todbot blog

Jed, aka “JedJedJed”, “Jedders”, “Jedbutt”, “Little Wacko” died today after living approximately 15 years. He died quietly in his home with me at his side.
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general, ramblings | 12 Comments »

In my periodic perusal of Warren Ellis’s blog, I see he’s linked to Nicolas Nova’s post about “The Ubiquitous Computing of Today”. Nicolas discusses a great LIFT07 paper, “Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision” by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2006). He and the paper highlight a persistent problem with ubicomp research: the ever-receding horizon of technology.

It’s a truism that the technology we need is “just around the corner”. This “proximal future” described in the paper is comforting because it means we don’t have to focus on the actual implementation issues. Just wait for Moore’s Law and everything’ll be alright. But this is a cop-out. I’ve been guilty of thinking this way and it bugs me. I don’t want promises of a future ubicomp world, I want that world right now.

At ThingM we’re focussing on what’s just possible. A tagline of ours is only half-jokingly “ThingM brings you one minute (+/- 20 seconds) from THE FUTURE!” We’re not about the Ubicomp of Tomorrow but rather the Ubicomp After The Next Commercial Break. Our two most recent technology sketches, LoveM and WineM can be built with today’s technology at a cost of 10x over the equivalent dumb version.

An order of magnitude cost increase for a smart version of a dumb object may seem like a lot, but isn’t when put in the context of product variations. Our most pervasive computing device, the cell phone, already exhibits over a factor of ten in price variation, from the $20 unlocked Nokias from yesteryear on Ebay to the tony $700 Sony Ericcson P990 uberphone. Another ubiquitous piece of technology, the TV, ranges from the $20 B&W portable CRT to the mammoth $10k Plasma HDTV.

The markets most allied with ubicomp, electronic gadgets, exhibit enormous price sensitivity, expanding upward in features and price from a minimally-priced base. Most of us buy in the middle to try to hit the sweet spot of the most features with the highest economy of scale. Those of us with special requirements or desires aim at the high-end. This is one reason, as Gibson puts it, the future is already here, just unevenly distributed.

As technology suffuses more into everyday objects, those objects will exhibit the same price elasticity of gadgets. Many domestic objects already do because of luxury and designer brands. The difference in comfort between a no-name leather easy chair from Target and an Eames lounger from Design Within Reach does not track the 10x difference in cost. The cost of adding intelligence to the DWR chair is the same as the sales tax on it. The objects at the high end of the price scale are the ones likely to first incorporate ubicomp technology, making them a better value compared to their non-intelligent siblings. As economies of scale kick in, these new features will become cost-effective for the entire price range.

Exploring what will be possible in a decade’s time is a useful and inspiring task. But until we have nanoassemblers, if we want to impact the lives of people today, we must discover and utilize the technologies available today that are on the verge of having high economies of scale.

ramblings, ubicomp | No Comments »

I gave a talk at the Sketching in Hardware 1 conference. It was a great conference, full of amazing people and hosted at an astounding location. I’ll write more on the conference later.

My talk was “USB on Rails”. The USB HID standard enables the sending and receiving of arbitrary data-structures (”objects”) between a host PC and a device. All without any additional device drivers, since the HID driver is built in to all OSs. Many sketching tools or demos use USB, but introducing them to the unintiated means lots of reboots for driver installs. The title is a silly, but half-serious, take of applying the philosophy of Rails to hardware-to-computer interfacing: solve the common case simply, but allow deviations. More on this later, for now, here’s my talk’s slides:

hardware-hacking, ramblings, sketching | 10 Comments »

So I’ve written a tool that can turn any parametric equation into a series of Roomba movement commands. Mostly, anyway. The parametric equations I’m predominately focusing on are the hypotrochoid series of equations used in a Spirograph.

To explore the space of hypotrochoid curves I created SpiroExplorer, a simple Processing applet that lets you to adjust the equation parameters in real-time. You can do the following things while it’s drawing:

- left/right arrows change “r”, the radius of the inner moving circle
- up/down arrows change “d”, the pen’s distance from center of the moving circle
- ,/. changes “R”, the radius of the big fixed outer circle
- +/- changes scale
- [/] changes “dtheta”, the increment size (resolution, essentially)
- space bar randomizes parameters
- return key clears the screen

Click the below to play with SpiroExplorer:

programming, ramblings, roomba | No Comments »

I’ve been playing around with Processing in order to visualize complex Roomba movements but instead have been having making little graphics programs that amuse me.

Thus the below. Click on each on to start it going.

I guess this is generative art, but mostly it feels like wanking to me. Lots of fun, but still.

ramblings | No Comments »

It has started.

(image caption: factory robot wrestles Glock-9 from off-duty officer, shoots him)

They’re not going to take any of our crap anymore.

Scattered reports around the country show a coordinated effort by the machines to displace humanity as rulers of this planet.

ramblings | 2 Comments »

they would all look something like this. (18 MB MOV)

The lighting, the digital compositing, the motion graphics effects… all just perfect. And the hot milfs are nice too.

[from green towel and via the tween blog]

ramblings, video | No Comments »

dumb stream-of-consciousness replacing of ‘cat’ with ‘cache’ for movies

• That Darn Cache — You can never have too much
• Cache on a Hot Tin Roof — A story of casemodding gone horribly, horribly wrong
• The Cache From Outer Space – Computer technology gets uplifted via Roswell-related research
• The Cache In The Hash — Turns out you really do know more when stoned
• Cache Me If You Can — “Why don’t huge porn files load faster!?”

ramblings | No Comments »