Categories
Makerspace Release_Candidate

Mothership HackerMoms

A new kickstarted hackerspace in Berkeley, CA where, as they say:

We started our non-profit organization in April 2012 because traditional hackerspaces don’t really have safe spaces for babies and young children – or, consequently, their mothers. Our mission is to give creative moms the time and space to explore DIY craft and design, hacker/maker culture, entrepreneurship, and all manner of creative expression – with childcare.

But I’m still going to back it, as the more women we have in STEM-focused fields the better off we will be.

via Mothership HackerMoms: The first women’s hackerspace! by Sho Sho Smith — Kickstarter.

Categories
Drones Release_Candidate

Everyone Who Wants a Drone Will Have One Soon

Semi-autonomous flying things are already available to the general public and will continue to become more available. Yet our intuitive privacy settings, our security forces, and our sense of property all assume humans on the ground.

Let me posit this: Drones will make traditional fences as obsolete as gunpowder and cannons made city walls.

via Everyone Who Wants a Drone Will Have One Soon – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic.

Categories
Brand_New_World Uncategorized

Eliza & Granny Jo



Olive Hill & Carter Caves 136, originally uploaded by griffey.

We don’t post here much anymore, as Eliza is keeping us busier than ever and posting here has taken a backseat. But this was too good to not mention, as seeing Eliza interacting with her great-grandmother was one of the best things I’ve seen all year.

Categories
3D Printing FutureTech Open Hardware Release_Candidate

3-D Printer Company says “not with our machine”

The WikiWeapons/Printable Gun project seems to be drawing the ire of not only one of the largest 3D printer manufacturers in the US:

Stratasys’s legal counsel wrote back: “It is the policy of Stratasys not to knowingly allow its printers to be used for illegal purposes. Therefore, please be advised that your lease of the Stratasys uPrint SE is cancelled at this time and Stratasys is making arrangements to pick up the printer,” stated the letter, which Wilson posted to Defense Distributed’s website. The next day, contractors hired by the company arrived at Wilson’s apartment in an Enterprise rental van and took the printer.

…but also the ATF:

Wilson visited the ATF field office in Austin on Monday to ask about the legal and regulatory issues surrounding the Wiki Weapons project, he tells Danger Room. Instead, he was brought into a room, questioned and was told the agency was preparing to visit his apartment this afternoon for an “investigation,” he says. He added that the ATF believes he’s not broken any laws, and that the agency believes 3-D printed guns fall into a regulatory gray area, but that he still needs to get licensed if he’s to manufacture a weapon.

This is going to be really, really interesting. Is it illegal to post instructions for a printable weapon? Where do those lines fall? The next 5 years is going to make these sorts of questions very troublesome…and just wait another 10 years until molecular-level printing is happening and see what that does for drug laws.

via 3-D Printer Company Seizes Machine From Desktop Gunsmith | Danger Room | Wired.com.

Categories
FutureTech Release_Candidate Wearable computing

Augmented Reality Welding Mask

Incredible augmented reality technology that has real-world, everyday use: use cameras and computers to make seen what can’t been seen by the normal eye. In this case, it’s welding that benefits, but there is an obvious extension into many other fields.

As computers become even more powerful, it will be possible to do similar real-time HDR image processing with little more than a smartphone. There will be a point down the road where humans will be able to manufacture cheap and lightweight glasses that are capable of providing better imaging than our own eyes can manage. This will be one of several points where true augmentation of human capabilities begins — the very definition of cyborg. It’s not science-fiction, it’s the future.

via Augmented Reality Welding Mask With 100 Million to 1 Contrast RatioRoad to Virtual Reality.

Categories
Gadgets Library Issues LibraryBox presentation

The Future of Things: How everywhere changes everything

This morning I was privileged to give a keynote address to the Homewood Public Library in Homewood, IL for their Staff Development day. It was the first time I gave this particular talk, and it was a distillation of an essay that I’ve been trying to write for some time. The thrust of both is that the technological changes coming over the next 5-10 years are likely to be so transformative that we (libraries and librarians) need to be thinking now, hard, about how we prepare for them. How do libraries continue to measure our value when our historical measurements become useless? How can we use open hardware to prepare ourselves for these newly-needed measurements? How will the continued and unavoidable drop in price, increase in processing, and lessening of power consumption of hardware be useful for libraries?

I don’t have lots of answers. But I think these are the beginnings of some interesting questions.

