Tinkering With Torrone

segway torrone Contacting gadget lovers is always difficult – the simple option of email, lost in a forest of communication possibilities. Do you chat to them on aim, ichat, msn or irc? Dive into a VOIP phone chat? Get their encryption key for truly private ping-pong, drop a line to one of their many sites, or just send a message to their watch? All of these options are available on Phil Torrone’s www.flashenabled.com, which is both a companion site for his book about using Flash for multimedia devices, as well as a depository for his lon-n-n-ng list of gadget hackery, optimisation and remixing. Fresh on the job at the new makezine.com, he took time to beam us these answers using nothing but a can-opener, a hello kitty vibrator and one of McGyver’s shoelaces:

What’s the thrust behind MAKE magazine?
MAKE looks at the world with do-it-yourself lenses. We have tons of projects, hacks, mods and articles – from everyday technology to incredibly insane inventions. We celebrate your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will. Dan Bricklin described Make Magazine quite nicely “This is a dream publication for an engineer or an engineer at heart”.

Why do you enjoy gadget tinkering so much?
As a child I didn’t care for toys – I was far more interested in taking electronics apart. My dad had to hide the tools at one point, I of course fashioned my own out of utensils, that wasn’t exactly well received. I need to know how something works in order to use it, and usually try and find ways to make it do something else, like a robot army.

Have you ever been troubled by companies about publicising hacks to their products?
Not directly, but I recently wrote an article about unlocking the new T-Mobile Sidekick II and putting “developer” applications on it. After the article hit, T-Mobile added a new requirement of faxing a request to unlock your phone, and the fax machine isn’t working. Apparently tons of people were unlocking their phones and installing RSS readers, other IM clients and other stuff T-Mobile didn’t really dig.

What do you really do with your shower webcam and ipod?
The shower cam was a project I was pitching to a high end hotel. I thought it’d be interesting to have an “opt-in” shower cam, so after all the party people hit the showers at 3am they could “tune” in to others folks doing the same thing. I needed to test the sound and waterproofing, no iPods were injured in this experiment.

Segway madness! What are those beasts like to ride?
It’s pretty much as close as you can get to a machine reading your mind and moving based on thought. For most people, if they “think” about moving forward, their center of gravity move a little forward and that’s what causes the Segway gyroscopes to move the transporter forward. When you’re going down a steep hill, at 12.5 mph, standing, it’s pretty close to flying on a magic carpet I suspect.

Can you describe that self-balancing ‘ibot mobility device’ a little more?
At Dean Kamen‘s house I was able to sit in it and use it. It’s perhaps the most incredible piece of technology I’ve ever tried – like two invisible hands are holding you safely and firmly in the air, just waiting for your command to move. For a disabled person this technology changes your world, stairs, mobility, you can go and do just about anything. After I chatted with this fellow, I couldn’t help but get a little teary eyed- it’s rare to see such a lifechanging technology actually in use.

Upcoming issues on the technology battlefield?
The battles will have many names, DRM, broadcast flag, p2p, fair use…In the end, it’s all about the content cartels being able to legislate how and what technology is created. We can’t let that happen. For the first time, everyone can create, share, mix, remix and create- in parallel the movie, tv and music industries are trying to take our rights away on a daily basis. If you haven’t visited the EFF, go there now, and support them- they’re fighting the good fight.

Why haven’t we seen you shoes that ‘spell words in the air as u walk’ everywhere?
When it happens, people will never forgive me. Actually, a couple shoe companies have approached me- but nothing really came out of it. The latest version I’m working on spelling the miles and pace (for runners) when you look down. We’ll see, it usually take 100 or so bad ideas to get the one good one.

In your opinion the best mp3 player out there is ?
3G iPod, you can install Linux and record high quality audio. I use it all the time, it’s the one that has the 4 buttons that Apple discontinued and the most hackable one out there.

