So I’ve played with a couple of the augmented reality apps available for the (non-jailbroken) iPhone — Yelp, with its Monocle functions, and Bionic Eye — and my conclusion is that navigation AR apps are completely pointless. You see, augmented reality takes into account your position and direction. What it doesn’t do — can’t do, […]
Tag Archives: Technology
Ableton Live + Algorithmic Composition (sort of)
So I finally acquired a legal, full copy of Ableton Live, as payment for designing a logo for a client. Yay! As anybody who reads this blog knows, I’m a big fan of algorithmic/rule-based/non-interactive composition. As much as I love writing songs, I also love simply setting up the computer to generate music on its […]
The Kitty Genovese model.
A couple of years ago, I delivered an incoherent, profanity-laden and probably awful lecture on the Grim Meathook Future at the Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin. (In my defense, I was completely unhinged due to jet lag and the meltdown of my MacBook the night before the talk, when I’d planned to finish my speech […]
Vids from the show
“Just Like Honey” (Jesus & Mary Chain cover) “Heroin” (Velvet Underground cover) These were the last two tracks I did. “Just Like Honey” was going to be the final song, but as you can see in the second video, an audience member asked me to do an encore. For these, I had a random audience […]
Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work | The Onion – America's Finest News Source
Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.
OLPC "Give One, Get One" is on again!
Oh, man, I want an OLPC so bad. And they’re repeating their Give One, Get One policy from last Christmas: buy two of them for $399 and one gets sent to a child in the developing world. I actually want one to try to develop software on it; I have a nice MacBook for all […]
I Weep For These People.
Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) on the horror of tech conference panels: My first reaction was that in the greater scheme of things (economy in free fall, war in Iraq, global warming, energy crisis, not to mention the old reliables like cancer and poverty and AIDS, etc.) this challenge of finding a good restaurant seems […]
Top 15 criteria for new or interactive media art
From the Near Future Laboratory comes this hilarious (and completely on-the-mark) list. The Near Future Laboratory Top-15 Criteria for New or Interactive Media Art It doesn’t work It doesn’t work because you couldn’t get a hold of a 220-to-110 volt converter/110-to-220 volt converter/PAL-to-NTSC/NTSC-to-PAL scan converter/serial-to-usb adapter/”dongle” of any sort..and the town you’re in is simply […]
Playing it by ear: a short interview with Jack Womack
Jack Womack is one of speculative fiction’s secret treasures. His 1995 novel Random Acts Of Senseless Violence is one of the most remarkable and emotionally affecting works I’ve ever read and the seed of my thinking about the whole Grim Meathook Future thing.It’s not science fiction, per se; it’s the story of how American civilization […]
Technical Question: TPS to MySQL
I need to import an assload of data from old TopSpeed (TPS) database tables into MySQL. I don’t have access to the original app, just the database tables. I’m on a Mac, but can use Unix tools and Windows as last resort. Anybody know an easy way to do this? It’s time-dependent.