If your Botanicalls kit doesn’t work as described, the microcontroller may need to be reprogrammed.

Check out the notes and links on this flickr photo for illustration, and follow the detailed instructions on the Botanicalls ‘Customize’ page.

Lately, I’ve been doing the exercises in Making Things Talk.

I put some pictures here.

There really is too much to summarize in a single post, but here are some of the highlights as I saw them.

People

I had the honor of meeting and befriending some amazing folks. A partial list:

Jennifer Magnolfi, Matt Jones, Timo Arnall, Matt Cottam, Michelle Malott, Chris McCray, Charles Warren, and probably a half-dozen others whose contact data I haven’t pulled out and reviewed yet. (Sorry!)

We managed to spend most of the summit sitting at a table in back, with half of us working on their presentation for the next day while listening to the presentation, and the other half listening to the presentations and exchanging (occasionally snarky) comments on twitter.

The GooglePhone’s internal compass and its ability to do an augmented-reality view with it, using Google Street View, was the technological nerdgasm of the weekend.

PaperCamp

The highlight of the weekend, for me, was meeting Matt and Timo, and getting to talk about paper as prototype spime.

(It was a bit gratifying, when meeting Matt, to be greeted with, “Oh, you’re that guy!” Admittedly, that’s usually what people say when a locally infamous eccentric shows up at a party, but it was fun nonetheless.)

Timo made the insightful comment that the idea of just attaching a URL to paper is kind of broken, and we need richer and more interesting interaction patterns. He and I agreed that the usability of QRCodes is quite poor as they stand, but they are a printable, inexpensive analog for passive RFID and touch interaction in some ways.

Matt percolated a bit, and came up with the idea of having a PaperCamp event for like-minded people to explore what can be done with printable protospimes.

Matt’s suggested topics:

• Way-new Printing
• Protospimes
• Ingestion/Digestion/Representation
• Bionic Sketching
• Folding/Structure
• Paper’s Children

(“What would Paper’s Children be,” I asked. “That’s the point, I’m asking you,” Matt said.)

(I have some ideas about that, but let’s save it for later.)

Memes!

Some ideas that got bounced around, from talks, hallway discussion, and drunken ranting:

• Personal Informatics
• Game Mechanics for motivation and change
• Manatee Rape Waivers – band name, or legal necessity?
• The lack of personal fear in a welfare state (Norway)
• Warren Ellis won’t actually eat your heart if you buy him a beer.
  (Matt claimed this, but I’m still skeptical)
• Obama as the president in Independence Day
• RFID fields as physical objects
• Wii Fit and Nike Plus –- and how you should be able to change and record the messages in both
• Will the FUBAR security fiasco in Mifare RFID chips harm NFC adoption? (Yes.)

So, in other words, we made as much sense as you’d expect.

On the whole, as I said later, it was simply refreshing to show an example of my thought experiments and for people to not look at me like a dog that’s been shown a card trick. Worth the price of admission right there.

Thank-you’s

I really have to thank Dave for inviting me, and of course the summit organizers, Michelle Bauer and Mary Craig for allowing me to attend. Also, everyone else for being generally awesome.

What’s next?

Well, I just got this, from Matt Jones:

@paperbit 15.24, restate your assumptions.

Sounds like a good place to start.

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

“We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.”

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

I, too, find [Social Objects] a useful paradigm for web service design and community building.

Stop me if I’m wrong, but this is what I got out of the concept: A social object is something that you care about enough to form a social bond around. It’s an interesting, external thing.

Or, to put it another way, a social object is something “sticky.” It’s a node that gathers attention and acts as a network link between people.

In LibraryThing, the object is a book. On Flickr, it’s a photo …or a short video. On de.licio.us, the objects are URLs or tags. On Twitter, it’s short messages.

In blogging, the objects are sometimes posts, and sometimes something more nebulous: a shared interest or tag. This is one way that I feel blogging on Wordpress or Blogger or TypePad could be improved, and one reason why my posting here is sometimes sporadic: there’s no easy, accepted way to make those social bonds, without doing a lot of extra work to hold it together. There are ways: to name one, you can create a Technorati search, or subscribe to feeds and piece the threads together yourself, or use the comments on the blog itself (and then subscribe to the blog comments, I suppose), but the experience is fragmented and frustrating.

This is a difficult problem to resolve: in a network of independent actors, without a coherent service to form explicit bonds, is it possible to make a “sticky” social object? Can you still form an automatic, explicit bond in the absence of a controlling authority? Can you do it in a way that’s as easy as commenting on a Flickr photo and then getting to see the rest of the conversation through email?

(I’m using the term “explicit bond” to mean a way in which you can set a flag, so that changes to the object get pushed towards you, like a comment on a Flickr photo, or a @reply in Twitter.)

I hope the answer to this question is “yes,” but as of yet, have no idea how it would happen. Or, if it’s happened yet, would someone tell me? I’d like to stop doing the gruntwork myself and let the computer do it. I hear that’s what they’re for.

You see, until just now, I had Wordpress set so that only previously-approved authors got automatically accepted for comments. I figured, that was enough — if you’ve posted before, no problem. Otherwise, hold for moderation, and I’d just accept the real comments.

Then I found a few comment notifications in my spam filter. Someone had tried to post a couple of times, and got nothing. Finally, they gave up.

That sucks. Especially since it was someone who had something nice to say, and Murphy knows, there’s little enough of that in the world. And the web.

So. Comments: open.

cricketschirp

Well, that’s okay, then. :)

With a flourish, my friend fired up a new program he’d found, and showed me the home page for the Mosaic Netscape 0.9 browser. Then he showed me a primitive search engine… I think it might have been Lycos Search?

At the time, I thought it was less useful than gopher, and said so. I also said that I didn’t think it would last, because nobody really needed another useless clicky toy on the internet.

That is why I will never be a thought leader.

Weeks later, I was staying up late to get access to one of the five experimental SLiP/PPP-emulation-through-shell-access dialup lines, so I could click around the web, using Mosaic Netscape 0.9.

Now, on the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, the original mosaic home page has been resurrected, complete with the dedicated IP setup requred by the primitive web browsers of the day. All of the long-dead pages linked to by the browser toolbar buttons of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 now work, and you can run the web as it was in 1994.

…If your computer will run the program. Good luck with that. See Jamie’s notes on how to get it to work.

And that’s your tech nostalgia for the day.