Desert island, you and 3 devices?
I suppose I could get tactical and assemble devices in order to get saved from the island, but I’d be quite content with a solar panel, my 15″ Powerbook g4 and an Aibo – man’s best friend and all…

PS ( check www.segway.com – you know you want to )

by Sean Healy, March 20, 2005 0 comments

‘Will George Jetson Drive To Work?’

For those still waiting patiently for the 21st century to arrive, a dip this week, via the web-world of automobile obsessives, into the gas guzzling future of personal tranportation.

Up In The Sky – It’s Bird, It’s A Plane – No, It’s A Flying Car!
“No matter how you look at it the automobile is only an interim step on our evolutionary path to independence from gravity. That’s all it will ever be. Moller International’s M400 Skycar volantor is the next step.”
– believe the hype@ www.moller.com/skycar ?

Only from the Northern hemisphere nation who brought the world the Gulf War, parts I & II, and is the world’s largest, massively in debt, consumer of oil, would we expect should an appropriate invention for our times : ‘the flying car’. Inventor Paul Moller believes in a future where ‘personal transport vehicles’ will be available that are ‘as safe, efficient, affordable and easy-to-use as automobiles’. At the moment you can leave a $500,000 deposit which will deliver you a skycar ( once tests have been finished ), that can carry 4 passengers, travel at around 350mph, hover with one engine failed and use automotive gasoline. NASA cats are behind it too – or at least one of them is ( a NASA janitor perhaps?), and Daniel Goldin’s vision for a gas-guzzling future is to:
“Enable doorstep-to-destination travel at four times the speed of highways to 25% of the nation’s suburban, rural and remote communities in ten years and more than 90% in 25 years.”

Car-Parking In 2020
We have just over 6 billion people on the planet currently. We’ve yet to reach 1 billion for cars yet though, a prospect General Motors predicts will happen by 2020. That’s one thousand million cars. Chinese officials hope to have 140 million of those cars on the round in 2020, more than currently on the road in the States. More ambitiously, the forward thinkers at Toyota expect that we’ll have some 3.25 billion cars on the road by 2050. Given there’s a UN estimated 9 billion peeps on the planet by then, that’s a personal transportation vehicle for one in three of us. What per centage of those are flying vehicles is up for grabs, as will be all the inner-city rooftop parking spots.

Fuelling The Future
“The solution to the problem of the auto won’t be found under its hood.”
– Alex Steffen, from worldchanging.com, reminding that public transport, energy efficiency, bicycling, walking, and better urban planning can do more for improving transport in cities than technological advancements.

Funnily enough, a car causes more pollution before it’s ever driven than in it’s entire lifetime of driving. ( Think : extracting raw materials, transporting raw materials and producing the car). Pollution aside, 3 billion cars is a lotta gas guzzlin for gas we won’t have. Try googling ‘Peak Oil’ for a glimpse of the ending era of ‘cheaply accessible oil’ ( or read here : www.energybulletin.net/primer.php or see the freakish doco – www.endofsuburbia.com). They disagree about when it will happen, but most International energy bodies and institutions agree and understand that we will have less oil available in coming decades. Car manufacturers understand this too, and are already making plans to shift to hybrid engines that can switch between fuel and electricity – allowing energy to be partially gathered via renewable sources. They are also interested in hydrogen powered vehicles.

Is Hydrogen The Bomb?
Many speculators are keen on ‘hydrogen’ as a major fuel source of our future. Burning hydrogen produces a ‘smoke’ which is in fact water ( H2O), so a hydrogen economy would have definite benefits such as reduced air pollution. However as The Australian Technology Association point out, given that hydrogen needs to be separated and stored using energy from other sources to do so. In that sense hydrogen is a battery and not a fuel, and will still require lots of energy from elsewhere to make useful. By asking ‘How on earth do we charge the battery that is the hydrogen economy?’, the ATA remind that although hydrogen itself is attractive, there is still a long way to go to sustainably fuel our future.