So here’s my slide deck from the presentation. I hope to have the essay/post/whatever it ends up being done soon. I really want to start talking about this with other librarians.

The Future of Things from Jason Griffey
Categories
Library Issues Personal

Things that made me think

I’ve been re-reading a number of posts the last few days, and a few of them just truly stand out as things that have changed or are changing my thinking about tech and libraries…just really, really great things. If you haven’t read these yet, go do so:

  • Living our Values by Meredith Farkas – Meredith has been someone in libraries that I’ve looked up to for a long time, and is one of those people that seem to grok librarianship in a way that I’m still stumbling towards. There are others in this group (Jessamyn West, Michael Stephens, Michael Porter, Karen Schneider, and so many more) that I am indebted to for inspiring me to start writing this blog in the first place. If you haven’t obsessively read Meredith’s blog from beginning to end, you’re missing a great resource on how to be a librarian in the 21st century.
  • Walking Away from the American Chemical Society by Jenica Rogers – When searching for words to describe Jenica, I find that the same words describe her writing: Brave, amazing, inspiring, fierce, and honest. To find all of that in a person AND to have that person be in a leadership role AND be public about said role? I’m not sure it’s ever been done this way in libraries. She’s doing leadership right.
  • Hardware is Dead by Jay Goldberg & How Low (Power) Can You Go? by Charlie Stross – I’ve been spending many, many processing cycles thinking about hardware, and the Maker movement, the future of technology and libraries. These two essays sparked whole new pathways, and helped me light new areas to explore. I’ve got a lot to say about this stuff, which I’ll hopefully be doing over the next year or so.
  • How to See the Future by Warren Ellis – I’m just going to quote a section of this, because it’s so good I can’t even use my own paltry words in talking about it:

Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.

Go read these. I’ve got nothing to say that even comes close right now.

Categories
Open Hardware Release_Candidate

Marvell and Stanford create SMILE Plug

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and writing (none of it public, yet) about the upcoming hardware revolution. This project is right in the sweet spot of it…a classroom in a box for $30 worth of hardware. Awesome.

You may be wondering just what the SMILE Plug is good for? Well, Stanford’s SMILE Platform is designed to get students creating questions in the classroom instead of answering them. Dr. Paul Kim, Stanford School of Education CTO and Assistant Dean, sees the rote memorization and recall of facts method used in schools worldwide as a poor educational model because it doesn’t properly engage students or encourage higher-level thinking skills. SMILE addresses this issue by forcing students to ingest source material and generate their own questions about it. Those questions are then reviewed by both their teacher and fellow classmates — the more the question elicits critical thinking and reflects understanding of the information, the better that question will score.

via Marvell and Stanford create SMILE Plug cloud computer, SMILE Consortium to get companies and devs to build a better education system — Engadget.

Categories
3D Printing Release_Candidate

Warren Ellis on 3D printing

Somewhere, in some gilded bunker of the 1 percent, a very old, very rich man is laying plans to print himself a new cock.  Perhaps one with cameras in. And maybe a gun.

3D printing’s been around for a little while now, and it’s improving in leaps and bounds. On one end of the scale, I was talking to someone from a very famous special effects studio the other week, who was telling me they now have the facility to print cars.  One of their wizards took a current-day standard 3D printer (which tend to look like dodgy breadmakers), took it apart to see how it worked, and then used it to print the parts to make a massively larger 3D printer, which he then used to print off a car. Street-furniture set-dressing for movies.

via Print Your Own Penis | VICE.

Categories
3D Printing LibraryBox

Making things

It has been far too long since I posted here, but it’s been a very busy month. I’ve been busy working on an update of LibraryBox, making it fast, more stable, and most importantly, far easier to install. The code for LibraryBox v1.5 is on Github, and the installation instructions are forthcoming. One of the reasons that I’ve not published the current set of installation instructions is that I am working on a feature for Make Magazine on LibraryBox, and I want to ensure that they are as thorough as possible before they go to them, and up on the LibraryBox site.

I’ve also been playing around a bit with a MakerBot Replicator that we purchased at MPOW, figuring out its idiosyncrasies. Part of that process has been finding the easiest way to do simple object creation, so in that attempt, I designed a box to hold your LibraryBox:

You can edit one for yourself, or download and print. It’s also in place over at Thingiverse, if you want to download or comment on it there.

So the silence here isn’t to be taken for inactivity. 🙂 A new version of LibraryBox, an article for Make, and my first object on Thingiverse counts as a pretty good month.