power selector from 220 to 240 volts changed nothing about that (which is good), so I opened the case again in search of a tuning knob. There is none.

There are, however, 12 oscillator circuits, one for each note of the octave, and each board has big tuning pots (or maybe variable capacitors; I don’t really know). So although the organ sounded fine when being played because all 12 notes were off the same amount from the standard tuning, I had to re-tune all 12 circuits.

I wanted it to be quite exact, as tuning means opening the whole device, something I don’t want to do too often, so I googled for a tuning program and the first thing I found is Instrument Tuner for Windows, which is shareware but works for 30 days. Having a frequency display that shows how much the current note is off made it quite easy to completey tune the organ in 20 minutes. Now I’m playing “House of the rising sun”.

Dead tree music hacking

Imagine you forgot my birthday last month. To calm your shame, just preorder “Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking” by Nicolas Collins for me (e.g. at amazon).

I guess most of the information in this book is on the web as well. But I like books. They’re much easier to have them carelessly lying around on the coffee table so visitors get the idea that I must be strange.

(Who’s your daddy? GetLofi.com)