Oh, “&” …
For my money, George Jetson’ll have a modem and a bicycle.

by Sean Healy, March 20, 2005 0 comments

Hacking Phones & Biology : Hilton, Hunter, Ukrainians

Hacker ( haxx0r ) Monthly, Feb 2005 : Paris Hilton gets her innards blasted over the internet, Hunter S Thompson to get his ashes fired out of a cannon, Ukrainians market kinky scientific breakthrough.

Phoney Games
Apparently because she chose her lost password question as ‘name my pet’ (the same pet chihuahua she often mentions in the mass media ), Paris Hilton’s mobile device ( a T-mobile sidekick II – which offers telephone & net access ) was recently hacked into, and it’s contents strewn across the internet like a sequined handbag being emptied in a toilet cubicle ( see the peeps here squawking over notes by Paris, camera snapshots by, and usually of her, mp3 messages, and phone numbers of celebs such as Christine Aguilera, Fred Durst, Eminem, StephenKing etc ). Already one site ( paris-hacked.com ) offers to send Hilton camera pics to your phone, and has for sale a whole bunch of trucker caps and ‘I hacked Paris’ Phone’ merchandise.

Paris ain’t alone though, because alongside spam and security threats, a definite side effect of the increasing density of our communications, is the way the private is becoming public – whether it’s a blogger writing personal information about someone else, or ‘intercepting’ data – the methods of which, are many. Bluejacking hit the news a while ago, which was basically writing a message as the name of your phone and sending that to any other blue tooth equipped phone in a public space ( see www.bluejackq.com ). ‘Bluesnarfing’ is a more recently coined moniker related to that, describing the theft of data – calendar information and phonebook contacts – from a discoverable Bluetooth phone. Thanks to Paris and her chihuahua, we can sit back and watch ‘hacking phones’ rise up the Google charts, aided by eager 14 years old the world over. Those not busy making prank calls with the Napoleon Dynamite soundboard that is. Laid the cheese on way too hard in that film, so keep the hard-hitting Arnold soundboard ready as a back-up.

mo:life
Still on the phone phront, phans of the Independent Ozmag that was
Spinach, and others curious about mobile-media culture might be interested in their new moderated email list discussing mobile-media culture and technology.
“mo:life is interested in how, inherently global, mobile media will be implicated in our daily lives here in Australia and the Asia Pacific. mo:life maps and explores how we, as a distinct culture, will produce, adapt, consume, buy, sell, accept, and reject new forms and uses of floating communication.”
– PR tranmission from http://s7digital.com/molife

Biology Cheaters Part I
File under ‘Words that really sing together, but shouldn’t’ : ‘Musical Condoms’. Ukrainian inventor Dr Grigoriy Chausovskiy has concocted a way of warding off unwanted pregnancies without suppressing the pleasurable sensations involved in succumbing to our hard-wired desires – a musical condom that gets louder as the sex gets more vigorous. Keen observers may have already noted that Ukraine won the recent Eurovision song contest, with a softcore s&m number that left viewers wondering if they’d tuned in to some leather-clad-musical of Lord of The Rings. Thrusting forth from that same country now – condoms which have tiny sensors on the rubber, connected to a mini electronic device. Kind of like a musical valentines day card, except Dr Chausovskiy claims different lovemaking positions allow different tunes to be played by the condom. He was also keen to stress:

“There is no danger of being electrocuted.”

Part II : One Last Arc

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

-The late Hunter S Thompson
Famous as much for the mythology surrounding him, as his maniacal yet probing writings, his gonzo journalism – Hunter S Thompson is now dead. Has left the building. Only adding to that mythology, infused as it was with narcotics and artillery, is Hunter’s choice of exit : to have his cremated remains blasted from a cannon. Apparently the last two years of degenerative health are being tallied as heavy contributing factors for his suicide. His most famous book ‘Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas’ which was recently turned into a film, popularised his wildly extravagant writings, but he also left behind a long body of political and personal essays, articles, notes, and books – most of which can be perused here: www.gonzo.org.

