↑Unrealised Moscow features never-built architectural projects for Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s. The site carries beautiful concept-drawings accompanied by comprehensive descriptions. Simply a great resource for alternate-reality computergames and mods. via entry at hinterding … Continue reading
At first I did not intend to comment on the election of the new pope, but simultaneously I hung around in an IRC-channel of my community. Now I just have to show off how fast cyberspace reacts to breaking news. … Continue reading
The 104th triple-A meeting (30 November to 04 December 2005) will have a panel called ↑Parsing Culture: Cybersocial space and the making of group and individual identity. via entry at zerzaust … Continue reading
↑World Wind (see ↵world wind works) was released by NASA as Open Source Software, and quite naturally a ↑world wind community emerged, generating add-ons. See ↑The unofficial unofficial add-ons list, which includes download-links. There is much which can be put to good use, and things beyond. For example the ↑WorldWind 1.3 Deathstar addon—like Skall, the creator, said: “Useless, but somebody had to do it !” That’s absolutely right. … Continue reading
Last Saturday, 16 April 2005, the 4th German Casemod Masters (↑DCMM) took place at Dortmund. There were two categories: casemod, meaning the modification of an of-the-peg case, and casecon, meaning the from-the-bottom-up construction of an entirely new and original case. As a third category there was ‘most spectacular casemod’. The latter was not judged by the jury, but by the audience attending. Maico Bensien from Hamburg won the casecon-category with his creation “Alien” depicted here. For me another wonderful example of everything fusing together: pop-culture icon influence, resistance against the industry’s design-dictate, and cultural appropriation of computer hardware in the … Continue reading
Well, back in the 1980s I was in the other camp, because I was a proud owner of a C64—and we somehow looked down on those having an Atari. But that is history, and exactly from that point of view ↑atariarchives.org is very worthwhile, as it “makes books, information, and software for Atari and other classic computers available on the Web. Everything here is available with permission of the copyright holders.” … Continue reading
↑Mobile Magazine has a nice article on ↑The Birth of the Notebook by Christopher Null. The article starts with Alan Kay’s 1968 idea ‘Dynabook’, which saw the light of day only as a mockup made of cardboard (picture from ↵Lees 1980:5), as the necessary technology to make it a real thing just was not yet in existance. The Dynabook was thought for kids [play!] and the field of learning and education—the software was thought to grow with the children. The contents of Alan Kays’s original draft notes at Xerox Parc, which are dated August 1972, are remarkable: “The size should … Continue reading
This weblog is meant to fulfil a whole array of purposes. Among those is organizing and structuring my material and thoughts. The magnificent ↑search plugin is an essential part, but categories are nevertheless necessary. Problem is that I have to think up the categories myself, as the software won’t. I asked it to do so, but it stubbornly refuses. In my project’s ↵abstract I already boasted: “[...] the interpretation of the fieldwork-results will be set into relation to the appropriate parts of the history of technology [...]“. History of games’n’software is all fine, but the machines themselves and material culture … Continue reading
Wonderful, wonderful, they have done it again. The god of the information age indeed is a trickster. The ‘World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics’ (WMSCI) has accepted a paper submitted by the graduate students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn, and Dan Aguayo—of course all three of them home-based at MIT, where hacker-culture was born—called “↑Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” [.pdf | 709KB]. That’s nearly as good as Alan Sokal’s famous “↑Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” with which Sokal triggered a hard-time for the journal ‘Social Text’ and a … Continue reading
The speeding angels of Línea 5 Another instance of culturally appropriating the automobile, going well with ↵bososoku, ↵zelda vans, and ↵bedford’s metamorphosis. Good-looking ↑Joanna Michna, who graduated in anthropology together with me here in Munich, has made a great ethnological documentary movie on Colombia’s balineros, called ‘The speeding angels of Línea 5′. I would translate ‘balinero’ as ‘Of the ball bearings’, or less literally: ‘Dances with trucks’. For everybody capable of receiving German television’s infamous ‘third channels’, her film is rebroadcasted—D’oh!—was rebroadcasted yesterday night. Sorry. But! WDR will rebroadcast it again on Thursday 14 April 2005, 08:45-09:30 AM local, that … Continue reading