Dubbed „Low Tech Music For High Tech People“ the micromusic project uses flash to set up an interface for collaborative music making. it is a pretty noisy site but that is part of the concept. People contribute jingles and customize the site that includes a communication tool („microtalk“).
Carl Wanga – who is doing the presentation – says „it is all about reduction“ and it shows. All the music reminds me of the good old times of C64 and Atari Games as does the overall design of the site.
Finnish is a tough language. It is part of the Mystic Three (the other two being Hungarian and Bask). But I was pointed to a funny tutorial containing the most important stuff: Speak Finnish like a restless native!.
Käyhän että tuon kannettavani saunaan?
Alessandro Ludovico is talking about Neural.it, an italian hacker magazine. Behind neural, there is a group of italian hackers that are also organizing Hackmeeting, the annual italian hacker meeting. They are also regular guest of the Chaos Communication Congress and – hopefully – the Chaos Communcation Camp this year.
Neural.it covers lots of topics on hacktivism, e-music, new media art and other cultural activities. It attacts aroung 1400 viewers per day. Neural.it was one of the magazines reporting on Blinkenlights.
The talk is also mostly read from paper with accompanying web pages on the beamer. Makes difficult to follow but he is speaking quite clear and in good english.
I asked him about Hacktivism in general and what he thinks about his view on this. He explains that his view of hacktivism is more the virtual fight and not the actual active technological approach as done by the Electronic Disturbance Theatre for instance.
He is also elaborating a bit about Hackmeeting and stresses that these meetings are completely self-organized and never have an official sponsor. This is very similar to the CCC events while we have a bit more open approach (which is to be expected as our situation in Germany is not as problematic as in other countries) as long as we don‘t feel „incorporated“ by anyone. This is important for hacker meetings but makes them difficult to organize.
First talk is by Amy Alexander. She demonstrates the Discordia Weblog system. The insists the domain discordia.us should be pronounced „Discordia‘R‘Us“. That‘s fine with me.
Amy speaks very fast and very american. Difficult to follow when you are not too much into this style. But explains the „new approach“ of Discordia, which is more an experiment. I don‘t really get the „new“ thing here but doing experiments in blogging and trying to combine various technology to research new communication is certainly a good thing.
So here I am. Sitting in row four of the audience of the READ_ME Software Art Festival and they just started the keynote. I am supposed to give a talk on Blinkenlights later and have just finished setting up my stuff.
My computer is bogging me with failure and incapabilities. I can‘t use DVD playback in dual monitor mode and the program is either too simple or too complicated depending on how you see it.
The Keynote is read from paper. Not very intriguing. But the festival‘s organizers Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin are very nice and highly motivated.
Hooray. For the first time in my life I walked into a nice café and wireless internet was just available (and: free!). The place is called mbar, the coffee is great and I am happy.
Why is this not possible in Berlin? I don‘t get it. Setting up DSL is a no-brainer and a almost-no-cost solution to get people into the café.
I just arrived in Helsinki. Finally. For many years finnish things have invaded my life and it was usually a contribution: early Internet backbones, Aki Kaurismäki, Linux and Nokia.
So for the first time I am going to have a first time impression of this country. I am not going to make photos: I forgot my camera at home. But that‘s okay as I am going to cover this trip using my blog for the first time. It‘s the time for the first time as it seems.
Just left the airport bus. First impression: very european. Met Florian Cramer on the plane (he is going to give a talk on the READ_ME Software Art Festival as I will) and after some talk about permuted poems we agreed that the local architecture does not differ a lot from what we are used to in Northern Germany. But I didn‘t see much so far anyway as I was busy fiddling with my new Ericsson Phone and the local GSM setup.
Tried to send a SMS to somebody in Helsinki. All three providers signaled errors. After my last try the targeted person called me and told me she has received the message 20 times now and I should stop worrying about it.
I admit my first stop is McDonald‘s. I like McDonald‘s as it is a good benchmarking tool for international travelers. How much is a Big Mac Menu? EUR 4.90. Does it taste the same as in Germany? No. Is catchup included with the fries? Yes. Is the taste of strawberry milkshake okay? No. Traveling is fun.
I am using NetNewsWire for writing my blog offline while munching my Big Mac. Very convenient. A real productivity tool. Please keep on enhancing it, Brent. Thank you.
So much for now. I am going to have a walk looking for my Hotel and getting acquainted to the locals.
hi fuck off
I am busy fiddling around with Salling Clicker to prepare my new presentations on Project Blinkenlights that will be held this week and next week in Zürich (Switzerland) and Helsinki (Finnland).
It is not really easy to squeeze in all the material in a talk that is meant not to be longer than 60 Minutes. Our documentation videos alone would fill half an hour, so in the end I can only show parts of it along my other presentation.
But there is so much to show. The cude animations and the backstage photography in Berlin and Paris.
Following a small discussion on the (german) MacHackers mailing list about the obvious lack of a good project planning tool I poked a mid-size product request mail to the OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner users mailing list of OmniGroup.
It is a shame there is no good project planning software out there for the Mac. Admit it, FastTrack Schedule just doesn‘t cut it. The user interface is pure horror and therefore usuability is more than limited.
I would like to see a OmniProject done by OmniGroup. Their answer: „This is one of the ideas we kick around from time to time, but we‘re not willing or able to commit to anything at this point.“
Well, I hope they will, And I hope they will soon. Looking at their other tools I get the feeling they can‘t be that far from it anyway. They have many of the crucial „other“ things in place (outlining, doing graphics) so adding „project logic“ is the missing step.