by Sean Healy, February 20, 2005 0 comments

Silent Army Shenanigans

Alien comic anthropologists landing in Oz would soon gravitate to Melbourne, home of the infamous ‘Silent Army’ crew of comic artists, animators, stencillers, sticker-makers, public art-ists and visual inventors. There they would find evidence of much Silent Army shenanigans : glorious public art, numerous official and un-official exhibitions ( see www.theemptyshow.org ), several Big Day Out murals, and of course, central to any art-in-sequence, comic-makin-folk – a whole shebang load of publications : the PURE EVIL series (1-6), endless appearances in other compilations and the forthcoming ‘True Fantasy’ contributor anthology being collated by Michael Fikaris, the ‘Sparks’ compilation being curated by Lachlan Conn, and ‘Trails’ – the first of a hopefully regular series of x-large newsprint size magazines being compiled by Kieran Mangan, who is still welcoming contributions (trails_at_silentarmy.com) of sketches, drawerings, doodles, scraps, drugged out art, visual poems, found art, design, brut art, graffiti etc.

Silent Army books, paintings and live drawings can be witnessed alongside Swedish, German, Polish & Tasmanian artists as part of the 2005 Melbourne Stencil Festival, at the Meat Markets – 42 Courtney St, Nth Melb.

Silent Army Webness : www.comicslifestyle.com & www.silentarmy.com

by Sean Healy, February 20, 2005 0 comments

The Paper Web

What with portable electronic data devices, electronic ink and shrinking technology it seems inevitable that our magazines will have working hyperlinks one day. This week’s column is ready for that ( comes out in paper too, deear web reader), with a range of embedded web-addresses for future historians looking back.

Guerrilla Knitters
Aye, it seems even knitting can be given a rebellious facelift with a few political brushstrokes. The Knit 2 Together exhibition apparently taps into the ‘anti-capitalist’, ‘consumer-resistant’ movement of subversive UK knitters currently playing with wool, needles, sexual imagery and adult concepts. Maybe something to look into for electronic artists wondering why the Australia Council recently abolished their New Media department ? And to help would-be revolutionary knitters, the knitting movement mirrors the modern communication tactics of terrorists, sending instructions to each other all over the globe. Sayeth artist Shane Waltener, “By knitting you are resisting capitalism and consumerism. You are not responding to the fashion industry; you are making your own decisions.”.

Animated Karaoke Deers
Honest to goodness, whether this thing exists as prank photoshoppery or actual purchase-able product, the future of entertainment seems a little clearer with ‘Buck The Animated Deer’ ( search for ‘animated deer’ ). At only $159.98, a life-size wall-mounted Buck-Deer sings, dances and moves to the beat. And sometimes, there’s no point trying to improve on promotional writing :
“Let Buck be the life of the party as he moves and grooves to the music. Mount him on the wall and let your friends admire your hunting skills. Then click the wireless remote… and get ready! Enjoy their stunned surprise and side-splitting laughter as Buck belts out songs like “Rawhide,” “Friends in Low Places,” and “Sweet Home Alabama” while his head bobs, his mouth moves exactly to the words, and his ears wiggle to the beat. Use the included wireless microphone to join the song karaoke style — or watch his mouth move as you entertain your guests by speaking through the microphone! Buck looks incredible in your den or bar and adds flawless animation for party memories that will last a lifetime. Includes Buck with removable antlers, wireless microphone, remote control, mounting bracket and hardware, and DC adapter.”

Mp3 Blogs
Blogs & automated publishing systems are always adding new ways to easily enrich the reader’s web experience, providing simple ways to show the reader more about what the author is reading, photographing and listening to. That and continued cheapening bandwidth, this has lead to a flourish of mp3 blogs – blogs with embedded mp3 files accompanying the writing of bedroom music fans the world-over ( or the world is over, if record companies are to be believed ). Tofuhut has links to gazillions of these, and as this boy writes, he is listening to a new track by The Books, previewed via http://gabba.cc/pod. For someone else’s top 10 net label releases of 2004?. And don’t forget the locust collection.

by Sean Healy, February 20, 2005 0 comments