Link Latte #10

Another bunch of stuff. I’m having difficulty keeping my shit together of late. I always think these things are cop-outs etc – but they generally take longer to put together than normal blog-posts, so you can stop your moaning.

Anyway, the week that was:

1) How to make glow in the dark stuff

“WARNING” It says (in a voice like a droid), “This procedure should only be performed by, or under the supervision of, an experienced chemist”.

Is that the sort of thing I should be doing? Yes, I think it is. This is exactly the sort of thing I should be doing.

Although in today’s wack-job paranoid world you’d probably find yourself trying to explain how it wasn’t a drugs lab to some spotty 14 year old policeman with a moustache. You’d get your stuff back after 6 months of hassle, but you’d be “flagged”. Put on a database, and for the rest of your life you’d hear funny clicking sounds whenever you picked up the phone.

2) Aviary have made all their stuff free

I like Aviary – never use their stuff mind, but in principle… I like them. I went on about them last year I think.

When web-companies suddenly release all their content for free, it generally means that the subscription model has failed, and that they’re going to try advertising. Aviary claims that the subscription model hasn’t failed, and that they’re just doing this because they’ve got a load of venture capital – which may be true. I mean the VC bit is almost certainly true… but… the subscription model bit? Partly true I’d say.

3) Crowd-sourced funding for stuff

Indiegogo – which is a much-needed alternative to that other one which is US-only. It seems that people mainly want movies funded.

Which is sortof interesting – because I was reading this thing the other day in which the Jumping-On-And-Off-The-Treadmills band was bitching about EMI not letting them repeat the thing that made them successful in the first place… but at the end they said that the role Record Companies used to play was as Risk Aggregators – and I can’t fault the writer on this. They did… and even though the other problems that record companies used to solve no longer exist, this one still does. We still need risk-aggregation I think… but we’ll have a far richer and more inclusive culture, if we can crowd-source this… than if we have…

… well, Daryl Hannah said it best “What’s the greatest threat to film-making today?

The same as always: the fact that there’s a bunch of guys in charge, with sometimes questionable tastes, who dictate what gets seen.”

4) Google Goggles

The most convincing (in fact possibly only convincing) description of augmented reality I’ve seen so far

The same article had a thing with real-time voice->voice language translation… which is pretty impressive.

5) Kids spied on by schools through remote-controlled webcams on their laptops

I have mixed feelings about this one…

a) What is it with hierarchy these days? Are they fucking insane? Why is it that every single time I read the internets (or even turn on the TV news) there’s some example of top-down control completely over-shooting the bounds of what any sane person would regard as acceptable?

I mean how do you get to the point where you think it’s acceptable to do this?

b) My mum and dad are teachers. Most of their friends are teachers. I spent my childhood surrounded by teachers – and I can’t imagine any of them actually having the time, let alone the will to do this.

Then again, some of the teachers that taught at schools I went to were total cunts and should never have been allowed near children at all. They weren’t child molesters… they were just violent, blinkered disciplinarians.

6) Laser-Cutting is a lot more expensive than I thought it was… and I can’t really afford to experiment with this stuff (that much) any more.

7) Bloom Boxes – Looks like Bollocks to me.

Or just incredibly bad reporting.

People seem to be falling all over themselves to sing the praises of this science-free innovation… which costs about a million dollars per unit, and still needs gas as an input.

“Gas”? Any kind of gas? Yep, Apparently any kind of gas. Well I guess that’s good but… what if you haven’t got any gas?

There are some fairly major-profile names behind it, but I have my doubts. It follows the Bullshit Template to the letter. Apart from the major-profile names.

8) Chatroulette?

Well I don’t have a webcam and I suspect that the internet is too slow in New Zealand to actually use it.

But there’s been a load of excitement and hype etc, so it would be remiss to leave it out… and according to this, it looks like fun.

I’ll ask twitter if anyone’s managed to use it.

9) Android Controlled Lego Thing

I can’t believe that Lego nearly went bust recently – and my Brother pointed out the range of toys that brought it back from the brink… and they’re kindof pre-made-transformer type things which… um… kindof seem to me as though they require (or invite) less imagination than common or garden lego.

Lego is one of those things that if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. And we would. If lego does go bust (and I sincerely hope it doesn’t) people will start making their own – if not immediately, then within the decade.