Tag Archives: fscons2008

FSCONS: Smári McCarthy on abundance

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Smári McCarthy Originally uploaded by Wrote

The man in the picture is Icelandic, outlandish, with lots of fancy words.

FabLabs (a set of machines to make any plastic object up to 1 meter in size) point to a future, and McCarthy talked about that future. No scarcity, everything “non-exotic” (which is not imbued with aura, like say, the Eiffel tower) is… available.

The intersection of hackers and anarchists: substantial, but not complete.

Freeganism got a mention in the talk. And “turkey sandwich”.

He got a government grant to run his FabLab. He said he’d looked around him, seeing only fishing industry. Digital fabrication might be a future for a place like that. A clean break with tradition.

Open Farm Tech was mentioned. OS tractors. Smari is credited with the prototype code for CNC (you know, extruders and such) on the website. The tractor is called LifeTrac. Design-for-disassembly. I’m very taken with this project. Update: See comments for direct links to videos and such.


FSCONS: Conversations are the conference

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Just had an interesting micro-conversation, with a man who spoke with a slightly Indian accent. Cambodia: No landlines, but quite developed mobile phone networks, never bothering with the previous stage of tech. Leapfrogging. Related: Ericsson deployed a solar-powered mobile base station there. That press release hits all points in the last paragraph of the leapfrogging article on Wikipedia.

Now a guy from a company called Redpill Linpro will do a talk called “Hidden gems of PostgreSQL”. Full-text search (what used to be called tsearch2 is now called FTI: full-text indexing). Pretty neat. You can specify a language setting. Stopwords in English might be regular words in another language – is means ice in Swedish.

FSCONS 2008, Sunday

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Listening to a guy in a red t-shirt. He talks about Debian package structure. People ask questions. He is reading from a tiny-font control configuration file. Not so good for my concentration. But, he has a good voice, at least it has some melody.

Yeah, a big corporation in search donated a Moleskine notebook in the goodie bag. In my coat pocket, I found some Sponge-Bob Squarepants stickers.

Talked about Istanbul with Bergie (you pronounce it like “burrdgie”). He schooled me on some facts: It’s the third largest city in the world. 15 million people. One third of the city is in Europe, the rest in Asia. He said that Orhan Pamuk‘s book about the city opened his eyes to some things. I am half-way through it. Pretty good stuff, but I’m mainly interested in the personal story about his complicated family.

About the conference generally: People here are friendly, but the conference has no centre. In space, I mean. Where you all go. Agora. Meeting place. Well. I’ll go around and be friendly now.