02007-11-22 | Uncategorized
LongPen makes short work of distance
Author Margaret Atwood, perhaps best known for the near-future fable The Handmaid’s Tale, has invented a device called LongPen which allows writers to sign their works at a distance, replicating their hand movements.
Says Atwood:
It is the world’s first long-distance, real-time signing and handwriting device… In other words, the LongPen is not an Autopen, which signs your name over and over without your presence being required. Instead, the LongPen does whatever you have just done at your end, including ‘Happy Birthday Marge’ and a picture of a pussycat — making whatever marks you have just made, in the order and with the pressure you have made them. (The signature is a legal one – which LongPen has just had reconfirmed by an expert in this field.)
…
The LongPen is known in tech circles as a ‘disruptive technology’, which means – I’m told – that it came out of nowhere, was not anticipated, is not an enhancement of a pre-existing technology, and will radically change how things are done. Author signings are just a small part of the picture!
(Via Long Views)
02007-11-21 | Uncategorized
I brought something back from Mexico with me. It’s either a cold or a flu, can’t figure out which yet. A virus in any case. Made me think of the whole human race as one big virus. It’s fairly smart, incredibly robust, multiplies like crazy and there is a good chance it will wipe out it’s host. Don’t say save the planet. The planet will be there for a long time. It’s a matter of saving us, the human race. In India they say the entire cosmos is an out-breath of Brahma and when he breathes in, it’s gone again. At least that’s what I remember. They also say this isn’t the first turning of that wheel.
That reminds me of the time my brother became really ill in the Eighties. On a Friday afternoon the local hospital called him and told him that the blood-sample they had taken from him contained a rare African virus and he had two or three weeks to live. He slept with his magnum under the pillow that weekend. At one point I said to him, we don’t know enough about re-incarnation, whether it happens or not, but what if you have been at this point many times before and every time you chose to end it. Somehow Monday came and the hospital called again. Oops they said, our bad. You only have mono and will live a long life after all – if you don’t get run over by a bus.
So, have you put the two together yet? What if this is the big hump and every time a bunch of cells get complex enough, large enough, conscious enough, powerful enough they end up doing too much damage. In other words the virus is not able to mutate into something less vicious, something more benign, something that doesn’t replicate so much…
And slowly life starts again… on another planet maybe, another solarsystem, taking on an entirely different form…
With that off my chest, I shall go back into the studio to finish a mix of this song. I should upload it to the LL sometime soon, as a reminder that we will release the SSRI DigiPak version of ITAOL sometime in March.
02007-11-21 | Ottmar
As you might have noticed if you looked in the LL, the “La Semana” album now has a new and slightly different cover. After the Januay 2007 bancrupcty of distributor 33rd Street, which was owned by Tower Records, the SSRI CDs (“La Semana” and “Winter Rose”) they had in stock were sold to the highest bidder. We were not given an opportunity to buy the product. As a result we have not seen a cent from any of the “La Semana” or “Winter Rose” CDs you find in stores now. Since we sold out of the copies we had I thought it would be nice to create a new cover for the album, which will be released in a 6-panel DigiPak – just like the other recent releases 1G, Thira and Transit 2. The new “La Semana”, with identical content, will sell from our online store and through our new distributor Burnside sometime in December.
Here is the new “La Semana” cover:
– and this was the old one:
If you want the new artwork, and you already have the CD or the files, you can download the PDF here.
02007-11-21 | Art, Copyright, Music, World
Amazon’s MP3 store rips off your fair use rights – Boing Boing
Amazon’s contract says you “may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content” for personal use. But then it goes further and specifies restrictions, saying you “agree that you will not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, sub-license or otherwise transfer or use the Digital Content.”
Oh, ffs. All we want to do is buy MP3s, like we used to buy CDs and records and tapes. Stuff we could make some claim to owning. You’d think that a group of people as property-obsessed as the recording industry would understand the desire to own one’s music collection and have all the rights to it that copyright normally confers on those who buy copyrighted works — like the right to sell, edit. adapt, loan, modify, etc. All the stuff the law give law-abiding customers who buy stuff.
Why s this so hard to understand? A digital file does not equal STUFF, you know, things you put in your bag or carry with you or place in a drawer. A song in mp3 form is not the same as a song on a CD and therefore the same rules cannot apply. When I sell or give away the CD I bought, I have given away my ONLY copy of the song – certainly true prior to the late nineties before anybody with a computer could burn a backup CD for themselves.
(When I think of how hard it was to buy a DAT recorder in the late Eighties, because the music business had convinced law-makers that DAT recorders were dangerous in that they could make perfect copies of music… There was even a tax on DAT recorders and on DAT-tapes that went to BMI and ASCAP to be dispensed to composers… and then came 2001 and Apple’s slogan “Rip, Mix and Burn” and that was that. Did nobody see that coming? Was a fight futile? Was it the tipping point?)
In a way the value of the piece of music had been transferred to the piece of plastic it came on. Selling the piece of plastic meant selling the music. But, when I sell or give away a copy of an mp3 file I bought, what would make me give up the copy on my HD, huh? An honor system? A kind of DRM? What?
All we want to do is buy MP3s, like we used to buy CDs and records and tapes. Stuff we could make some claim to owning.
Music is no longer STUFF, folks. Let’s get over that as soon as possible. What we have here is a new way of dealing with ideas. Those ideas are no longer put on a piece of plastic or vinyl or tape, married to something physical. They are no longer transferred to something tangible which can’t be copied. They have become zeros and ones. This is a HUGE change. What if you made wine for a living and suddenly the grapes you grew and with much expertise and care turned into wine… could be turned into zeros and ones and replicated like yoghurt. You see, yoghurt is a mix of bacteria and if you like a certain yoghurt’s taste you could easily add warm milk and make more! Let’s say people found a way to replicate wine like yoghurt? You buy a bottle of wine and turn it into 10, 50, 100 bottles of wine. And since bottles are easy to come by and paper-labels can be copied easily you can start giving away or selling this wine.
Actually, I believe that this WILL eventually happen to almost everything in our lives. What was once something you could store, put away, sell, loan, hang up, present… will all become something, hm, different, more intangible. Once again art is getting there first, presenting the problem we need to solve. Nobody has, in my opinion, found a decent solution yet. DRM is not a solution – at least not in the shape it has taken so far. Music wants to be free is bullshit, but music wants to be locked up is bullshit, too. Watch this TED talk by Professor Lawrence Lessig for some clues.
This is about money, and it is possible that the first person/company to figure out a fair and righteous way to sell music might become very rich, but it is also about CULTURE. How do we view artists, musicians? How do we view their work? What is ownership? How do we deal with the fact that it is no longer about the object (CD, Photograph, Wine-bottle, Book etc.) – but the content? I don’t know the answer, but I know this: let’s stop making stupid statements like this:
All we want to do is buy MP3s, like we used to buy CDs and records and tapes. Stuff we could make some claim to owning.
If musicians can’t go back to how it used to be ten years ago, then neither should the public. Moving forward is the only way.
02007-11-21 | Design, Home
The Plumen Project
Despite there being an abundance of producers, we see only three basic bulb formats available: The Radiator, The Ice Cream Whip and the Tungsten-esc types. Each style is uniform in shape, with no variation, tension or interest. It seems strange that the bulb, an object so synonymous with ideas, is almost entirely absent of imagination.
