dorkbot is the name of a movement that started in New York City. Since then, the idea has expanded to other cities (Seattle, San Francisco, London, Lisbon, Melbourne, Linz, Gent, Mumbai and Rotterdam). As far as I understand, it is a regular meeting of technical artists that do strange things with electricity.

Next monday (Feb 2, 2004), there will be a kickoff event in Berlin for a new dorkbot.bln meeting and I was asked to do some moderation and a short talk about Blinkenlights as we are also doing strange things with elecricity. There will be a presentation by the dorkbot.london crew.

The meeting is hosted at Berlin‘s space ship c-base and will start at 20:15 CET. The event is aptly named Primetime and is a partner event of transmediale.

FWB, maker of fine utility software for the Mac has apperently put it‘s discontinued Mac OS 9 products for sale on eBay, MacNN reports. So for if you have +$65.000 bucks spare you can spend them on a coverless DVD-R. Interesting way of selling it. But I doubt that the source is really helpful for getting the old tools – mainly drivers and hard disk tollkit stuff – ported to OS X.

The Blinkenlights Library (blib) has been bumped to version 1.1.5, blinkensim and blinkentools changed to version 2.6. The actual change is that everything should compile on Windows now as well! Lacking a windows machine, I haven‘t tried this myself so maybe somebody who isn‘t afraid of these boxes might do a test? The stuff is available at Sven‘s Blinkenlights page

I am not a big fan of Flash Games. But this game is addictive. My score: 323.3. (Link updated!)

[via esse est percipi]

This has taken soooo long. But now it is finally coming! O‘Reilly is about to publish Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks, a new book on do-it-yourself hardware hacking.

The author, Scott Fullam, contacted us two years ago because he wanted to devote one of the chapters to Blinkenlights – which he did. You find it in the Table Of Contents (PDF): How to Hack a Building-Size Display (in Part II: Advanced Hacks, Tools, and Techniques). K3wl. In it you find the documentation of the technology used to build the first Blinkenlights installation in Berlin which we passed to Scott to be published freely.

I am really looking forward getting the book in my hands as there seem to be other really interesting things in it (like “How To Build An Internet Toaster” and “How To Build A Remote Object Tracker”).

I can‘t say I am a big fan of Frank Zappa, but I have respect for what he did and especially for how he did it. And, being a real loony, he apparently was a real visionary as well.

In 1983 – that‘s more than twenty years ago (!) – he wrote a text about the music industry named A Proposal For A System To Replace Ordinary Record Merchandising.

Ordinary phonograph record merchandising as it exists today is a stupid process which concerns itself essentially with pieces of plastic, wrapped in pieces of cardboard.

And he continues analyzing the state of the industry and the uselessness of simply selling music on hardware without taking the effect of hometaping into account.

It is our proposal to take advantage of the POSITIVE ASPECTS of a NEGATIVE TREND afflicting the record industry today: HOME TAPING via cassette of material released on vinyl.

Finally he proposes a system called Quality Catalog Items, making the good music available in digital form

We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company‘s difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user‘s home taping appliances [...] All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc. would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system.

So what he describes is basically something like Apple‘s iTunes Music Store – in 1983. However, he opts for a subscription service (instead of paying per song) and of course the proposed technical solutions do not reflect the current state of the art. But we have to admin that talking about accessibility by phone or cable TV is pretty close to the reality of the Internet today.

Chapeau, Frank

[via IT&W]

The The Flash Mind Reader reads your mind. Or does it? Well, of course there is a trick. There must be one. Or maybe not? Who knows? [via l o g os]

Yes, today is RSS day. Brent points us to RSS Feeds of recent earthquakes. Nice. Start feeling it rumble below me….

Oh, yes! There are various RSS feeds for Apple‘s Knowledge Base available to keep track with changes.

There is an ongoing myth that Blinkenlights provides a SMS-to-screen feature. It doesn‘t. It won‘t. The Hello World project shows us why it is a good idea to stick to that principle.