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Steampunk Computer Casemod
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Poking the Shub-Internet with a Stick
Artist Fang-Yu Lin is trying to make contact with the “aware” portion of the Internet. According to legend, Shub-Internet, Beast of a 1024 Processors, Eater of Characters, Avatar of Line Noise and countless other appellations rests peacefully in its lair deep beneath the Pentagon. Shub-Internet is nothing less than the harsh personification of the hideous…
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The Rise of the Machines
News at Seven is a scary-smart automated news project from Northwestern University. It pulls news stories in from RSS feeds, finds related video and still images, and then composes a story that’s “read” by a video-game character from Half-Life. It even cuts away to a different reader narrating posts from blogs related to the day’s…
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Snow Crash Comes to the Metaverse
Penguin Books has launched an in-game publishing venture in the virtual world Second Life, leading with Neal Stephenson’s wonderful Snow Crash. Which is nice, since the book’s Metaverse was the inspiration for the Second Life game. Penguin worked with the London-based virtual world design agency Rivers Run Red to create an in-world version of the…
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Jobs of the Future: Virtual World Tour Guide
Synthtravels is a tour operator that arranges for guided visits to virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life, providing “native guides” for people who want to get the lay of the land. There’s a job description I bet no SF writer ever saw coming.Link (via BoingBoing)
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DNA Computer Masters Tic-Tac-Toe
A computer that uses strands of DNA to perform calculations has mastered the game tic-tac-toe.MAYA-II, developed by researchers at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico in the US, uses a system of DNA logic gates to calculate its moves.Link (via BoingBoing)
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Virtual Economies Attract Real-World Tax Attention
Gamers have long had to worry about virtual death in the form of being eaten by a grue. Now it looks like they may have to worry about virtual taxes. Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day, and…
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IceWeasel, Even Freer Than Firefox
IceWeasel is a version of the Firefox browser created for use in “free” operating systems like Debian which try to eschew any element that can’t be freely reused by anyone, for any reason. Iceweasel was developed because Firefox and the Firefox logo are trademarked, and because some of the default Firefox plugins can’t be freely…
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Podcast of Doctorow’s “0wnz0red”
Part one of writer Cory Doctorow’s story about “trusted computing, geek culture, and getting root on your body” has been posted for your listening pleasure. The link below goes to his BoingBoing post on the story, along with links to the podcasts themselves.Link
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Blogs: Why Bother?
When I mentioned that the O*W*C was about to launch a blog, one of the other hosts asked why; after all, we already had a message board. There’s a pretty good discussion of the differences between the two here at CommonCraft.As I see it, this blog will be a little like a daily version of…