robot porn

hardhack partially too hard for me

I’m sort of chickening out of the upcoming hardhack event, at least on friday, tomorrow. Mainly because it’s Josi’s and mine anniversary and this is not the kind of pastime she likes to be dragged to, even if half of hardhack’s speakers are women (which certainly helps with the “I can’t do that” problem, but no inch with the “I’m not interested” fact).

Additionally, I like that hardhack sets its standards pretty high, very much unlike e.g. MAKE magazine, which I still love, but where I sometimes feel that they have very very basic projects that should annoy anybody who ever held a screwdriver before. But, coming back to hardhack and the interesting workshop on how to hack your wireless router and use OpenWRT on it, this might be a little too much for me. Opening the thing and soldering a serial port to it – no problem, can do this all day. Compiling your own firmware and knowing what to do if it doesn’t work – problem, at least for me. And it seems the wifi component in the T-Com router I have here is not supported yet, anyway.

So, if not tomorrow, I definitely plan to have a look around hardhack on Saturday and I’d love to participate in Sunday’s nerdtour of the pneumatic tube mail system (aka. Rohrpost) that once existed in (or rather under) Berlin.

One Laptop per childish adult

My XO Laptop has arrived. After a short detour via Austin, TX (thanks for ordering it for me, big cousin) and almost three weeks of United States Postal Service limbo it finally is mine. (Okay, the German customs had some fun with it which allowed me to sit in their Berlin office for almost 2 hours and watch the painfully slow processing of my packet. Think as east block style agency meeting slow motion village post office. Only slower. Finally I could have it for only 18 Euros of tax after convincing them it was a gift as well as a toy.)

Of all the 400 color combinations of the logo I of course received the one clashing most with the laptop’s green plastic: mint and sort-of dark green, both quite off the main hue, ah well. I’ll learn to love it.

It doesn’t look as small as it is next to my 12″ Powerbook, most likely because the Powerbook is not so big to begin with.

This is more accurate although I may have extraordinarily big or small hands, so maybe it is not so informative as a picture.

So what am I planning to do with it except for showing off? First, there are some interesting programs (”activities”) already installed, the most interesting being the TamTam SynthLab, a Max/MSP based visual synthesizer modeler. Here’s a video of SynthLab in action. There is another activity called Measure which is a very simple oscilloscope. The XO’s audio input accepts a wider range of voltages compared to regular  computer soundcards, so it can be used as a flexible A/D converter.

A lot of improving and hacking of the XO is currently done and all over the web. Some people want to increase the analog input’s versatility by a usb powered probe circuit to enhance the oscilloscope range. On the software side, because the XO runs on an adapted Linux distribution (with custom “Sugar” interface), we’ll certainly see a lot of applications being built for it in the near future. About 80,000 laptops were sold to individuals like me, so a lot of them are now in the hands of hackers and tinkerers.

And finally, the XO may have a lot of differences to regular laptop computers, but in the end it is a computer by design, so even if development for its regular system stalled, there will be someone putting together a special Ubuntu distro. So, no worries that this system cannot be used for something in the end. It does already run Doom.

That’s the spirit

Just found this in my local newspaper. Here’s an English source:

A Bosnian hospital patient spent seven hours repairing hospital machinery so his operation could go ahead. Doctors had told car mechanic Slobodan Mocevic, 56, his operation to remove a kidney stone was cancelled because of faulty equipment. Mocevic asked to borrow a set of tools and then stripped down and repaired the Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy machine at the hospital in Kasindol. (source)

The German name for that machine is equally great: Nierensteinzertrümmerer.

No hay bending.

I might be a sloppy researcher (in a way that using Google means researching), but are there really no people doing circuit bending and related hacking here in Berlin? Surely there must be some artists (not necessarily musicians) and noise explorers in the gallery scene, but where’s the basic lo-fi hands-on approach for the kids? Spaß am Gerät, so to say?

Please drop me a line if you are already doing something like that here in Berlin, or if we could work something out.

