Yet another new business emerging from the drop in cost of 3D printing. Makie is a company that lets you design your own doll digitally, which they then will print, dress, and send to you. They look incredible, and this is just the beginning of the massively-customizable toy explosion that is headed our way.
Yet another Kickstarter for cheap and connected sensors that record and report things about your environment. Seriously, people, these are going to be everywhere.
I’ve been talking for awhile now in my presentations and writing about how interfaces are changing, and how the way we design for information retrieval is going to evolve over the next few years as they do. Here’s a prime example of the sort of thing that will be trivial to do in a very short amount of time…gestures as UI for computing.
One of the things that I’ve been most often asked about the Librarybox project is “What’s it for?”. That’s an honest question, and I’ve had a host of answers: to help serve files to areas without wifi but with devices, to serve files to users in a controlled fashion that doesn’t involve wider Internet access, etc.
But an email I got just a week or so ago put everything into focus for me. Here it is, edited to protect the identity of the person writing and anonymize the location a bit.
I’m a foreigner living in [REDACTED], and volunteer twice a week to help low-income [REDACTED] learn English. English classes are obscenely expensive, so it’s becomes a means for the Haves to keep the Have-not’s out of more lucrative jobs and overseas educational opportunities. Helping really motivated people, who just can’t afford access to this sort of education is quite rewarding and enjoyable.
We get upwards of 100 people showing up in the park to practice every week, so I do quite a bit of running around. One of the issues is that because of the [INFORMATION CONTROLS], often access to very simple, innocuous study material is blocked (of course well-to-do families have VPNs so don’t have these problems). So at first I would print things out, and then when the group got too large, encourages them to bring USB drives- which was a bit time consuming, and I’m concerned might attract the wrong sort of attention. Lately I’ve been using Piratebox, because even the cheapest [REDACTED] phones have wifi. It’s better than the alternatives to date, but as you pointed out it’s not really meant for the purpose and can be quite confusing…
[HARDWARE DISCUSSION REDACTED]…I just barely managed to get Piratebox installed- I’m not very good at command line. Most of the people who would probably get the best use out of this also would have similar problems, anything that could be done to simplify the install procedure would be great. If LibraryBox could simply open to some sort of file structure- read only, with no links or chat like the PirateBox has. Then I could just load the USB drive up directly with relevant study material for them to download to their phones, and at the cost so low I’m sure that the use would become widespread.
This is something I truly believe in, and a little English can make a massive difference in the quality of life here for some. Also for a hungry mind not to have access to books… well you probably feel
about the same way about that as I do or you would not have started this fork. So if any sort of donation would help with the development costs- please let me know.
As a result of this email, I would like to publicly ask for help with the project. I think two things need to be done: the first is moving the LibraryBox fork up to the current version of Piratebox, something which I have the hardware to start testing soon. But once I grok how to make the customizations work, I think the next step in the project is a true fork…producing an IPK that is installable directly to LibraryBox, bypassing Piratebox altogether. I had been holding out against this, hoping to continue to benefit from the code being produced by the Piratebox team. Once LibraryBox starts being a separate install, it becomes more complicated to merge code. But the letter above sold me, and I am asking for help with this.
If you feel as strongly as I do about the free flow of information, the sharing of books, and the education of the disadvantaged, help me. In the next couple of weeks I hope to have the customizations done, and if you have any coding skills, or understand how to build IPK’s for install, help me make this easier for people like the author above. The idea that this project could be something that helps make lives better around the world…well, that has a way of inspiring me. I hope it inspires you to volunteer some time to help out.
If you have questions, ideas, or want to touch base to find out how you can help, use the contact form here.
You know that Internet-of-Things I’ve been talking about? Here’s an example, from two of the hottest products to come from Kickstarter:
Twine+Pebble: Connect your world to your wrist on Vimeo on Vimeo
Categories
A shot across the bow
If you had any doubts that Amazon’s Lending Library was eventually going to compete with public libraries, here’s where your doubts get shattered. From Amazon’s homepage today, on the announcement of all 7 Harry Potter books entering the Kindle Lending Library program:
With traditional library lending, the library buys a certain number of e-book copies of a particular title. If all of those are checked out, you have to get on a waiting list….the wait can sometimes be months.
With the Kindle Owners Lending Library, there are no due dates, you can borrow as frequently as once a month, and there are no limits on how many people can borow the same title…
The full image of the announcement is included after the click:
Categories
Carbon-Freeze Me
I cannot adequately express how much I want to do this. Really fun use of 3D scanning and 3D printing by Disney here, and only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the future of toys. As this sort of thing drops in price, it’ll be available at every Toys-R-Us.
Guests attending Star Wars Weekends at Walt Disney World this year will have a chance to be captured by Darth Vader, frozen in carbonite, and mounted inside Jabba the Hutt’s lair – or at least a notch or two short of that.
Here, in a time-lapse by Steven Alvarez, is 3 minutes of why we live here in Sewanee. Man, is it beautiful.
The Light from Stephen Alvarez on Vimeo.
Client: University of the South
Music by Boy Named Banjo
http://boynamedbanjo.bandcamp.com/
24 hours on the campus of the University of the South.
The original page for the video is
http://give.sewanee.edu/thelight/
There is no video in this video.
I shot 27,000 images in the course of 3 weeks. Around 5,000 appear in the finished video.
Everything was shot as Canon raw, converted in Adobe Lightroom and edited in Apple Final Cut Pro.
Motion control is with a Dynamic Perceptions Stage Zero Dolly.
Cameras were Canon 5D MK II, the MK IIIs didn’t fit into my workflow.
lens are all Canon
16-35mm L 2.8 model 2
24mm L 1.4
34mm L 1.4
50mm L 1.2
70-200mm L IS 2.8
85mm 1.8
300mm L 4
Check out Cubify, a 3D printer for the non-hacker among us. Complete with wifi printing, cartridge-based printing media, and a design that is less hacker and more modernist architecture.
Remember all those talks I gave over the last few months talking about a data explosion because sensors were getting so cheap that they will soon be ubiquitous and allow us to measure everything and anything?
Yeah. So that’s happening.
tōd:Connect Real World Actions to Mobile Devices and the Web by Rowdy Robot