Published by kipbot on March 5, 2010
under misc, gadgets
A friend of mine is plugged into many toy subcultures. This one is the most fascinating, strangest, trippiest and to some plain offensive. It’s simulated guns. These are toy guns that shoot air pellets, but are built exactly to the specifications of real guns. Tokyo Marui is the leading maker of these guns and you can find them on eBay and various other sellers. youtube is loaded with videos of kids reviewing them. There’s a lot of interesting stuff around these toys. The simulations are possibly more complex to design than the real ones. While the real ones have relatively simple mechanisms for striking metal on metal to fire a real bullet, these toys require the placement of air systems and batteries that are powerful enough to propel the pellet and create realistic kickback. They are freakishly real. I’ve never held a handgun and I felt weird holding this one. And the seller’s culture is full of warnings and complaints about people buying them long enough to shoot a movie scene and then returning them. Trippy.
The best part, of course, are the kooky Japanese warning illustrations:
Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers. With the exception of Interface Culture, I would gladly see every one of his books (Everything Bad is Good for You, EMERGENCE, Ghost Map, and even The Invention of Air) be made mandatory reading people in digital design, digital strategy, digital marketing. Johnson goes deep into cognitive patterns, longer arcs of human behaviors around entertainment, information-seeking, and learning and provides great frameworks for understanding the features and technologies that are usually the center of gravity in digital discussion.
His Timearticle on the iPad does a nice job of setting the right tone for discussion. Rather than being millenial (Apple fanboys) or crotchety (iPad haters), he grounds the conversation in the longer arc of how we’ve envisioned computing in the last ten or so years:
If you time-traveled back to 1995 and asked the leading futurists of that time where our machines were soon to take us, you might well have heard just as much rhapsodizing about document-centric interfaces as that about hypertext and the World Wide Web. The first generation of software interfaces forced the user to think too much about the tools, the story went, and too little about the task. …
The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone’s — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It’s apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see. According to the demo last week, the main way to launch iWork documents is by an internal document-selection process after launch, where your files are presented to you in a gallery format.
I truly don’t know how I feel about this. It might be genius. Maybe most users are more confused by Finders and File Explorers than I’ve realized. But I can’t help thinking that if the iPad really wants to be a device that you might take on a business trip instead of the laptop, it’s going to need a little more document-centrism.
Couple things to love here:
- pointing out that there is a widget-centricity to the iPad. Hadn’t noticed it, but now that I think about it, it sounds like a bad way to make netbooks suck less.
- The comment that “most users . . . might be more confused than I realized”, highlights another weird dynamic in the discussion — just how bad do laptops and netbooks suck? Aren’t hundreds of millions of people living with these supposedly “fatally flawed” devices? A lot of the dialogue about the iPad as netbook talk about how unpleasant people find computing, but is the problem of OS stability and feature bloat so bad that we need a neutered appliance to replace it?
And what a great writer Steven Johnson is. I’ve been scribbling in my notebook, in evernote and two blog entries (this’n and this’n here) to get this idea across:
The iPhone revolutionized smartphones, but I think we all accept that smartphones were in our future. There is no equivalent consensus that tablets or couch computers or casual computers are inevitably on the road ahead. We don’t even agree on the aims here: Is the iPad replacing the laptop or supplementing it?
I love this Instructable and wish I could do it for me. The author, responding to that clear-but-squishy-edged school of thought that various stimuli are good for infants, created a remote-controlled pattern of fiber optic lights in his soon-to-be-born baby’s ceiling. He can remotely control the overall brightness, the rate of twinkling, and the phases of the moon (waxing and waning):
An ignite talk by Mark Argo about the increasing open-sourcing and personalization of gadgets begins with a fun account of the way in which the word gadget has evolved and been depreciated. According the usual on-line sources (OED, dictionary.com, Wikipedia), the origin of gadget is not entirely clear, but there was a late-19th early-20th century sense that gadget was originally a good thing. An early appearance of the word occurs in the 1918 memoir of a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (”Above the Clouds”): “our ennui was occasionally relieved by new gadgets — “gadget” is the Flying Corps slang for invention! Some gadgets were good, some comic, and some extraordinary.”
