habemus papam
At first I did not intend to comment on the election of the new pope, but simultaneously I hung around in an IRC-channel of my community. Now I just have to show off how fast cyberspace reacts to breaking news.

parsing panel
The 104th triple-A meeting (30 November to 04 December 2005) will have a panel called ↑Parsing Culture: Cybersocial space and the making of group and individual identity.
via entry at zerzaust

world wind add-ons
↑World Wind (see ↵world wind works) was released by NASA as Open Source Software, and quite naturally a ↑world wind community emerged, generating add-ons. See ↑The unofficial unofficial add-ons list, which includes download-links. There is much which can be put to good use, and things beyond. For example the ↑WorldWind 1.3 Deathstar addon—like Skall, the creator, said: "Useless, but somebody had to do it !" That's absolutely right.

german casemod masters
Last Saturday, 16 April 2005, the 4th German Casemod Masters (↑DCMM) took place at Dortmund. There were two categories: casemod, meaning the modification of an of-the-peg case, and casecon, meaning the from-the-bottom-up construction of an entirely new and original case. As a third category there was 'most spectacular casemod'. The latter was not judged by the jury, but by the audience attending. Maico Bensien from Hamburg won the casecon-category with his creation "Alien" depicted here. For me another wonderful example of everything fusing together: pop-culture icon influence, resistance against the industry's design-dictate, and cultural appropriation of computer hardware in the form of complete reworking. I am happy. See more at ↑modding-faq.

atari archives
Well, back in the 1980s I was in the other camp, because I was a proud owner of a C64—and we somehow looked down on those having an Atari. But that is history, and exactly from that point of view ↑atariarchives.org is very worthwhile, as it "makes books, information, and software for Atari and other classic computers available on the Web. Everything here is available with permission of the copyright holders."

notebook's roots
↑Mobile Magazine has a nice article on ↑The Birth of the Notebook by Christopher Null. The article starts with Alan Kay's 1968 idea 'Dynabook', which saw the light of day only as a mockup made of cardboard (picture from ↵Lees 1980:5), as the necessary technology to make it a real thing just was not yet in existance. The Dynabook was thought for kids [play!] and the field of learning and education—the software was thought to grow with the children. The contents of Alan Kays's original draft notes at Xerox Parc, which are dated August 1972, are remarkable: "The size should be no larger than a notebook; weight less than 4 lbs; the visual display should be able to present at least 4000 printing quality characters [Did you hear the rumours about Microsoft wanting the next generation of operating systems to sport vector graphics instead of bitmaps for displaying characters?] with contrast ratios approaching that of a book; dynamic graphics of reasonable quality should be possible; there should be removable local file storage of at least one million characters (about 500 ordinary book pages) traded off against several hours of audio (voice/music) files." (cited from ↵Lees 1980:5-6)

Null's article goes on covering designs like the 'Osbourne' from the 1980s, which looks decidedly strange to our contemporary eyes, but may be inspirational to casemodders searching for the optimal shape of ↵LAN-party machines, and concludes with 'the 1990s and beyond', when manufacturers 'agreed' on one basic shape for notebooks. Astoundingly enough this shape—to which we all are used to nowadays—comes quite close to Kay's original design from way back.
hint via entry at infocult

xirdalium::category::hardware
This weblog is meant to fulfil a whole array of purposes. Among those is organizing and structuring my material and thoughts. The magnificent ↑search plugin is an essential part, but categories are nevertheless necessary. Problem is that I have to think up the categories myself, as the software won't. I asked it to do so, but it stubbornly refuses. In my project's ↵abstract I already boasted: "[...] the interpretation of the fieldwork-results will be set into relation to the appropriate parts of the history of technology [...]". History of games'n'software is all fine, but the machines themselves and material culture are absolutely vital. In consequence I created the new category ↵hardware.