A half-arsed mudslide of twigs and things

Ok – this post is probably going to be quite incoherent. Stuff has happened etc… turned up, with no rhyme or reason to it, and I am slightly hungover.

Firstly, some art

Someone has made wax models of his facebook friends… but with his own face, and coloured according to how close their survey scores align. A bit like that Chinese terracotta army… but… friendlier.

In a spooky, self-referential sort of way.

It would be quite cool to give them hexapod legs… like these ones etc, but smaller

And they could follow you about, firing pingpong balls and singing rousing patriotic music – the sort of thing that the “I’m So Ronery” guy use to go in for

Who’s son was (according to Chinese Twitterers) assassinated in Beijing this morning, but who probably wasn’t.

So…. apropos of that… I had to buy a smartphone because I invested in this kickstarter thing:

So I got the best Android I could – and my, what a quantum leap that has been… I didn’t have a cellphone at all for about 3 years… my last one was a little steam-powered thing made out of silver plastic with the paint peeling off… so I’ve jumped about 5 evolutionary stages in a single go. Bit of an eye-opener. That is all.

Ok not all – I still think that we haven’t actually fully discovered what smartphones are for yet… I mean they’re “for” making phone calls and taking photos about as much as computers are “for” running spreadsheet software and playing pong.

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I’ve finally cracked and upgraded my laptop… it was running ubuntu 9.10… now running 10.04… the upgrade took about 4 hours (slow download of big files) and went off without a hitch… on a dual-boot PC. I was a bit worried about that… but as is the way with linux, a smattering of small, but really fucking hard to fix hassles is slowly coming to light, eg:

1) plugging in headphones doesn’t mute the onboard speakers
2) I remap the keyboard (because whoever designed “the keyboard” was a fucking ning-nong)… and the remapped delete key (RHS ctrl) now acts as CTRL-X.

As well as the usual flotilla of minor annoyances, largely involving disabling new features, and getting the system back the way it was before.

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I’m opening a fablab in Wellington.

Have incorporated etc – haven’t found premises yet. More on that later.

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Oh yea – the reason I upgraded my laptop is so I can play with this http://joostn.github.com/OpenJsCad/ – which is an open-source, 3D CAD program that doesn’t use WYSIWYG, but raw javascript… which is the approach that proper web-devs use. Everything is hand-coded.

It’s really easy to use – and the fact that the basis of everything is mathematical makes for better precision… but I kindof wish there was some way of doing beziers.

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So that’s probably enough for now. In other news, The NASA peeps have invented a micro-capsule drug-delivery system

so you can “gland” drugs like they do in Iain Banks books… although I imagine there’s a way to go before you can do it voluntarily.

and…

Anonymous might just have destroyed a Letting-People-Get-Away-With-War-Crimes legal firm.

and…

The Japanese govt is opening a robot farm in the tsunami area – although the robots look like tractors,

rather than what I was imagining which was hundreds of hexapods with my face on them, crashing about and wreaking destruction etc.