I‘m interested in ambient interfaces, unobtrusive data, and augmented reality, which is why this video, The Ambient Life, caught my eye over at johnnyholland.org. According to the post, The Ambient Life, … was created for Freeband, a Dutch research program in which a.o. Philips and Delft University participate. The video tries to show a glimpse [...]

It’s been quiet around here, and I only have World of Warcraft to blame. I still bathe on a regular basis and haven’t given up my day job (yet), but I forget to eat and am incredibly moody when the server is having problems (more often than not on Khaz’goroth).

Well, technically I’ve been legal for about a decade now, give or take, depending on what country you live in. But more importantly, as of Friday afternoon, I am playing World of Warcraft legally. Whether poorly-hosted illegal servers are part of Blizzard’s overall marketing scheme or just a by-product of primordial internet chaos (you know, [...]

This August I bought my first keitai accessory at the airport. I now have multiple kitty-chans for my phone, including one from Korea, and one with a basketful of tea leaves from Shizuoka prefecture. The little pig was added today, though I’m not sure who the character is.

A little over a month ago I made a quickie-post on my Free Speech blog that made brief mention of a wiki for direct action, and a torrent site curated specifically for the activist crowd. In this post I’d like to flesh out those ideas more in as non-technical a way as possible. Where specific [...]

Accessorizing my keitai completes me. I purchased my first keitai accessory at the Central Japan International Airport while waiting for the Asiana Airlines counter to open. If you can’t tell from the picture, that’s Hello Kitty with a sake drum and a sake cup. I purchased my second keitai accessory at the Incheon National Airport [...]

Following the tide of video-blogs that have been popping up all around the net comes progressive video portals; websites that collect and distribute alternative media views. Zed TV, ourmedia.org, Participatory Culture Foundation’s Broadcast Machine, and Independent World Television are four sites/projects that I’ve been interested in. » Zed TV has been around the longest, I [...]

From wikipedia: Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification. This phenomenon typically only arises in non-heirarchical communities, such as [...]

Soft toothbrushes in Japan are *really* soft. I like them. I just started reading The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, and started with Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand by Hubert L. Dreyfus. The first paragraph details a disembodied future mediated by the internet/communication technologies and tells us we [...]

My italk and isight arrived today; the former for podcasting and the latter for keeping up with friends and family while in Japan without the expensive phonebills (VOIP too). I’ve convinced kzi to do some podcasting about our travels with me, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with audio broadcasting. But then I started to [...]