Alex Bowyer // A British thirtysomething living in Montréal, Canada, with interests in people & society, technology, science fiction, films, travel and getting the best out of life.
Can also be found blogging at alexbowyer.blogspot.com and tweeting as @alexbfree.
I think the strongest message of last night's Challenge Your World event was this excellent short video by Sebastian Baptista from Uruguay. A simple idea, powerfully conveyed. Technology is not the answer to every problem.
This is Hyperland, a BBC2 documentary with Douglas Adams, Tom Baker, Ted Nelson and others, broadcast in 1990 - that's before the World Wide Web, before DVDs, before digital TV, before the Internet as we know it.
What's quite remarkable is the amount that it gets right:
All in all, well worth 50 minutes of your time if you are interested in changes in technology and media and their effect on society.
I found this today on Russell Davies' blog.
That is the thought-provoking possibility suggested by the RepRap project. RepRap is a simple 3D printer that can make plastic objects to any design, on your desk, using an ordinary PC. It can even make a copy of itself. It's entirely open source and freely distributable.
Ryerson University, the University of Western Ontario, Rabble and The Tyee have also started a very interesting multimedia project to explore this technology and the effects it will have on society further, called Maker Culture. You can read a good introduction by Wayne MacPhail here.
I am intrigued to see where this might lead. Developments in computing capability and internet technology have given us recording studios, photo labs, broadcasting studios, video editing suites and printing presses from our desktop - and have completely changed those industries as a result.
What changes can we expect in the world's manufacturing industries if goods no longer needed to be manufactured and distributed, but instead you downloaded a design and printed it yourself at home (much like you download an MP3 or movie and burn a CD or DVD now)?
Certainly this is a technology in its infancy, but full of promise. I can't wait to see how this develops.
This is very cool.. There's this problem with electric cars, that they're too quiet, especially at low speeds - Pedestrians don't hear them coming. Nissan have realised they need to give their car a noise. So they've turned to Blade Runner for inspiration.. Why make your car sound like a petrol car when it can sound futuristic! Read the full story here.
This video shows some incredible feats of robot dexterity.
Here is a video of how technology that many people have in their home can be used in ways not intended by the manufacturer. This is interesting, but even more interesting is the wider trend this represents, as Johnny Lee describes - how the Internet and new media formats such as YouTube for video distribution can quickly spread ideas to thousands of people. Not just for persuasive purposes, but to do real good, allowing any teacher or parent to create their own interactive whiteboard using a Wii remote and some cheap hardware. Scientists are already starting to talk about how they can rethink the way research is done for this information-rich, hyper-connected age we live in. It's really exciting that scientists might finally have a way to directly explain their work to the public without having to go through journalists who don't always understand the science, or who are encouraged to take the most sensational angle.
Exciting times are ahead, I'm sure ...
Back before we left the UK, Mrs Alex and I (ok she did most of the work) digitized all our CDs and DVDs not to mention paperwork, recipes and all sorts of other documents to reduce the amount we had to take with us to Canada. Given we've also been living here in Canada without a TV for the last six months, we have accumulated plenty more downloaded movies & TV shows. We brought about 8 hard drives with us to Canada and our FreeNAS install media, and after 2 case upgrades, 2 additional green 1 Terabyte hard drives, 2 new 4 port PCI SATA cards and a beefier PSU, not to mention much consolidation of data from smaller, older IDE drives, I am pleased to announce our behemoth of a fileserver is alive.. Just short of 6 Terabytes of storage for our viewing and data storage pleasure! Hurrah! Now to get my Popcorn Hour media player which Alex bought me for my birthday working.. and then it's HD projector time (which is handy as we have just painted the walls in the lounge of our new apartment white which is just the right colour for projecting onto)...