Argo highlights that gadget covered useful inventions back in the day and lightly laments its devolution. (Think how it is used today: “gadget” plays are gimmicks in football and seen most frequently in bad football movies; gadget freaks are unnaturally attached to their devices; gadget and gizmo are ways for normal people (either the hero or the villainous suit who doesn’t get it) to marginalize something as esoteric).) Argo kind of undermines his attempt to recover the word by highlighting some laughable, if useful (who knows), canes: one has a ruler for measuring horses at the racetrack, one has doctor supplies.
One of the things this sparked for me, was that we no longer have a word that covers the sense of invention in the “Above the Clouds” quote. Something that highlights the excitement and potential value of something. The Name of the Rose (one of my favorite movies and favorite books) has a great gadget scene in which Brother William (of Baskerville . . . get it?) is inspecting a book and whips out a crude pair of glasses.
This gets the other brothers all a-twitter:
Which prompts the best Sean Connery picture ever:
An earlier scene shows Brother William’s other ‘dangerous’ possessions:
In the scene, Brother William slowly unpacks the items (for our benefit) but, the moment he hears footsteps (of the approaching abbot), he throws a cloth over them and assumes a casual air. The gadgets are an hourglass and an astrolabe. (Brother William takes astronomical measurements at night.)
I love how these things have life-changing and even heretical potential. Sadly, my mind, now owned by marketing-speak, can only come up with tepid words: innovation, game-changing, category-creator, novelty, differentiator. Invention has potential, but it goes to sad cranks toiling in their workshop hoping to strike it rich with their invention (and the inevitable cliche of the inventor who actually does create something great, but never sees the rewards). Gadget’s not terribly exciting, but it has some of the energy of the word invention back in the day.
On his site, Argo lists the links he refers ton in a delightfully low-rent way:
Psyche! I finally made it to Maker Faire and it was every bit as fun, interesting, and inspiring as I hoped. It was big and massive with welded giants of art and smashery. It was cool and witty with installations that made you laugh and wonder how the hell they did it. It was people-focused, having a large number of things that required no power or revived old skills (from vaudeville to composting to a lotta lotta Victoriana). Most of all, though, it was smart and, I hate to use the word, empowering. Everything had wit and intelligence and everything was comprehensible with a little help from the presenters, who were psyched to explain what they were doing.
My favorite, and I kept going back over and over again, were the soldering areas. Both the MAKERShed (MAKE Magazine’s store at the Faire) and Sparkfun (my favorite purveyor of fine electronic goods) had large tables set up with soldering stations where people could take the kits they had just bought and put them together with the help of staff.
These tables were never less than half full and it looked like there was always a mix of adults/kids, noobs/pros, male/female (though the females were predominantly adult). Sparkfun and Make both did a nice job of putting out projects that were doable, but not simplistic. Some kits let you solder two wires coming out of a battery pack to a thing that’s already running. While you learn to make a decent connection, and you’re not likely to fry any parts, you don’t really learn much and it’s not all that energizing. These kits, involved matching resistors, getting polarities right, and required some precision. I love the intensity on everyone’s faces.
The only disappointment is that there wasn’t much around renewable, social, or eco-preneurial. The DIY ethos was strong — make rather than buy, fix rather than replace — but it seemed like they could have dialed some of that up more, without being over-earnest or taking the fun out of it. Example: they had several playground toys designed by MAKErs. They were fun, looked cool, and had some interesting story to them — one was bicycle powered, one worked like a swing and was powered by leaning and leaning back. It would have been cool, given the theme, to see some of the playground toys that generate electricity or pump water.
Still, it was awesomely fun. I bought my second arduino kit and I’m converting space into a little work area and unpacking my soldering iron and box of switches, pots, leds, resistors, caps, transistors, etc and getting back to work. My first goal is to work with the Peggy:
It’s a board that allows you to address a 25*25 grid of multi-color LEDs. Loads of possibilities, especially if they’re connected and working in synch.
More pictures and vids and more to be added to a set on my flickrstream.
