Paper Bits

Jan 28

“It’s an offensively brilliant idea. Barcode Kanojo’s free iPhone app will scan any product you have knocking around your house and turn it into a delicate anime girl over whom you can obsess”

Sexy Beans | Five Players (via iamdanw)

This is not a joke. You can scan a package of index cards, and if no-one has scanned that UPC first, you get to name a submissive anime girl, who will love you forever. Until some other obsessive nerd gives her more money.

This is the first time a spime has given me a case of the howling fantods.

Nov 30

emergentdigitalpractices:

*Nice homemade Dutch CNC router, there. If you can fab a fabber, you oughta be able to route a router. http://protospace.nl/ultimaker-en-mantis-machines-make http://www.flickr.com/photos/protospace/sets/72157625071449720/with/5036557238/ (via Spime Watch: the Mantis Machine | Beyond The Beyond)

Nov 3

Papernet Pattern: Data Shadows

See also Dave on Information Shadows for a more refined and just plain overall better exploration of the idea.

Communication Nation: Information shadows and spimes:

In his book Smart Things, Mike Kuniavsky talks about the information shadow as an essential element of a smart thing. The information shadow is the information that’s associated with an object such as its name, number, position in space and time, and so on.

Good timing…

Oct 27

Sketching in hardware with microprinters

I just bought a CBM-1000 thermal printer off eBay.

This is a simple, serial-controlled printer, which some clever people have worked out how to connect to the internet. And they’ve shared the code and howtos in the best tradition of open-source.

So, what is it good for?

Not sure yet. That’s the point. It’s a platform for sketching.

For one example, see Ben O’Steen’s visualization of MP expenses:

QRcodes piling up in a box

The Guardian had run a crowd-sourcing effort to uncover the MPs expenses and had made their data available to hack with so this was the perfect place to start. After an hour of tinkering with the layout of the receipt, we set the machine going.

Each receipt has a QRCode, linking it back to the data it was generated from.

Box of QRCode Slips

Another way of looking at this is, the paper slips are physical shadows of digital data. The URL embedded in the QRCode links the object back to its source.

Think about that. Given a thing, you can grab a link right off it, and generate another copy.

Digital Alchemy

Add version control or a wiki-like history to the generating data, and you get something even more interesting (in my opinion): an object that contains the history of its design intent:

Because it is linked to, or even contains, the sum of the decisions, mistakes, variations, source material, notes, comments, and other metadata that you’ve used to track and manage the project, the thing has a kind of DNA. It’s as though it were food that contains, not only the recipe, but the history of how the recipe was worked out, by trial and error.

A microprinter seems to be a very simple way to play with this kind of proto-spime. Ish. Thing.

We will see.

3D Printer Alchemy - MakerBot Industries

A little over a month ago I had pondered how cool it would be to have things on Thingiverse embedded with QR codes – so you could show the bottom of the object to a friend, they could grab the digital file, and print off a duplicate. Well, l0b0 has done just that with his parametric box!