MaKey MaKey: An Invention Kit for Everyone – Buy Direct (Official Site).

Nice! Hook up anything as keyboard or mouse input.

From the Economist, more on the Bullshit Jobs article

Emphasises the point we’ve been thinking about: the necessity of divorcing income from work. Go, Economist!

This is a big deal.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

As the people behind Silent Circle have said, there is currently no technical solution for the exposure of metadata in email; current encryption mechanisms only apply to the body of the message.

So, currently, using email means we all have to put up with this creepy feeling that the operator of Groklaw refers to.

Or “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”, by Tom Churchill. A new play by Tom, one weekend run just finished. I was honored to play the Piano Player.

The show was littered with old IWW “wobbly” songs from “The Little Red Songbook“, in print since the beginning of last century. Lots of seditious lyrics set to old hymns and folk tunes that everyone knows, so you don’t have to teach ’em the tune. We got the audience singing before the show. There was lots of mid-century “modern” film-y underscoring, too, right up my alley, improvised throughout the show.

The play’s about the persecution of suspected Communists in the late 40’s, made personal in the story of someone who used to live on Whidbey. Turns out this stuff was local, too.

The whole thing felt intensely topical. Songs about people claiming back power after being laid off for an age and tossed away as disposable. Banding together to take on the establishment. Got me revved up; the words and the ideas are energizing, and relevant.

Tom writes good stuff. I’ll do whatever he asks. He video’d one of the performances; let’s see if he’ll put it online with a Creative Commons license or something.

Just finished “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow. One of those cant-put-it-down kind of things that keep you up til 2AM. I appreciate the Creative Commons release mechanism, with the support of his publishers and his reciprocal support for not undercutting them. It’s the right model for putting out digital stuff. He asks that, if you’re motivated to donate, you buy a physical copy for your local library. Yay! But Sno-Isle is enlightened, they already have his stuff.

Go download if you haven’t already.

More on the “day’s pay for a day’s work” conundrum. Why we really work.

Further to the earlier post: Ian and I had a discussion the other day of a scheme thats been implemented on the Web. It’s a pay-to-recommend thing: you have a social network of ‘friends’ who, when suggesting a product for purchase that results in a sale, get a little payment. Proponents tout it as a way to get a little money for what people do naturally. Both Ian and I view it as a Ponzi scheme, like other network marketing ‘opportunities’ that pollute human relations with suspect motivations.

Here’s a better idea, started by Ted Nelson in his astounding book on hypertext, which started the whole thing, and referred to just last week by Jaron Lanier in the NYT. Every bit of information online is tracked as part of a micropayment system; no ‘information wants to be free (as in beer)’. Whenever someone links to, browses or downloads a blog post you make, or a comment, or a photo you put up on Facebook, you get a little credit in your web account. When you do the same, a little payment from you to the author. Your information is now your property, and you earn a little money from it. Lanier reckons this is how we save the middle class. At the very least, it corrects the imbalance between the vast numbers of people posting original material, drawing connections between existing material, editing and curating, and the relative few who take the money out of the resulting system by virtue of being the infrastructure providers.

Go read Nelson. He thought about many of the issues we’re facing in our plan-less stampede to the Net, and tried to implement much of what he came up with. It’s worth revisiting, now we all have real world experience of the problems he foresaw with his thought experiments.

I just signed up with MLS online so I could watch my local team, the Seattle Sounders, squonk Vancouver tonight. The game is being broadcast on something called the NBC Sports Network, and I just get tv off the antenna on the roof, so I bit the bullet and plonked down money for the official online live streaming version. Goood, I thought, they’ve got a Roku channel, so I’ll just lean back and enjoy.

Turns out this game is blacked out. Nationally. Because NBC Sports say so. So the MLS won’t allow me to watch my local team on their streaming service, even after I pay them.

The customer service guy said the service was better for following out-of-area teams, so, for example, if I lived in Florida I’d be able to follow the Sounders, but its less possible if I live in the region. To which I responded, if I lived in Florida I’d probably be following a Florida team, wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I want to follow my local team?

Fail. Refund. These guys are having a hell of a time figuring this newfangled Internet thing out. I’m off to watch European Champions League.