Flying out to MakerFaire in SF tomorrow and continue to be psyched, especially since they are focusing on renewable/sustainable America. But there’s a group trying create a Maker Faire in Africa — even more focused on social consequences and improvements from tinkering/making/experimenting ethos:
When discussions of wealth creation and poverty reduction are made in reference to the continent, for a variety of reasons manufacturing is left off the table. This is partly the fault of education and or orientation. Making fabrication the next “big thing” in a sense could go some way in changing these attitudes. Manufacture – literally, fabrication by hand – is exciting, and exists across the continent of Africa, and is abundant – from centers sited at dumps, where scrap metals are abundant, to more formal collections of mechanics and repairers who have set up shop in the urban core. Much of this curiosity, talent, and entrepreneurial spirit in manufacturing remains trapped in the informal sectors - bricoleurs and tinkerers who ingeniously meet hyper local demands and tend not to scale.
During President Obama’s Inaugural Address, lots of people got jazzed, and many tweeted about supporting, celebrating, and being “”the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.” MAKE Magazine is building the Maker Faire and the most recent issue of the magazine about the transformative power of DIY — to innovate,to satisfy, and to solve problems.
In the intro to the issue, Editor Dale Dougherty, makes the big but cool claim that “makers offer one of the best hopes for the future.” He has a list of things people can do to “Make Things”; improve “Energy Usage” (monitoring and improving home usage; make “Transportation” smarter and better for us (bicycles, electric cars, reduced transport overall); better handling of “Food and Water” (raise your own chickens!, cook (gasp!)); and do more “Learning”. I hope the list gets viral (I don’t want to do two scans), but it’s worth re-typing the “Make Things” list:
Make things that people want
Make things so that you don’t need to buy them
Start a business that employs people making things
Make things closer to where they’ll be used
Repair things instead of replacing them
Harvest usable components from devices and redeploy them
Get to know your local salvage yard and recycling center
For a while I have been, not obsessed but itched, by the notion that environment and sustainability has a big maker hook. In an age where men can no longer tinker with their cars (they’re too chip-based, and the engines are increasingly black boxes), focusing on their power supply, tweeking their environment, making their stuff last longer and hacking it to work better, could be a satisfying alternative.
Sadly, for me, the first place my head goes is my last trip to a hardware/home supplies store and my urge to buy a sewing machine and make pillows and curtains, cuz I hate buying that stuff. Ah save . . . I also had the urge to hack motherlovin’ sh*t out of solar panel backup systems at Home Depot. (Flickr link provided as proof that I had this impulse BEFORE admitting to the sewing one. Excessive swearing purely out of compensation, of course.)
Mattel’s electronic football game might be the simplest great game I’ve played.
When I posted this to flickr, someone reminded me that the game had a click that got faster and more menacing the longer you rushed for . . . So simple: three direction keys, one bright led, 5 medium ones.
Riding to and from Washington on the Acela yesterday, we were only able to find seats in the quiet car. At 5:45 in the morning, I reminded my colleagues to bring their DSes so we could play some head-to-head games (which, sadly, I hadn’t done on the DS before).
For those who haven’t been in a quiet car on Amtrak, it’s a trip. Manna from heaven for people who need to concentrate, want to sleep, or hate the loud cell phone conversations. The self-policing, however, can be over-zealous. Two co-passengers yesterday sat behind a woman who was sitting next to a man who apparently was a loud PC-typist. In reportedly pissy tones, she grilled the percussionist-emailist about how long he planned to type, with heavy sighs, and pointed intonation. It’s a tough crowd.
But three of us are punchy with morning coffee and adrenaline and lack of sleep (It was a 7 AM train, with boarding at 6:30) and need to play Mario Kart, a competitive racing game with all the cute characters from Nintendo. In addition to racing, you pick up power-ups which can give you speed boosts, but which can also be offensive things to lob at your opponents (turtles that you trip, octopus that sprays ink on your windshield so you can’t see, and the classic banana peel). So, while we’re playing, we’re desperately trying to be quiet — whispering trash talk, creating Nintendo-appropriate equivalents of flipping the bird, celebrating wins, taunting when you’ve done something clever — it was awesome.
Better yet, though, on the way back, we played Mario Party, a game where you roll dice and move around collecting points and things, but also where the squares allow you to play mini-games (like whack a mole, connect the dots, tangoes). One of the games required you to blow into the microphone in order to knock down a wall. Hard, fast breaths were advised. I was sitting at a table with three strangers, determined to win, and blowing into the mic as discreetly (and quickly and powerfully) as I could. It was crazy awesome funny. (The scotch from my flask helped, but it was fun under any circumstances.)
