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Festival of Inappropriate Technology
A reader writes " NTK Magazine and Mute Magazine are holding a Festival of Inappropriate Technology in London city centre on the 9th of June. Featuring the Commodore 64 underground, The Classic Amiga Preservation Society, DNSCon, the EFF plus many more talks and stalls. There will also be wired and wireless network access available. The Register will also be there. Should make for a great day, all are welcome!"
Hmm... June 9 - gives me plenty of time to pack my bags...
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
You'd think anything interesting that could be said in a Commodore 64 talk or an Amiga talk would have been covered in some talk, oh, five or ten years ago. :P
:)
Then again, I guess there are some younger folk around who haven't been able to experience the wonder of a C64. I can't wait to read what people have to say *after* the conference.
Woo hoo - never seen so many geeks in one place. There's a stall selling teatowels (trans: dish clothes) with various browers and Google search results printed on them - ideal for geek washing-up, maybe that one day a week when you rinse out the old coffee mug.
bring my UNIVAC that I play Pong on?
I wish I had known about this earlier....
But then again, considering that the average piece of software takes 5 minutes to load on one of those Commodores... well... maybe I can leave my house now and get there before the show is over...
(As a side thought)
Time required to load GEOS on a C64 - 5 minutes
Time required to load DOS + Windows 3.1 on a 486 - 5 minutes
Time requiree to load WinXP on a P3 - 3 minutes
Time required to load Red Hat on a P3 workstation - 5 minutes...
-Rick
I just got home from it... the wifi access is nothing to write home about but the old hardware is cool and the guy with the wearable spectrum rocked
:/
If any of you go - the entrance is around the back of the building, not on euston road - took me a while to figure that out
I think I'll go look for my c64 & atari2600 & see if they still work... And at the same time I will also be able to chek if my TV is still working like it did a month ago when I last watched it. :)
From here, trains to London take about 1 hour, but what with getting to the station, waiting for a train (not frequent on Sundays) and getting across London I won't be there until its nearly over.
Mind you, I subscribe to the mailing lists of the EFF and Campaign for Digital Rights. Both are supposed to have stands and neither bothered to tell me about it.
Sure...I'll just whip out my old commie and surf on over to that site and see what's up...
Oh my GAWD!!!! you can surf with a commodore 64!
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I'm on the 'conference' floor with an iPAQ :-)
The wi-fi access works okay. Go say hello to Sarah, Michael and Ollie on the Linux-on PS2 stall in the corner if you read this.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
Well, to let you all know, i was the one who submitted this story over a week ago. I couldnt log in at the time to post it as a registered user. So i had given everyone plenty of notice about it. Just must have been a pretty busy slashdot submission bin.
Ah well, hopefully this will become a regular festival.
I find it interesting that they encourage people to exchange supermarket loyalty/discount/surveillance cards. I bias my own shopping toward stores that don't use them, but does anyone know of similar swap events in the States?
Also, live discussion on #infoanarchy on irc.openprojects.net
I'm blogging live from the stage
Time required to load Red Hat on a P3 workstation - 5 minutes...
I only run Red Hat on my notebook, but it boots to a Gnome/Enlightenment desktop in just under three minutes (excluding time to type 'root' and my password).. and that's only a cranky old 266 Mhz!
mogorific carpentry experiments
I just read a great book that talks about "Inappropriate Technology" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The book is available for free at the Baen Free Library. It is a great read and was very enjoyable. Really puts a different perspective on "good" and "bad" technology. Funny that they used the same term for the show.
A much better use for supermarket loyalty cards.... give a tramp a home.
:-)
Let me explain. In the UK some bank ATM (cash points) are inside the bank building and the only way to get in (out of hours) is by swiping your ATM card to make the door open (the rest of the bank is shuttered off). I assume this is to stop tramps using it as a place to sleep. However I discovered that a supermarket loyalty card also lets you in. So if you really hate supermarket loyalty cards, you can now put them to good use and give a tramp a warm place to sleep.
Some (not very many) photos (not very varied, or good) are here
Showing off the soekris Net4521's which consume.net may be adopting as there weapon of choice.
The french guy with the singing birds and the cybernetic parrot sausage is Paul Granjon from zlabs.
poke 144,15 if memory serves me right.... made the machine crash as a "security measure" (but no flames....)
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
In almost every case, the card opening is simply a switch hidden behind an approriate sized slot. Anything which will push through the slot will open the door. That's why a card inserted in any of the 4 possible orientations will open the door, while on the actual ATM, it has to be inserted in the 1 working orientation.