robot porn

An ephemeral machine with built-in dysfunctions

I saw this leaflet on a bulletin board at university. Sounds interesting. Maybe someone with a real understanding of electronics can help him? I guess I should ask him about his project in some months to see what he made and how long it lived.

voc, bs, dr, shirt

wmmna brings us the news of a wearable “air guitar” controller disguised as a regular T-shirt:

‘Freedom of movement is a great feature of these textile-based interfaces,’ [Dr Richard Helmer] says. ‘Our air guitar consists of a wearable sensor interface embedded in a conventional ’shirt’, with custom software to map gestures with audio samples. It’s an easy-to-use, virtual instrument that allows real-time music making, even by players without significant musical or computing skills. It allows you to jump around and the sound generated is just like an original mp3.’

Heh. He said “original mp3″. But besides, Régine also mentions the Bangarama developed by Students at Aachen’s RWTH university two years ago: A helmet to convert headbanging into guitar sounds using an acceleration sensor. That could be a cool add-on for my MIDI key-/guitar (still unfinished).

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.