(Finally, I still feel a little stupid for passing a Casio SK-1, circuit benders’ favourite victim, on a flea market for 20 Euros some months ago. Having paid the same price for mine years ago, I was subsequently frustrated to learn that it now fetches a lot more on ebay and is not at all something you come across a lot anymore.)

Vee don’t know zis maschine you speek of

A big news item in the last weeks has been the Austrian girl who was kidnapped at the age of 10 and held in secret custody for over eight years. BoingBoing points to a story in the Gurardian that outlines the difficulties the Austrian investigators seem to have with the kidnapper’s Commodore 64:

However, Major General Gerhard Lang of the Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau, told reporters the computer would complicate investigators’ efforts to transfer files for closer examination.

There are emulators available which can make a modern PC capable of running Commodore 64 programmes but Maj Gen Lang said it would be difficult to transmit the data from Priklopil’s machine to a modern computer “without loss”.

Well, duh. Star Commander, a software that allows to connect a 1541 (the C64 floppy disk drive) to a PC has been around for ages. The necessary cables can be bought on ebay all the time if you are unable to solder them yourself. All the knowledge neccessary is on the internet, for free. And you could always ask one of the 151 Austrian C64 scene members if in doubt. The C64 must be the most-hacked, transparent and easiest to access piece of antique computer hardware by now.

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.

Push the button

I bought a 1-inch-button making machine yesterday. Some friends talked about having some 200 buttons made for their band and I thought I might as well buy a machine to make them at home. I figured the expenses would be covered by selling the buttons in the near future. Even if it does not add up at the end; I’ll still have the machine to play with.

I got it from buttons.de via ebay including a circular paper cutter and 1000 button blanks for a total price of 223 Euros (including shipping). Please talk to me if you live in Berlin and want me to produce buttons for you. Just for fun I set up an extra page for the machine to see how long it takes until I’m back to zero.

The big Berlin-Treptow flea market

I’m really into flea markets, because (if they are good) they manage to include lots of items I like to buy, like music on vinyl, furniture, musical instruments and odd stuff in general. My favourite flea market in Berlin is in the Treptow district right next to the Arena concert venue. It’s not open air, but in a disused factory building and while generally open to everyone to sell his stuff, mostly occupied by regular sellers who have their own booths and spaces in the factory halls (some pictures here).

If you come to Berlin and are interested in seeing all kinds of… stuff and marvel at the wonders of industrial mass production of the last 60 years, you definitely need to check out this flea market. (To me, it it the proof that our world is real and not a Simulacron-esque simulation, as I can’t imagine you could artificially build a scenario with millions of objects in all kinds of colours, shapes and physical features.) Actually, you could furnish a completely empty house with items from that flea market only.

The market is best visited on weekends (I really don’t know if they open during the week.), only five minutes to walk from the Treptower Park train station (look for Eichenstraße on the map). While you’re there, have a look over Berlin’s Spree river, which runs directly behind the market halls. You can get a nice view of the city and the Molecule Man from there.

Some sellers have begun to specialize in certain products, so there’s one guy only selling remote controls (but he has all of them), another one offers only clocks, and of course there are booths dedicated to colourful 70s appliances like orange telephones and tv sets. Lots of eastern-european stuff, too, of course. You can also get all kinds of machinery, power tools and even old medical devices. I doubt that everything being offered came to the sellers on legal ways.

Last saturday I bought an old Aspectar 150A slide projector from eastern german production. Unfortunately, the lamp burned out after two minutes of use and it seems to be hard to get a new one (230V, 150W, Ba15S socket). They are still produced but expensive, I guess. The small photo shop I wrote about had none of these lamps but they suggested that I remodel the projector so it works with today’s normal halogen lamps. (They don’t know that you can get me everytime by suggesting I build or hack something, so I guess I will eventually do that.)

I saw this old portable hamonium (made by Harmona in Germany), working, complete with stands stored in the top cover, for 180 Euros, but I don’t know if that is a reasonable price for it.