Skip to main content

The DIY FOSS Cyborg dustycloud.org/blog/the-diy-fo…

Yes, I met a DIY FOSS Cyborg who lives in Emacs and Guix full-time. And YOU TOO can live such a life, if you dare!

Zacchaeus standing with his full cyborg getup: heads up display, a USB-C dock, a belt, cables leading everywhere including to (out of view) ergonomic keyboards

The DIY FOSS cyborg -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

dustycloud.org

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber

Christine Lemmer-Webber
Christine Lemmer-Webber
• •

I also posted a video of me interviewing Zacchaeus about his DIY FOSS cyborg setup. It's wild to see!

On YouTube: youtube.com/shorts/flYs1fwwACk
On PeerTube: share.tube/w/uuTsg6L6RKf66fnSN…

- YouTube

Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
www.youtube.com
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

screwlisp
screwlisp
• •
oh, yeah, I saw it thanks, I wondered if either of them talked to @sacha about this previously as well.
@Sacha Chua
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to screwlisp

Jonathan Lamothe
Jonathan Lamothe
•
@screwlisp @Sacha Chua As much as I love the simpler analog solutions to stuff, I have to admit, having a persistent org-mode overlay is really appealing.
@screwlisp @Sacha Chua
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

screwlisp
screwlisp
• •
@me
Iirc when I interviewed @sacha about her experience doing this, she said basically people look at you funny when you're like this whereas an idea is that if you had a screenreader you could use that subtly instead of the displays and pass as a non-cyborg in groups of humans. It's definitely cool.
@Jonathan Lamothe @Sacha Chua
in reply to screwlisp

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄
• •
@screwtape @me @sacha
#snowcrash #gargoyle
This is a non sequitur that has been nibbling on the edges of Hiro's mind for the last ten minutes: Laser light has a particular kind of gritty intensity, a molecular purity reflecting its origins. Your eye notices this, somehow knows that it's unnatural. It stands out anywhere, but especially under a dirty overpass in the middle of the night. Hiro keeps getting flashes of it in his peripheral vision, keeps glancing over to track down it's source. It's obvious to him, but no one else seems to notice. Someone in this overpass, somewhere, is bouncing a laser beam off Hiro's face. It's annoying. Without being too obvious about it, he changes his course slightly, wanders over to a point downwind of a trash fire that's burning in a steel drum. Now he's standing in the middle of a plume of diluted smoke that he can smell but can't quite see. But the next time the laser darts into his face, it scatters off a million tiny, ashy particulates and reveals itself as a pure geometric line in space, pointing straight back to its source. It's a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he's not already conspicuous enough, he's wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops,
they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
#gargoyle #snowcrash @Jonathan Lamothe @screwlisp @Sacha Chua

screwlisp reshared this.

in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
• •

Note the sartorial elegance in this 1980 photo of Steve Mann, "The Father of Wearable Computing":
wearcam.org/steve5.jpg
wearcam.org/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ma…

P.S. His related 2001 book "Intelligent Image Processing" was innovative; seminal; excellent.
wearcam.org/textbook.htm

He also wrote the 2001 "Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer" but I never read it.


Professor and wearable computing researcher

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

reshared this

in reply to DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

screwlisp
screwlisp
• •
@dougmerritt
Onto the reading list
@mdhughes
#gargoyle is new to my lexicon
Now, to actually read Snowcrash, even as I'm eagre to figure out what happened next in Murderbots, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, That Portuguese author, this grammar thing I'm utterly failing to write, ...
@me @sacha @cwebber
#gargoyle @Jonathan Lamothe @Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄 @DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) @Sacha Chua @Christine Lemmer-Webber
in reply to screwlisp

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
• •

@screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha
Mind you, I liked Snowcrash a lot, but it is not a very serious book. It began life as a background theme for a video game, according to the author, and when that fell through, he fleshed it out as a whole book.

It's therefore not too surprising that it has many silly aspects. But it's fun.

His later books get much more serious.

@Jonathan Lamothe @Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄 @screwlisp @Sacha Chua

screwlisp reshared this.

in reply to DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

AN/CRM-114
AN/CRM-114
• •
@dougmerritt @screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha that being said, it’s a much more serious book than, say, Ready Player One
@Jonathan Lamothe @Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄 @screwlisp @DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) @Sacha Chua
in reply to DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

AN/CRM-114
AN/CRM-114
• •
@sacha @cwebber I remember Stephenson getting Serious when he went all in on Thomas Pynchon, Cryptonomicon was Gravity’s Rainbow as the Baroque Cycle was to Mason & Dixon, I guess. I don’t think much about The Diamond Age
@Christine Lemmer-Webber
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to AN/CRM-114

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄
• •

@flyingsaceur @dougmerritt @screwtape @me @sacha I flunked out reading Quicksilver, ignored the rest of that series. And SevenEves was appallingly stupid in each of three sections (physics, biology, sociology, & languages don't work like that).

But until then, The Big U, Zodiac, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Interface had a *LOT* of valuable insights to the nightmare 21st C we've ended up in.

@Jonathan Lamothe @screwlisp @DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) @AN/CRM-114 @Sacha Chua
in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
• •

De gustibus non est disputandum.

But I grew up reading comic books, fantasy, and science fiction, before I learned physics, biology, sociology, and linguistics, so that vastly increased my tolerance for authors misunderstanding academic subjects.

And almost everyone gets these things wrong whether they know it or not, and the ones who actually do understand them often put their understanding on a shelf while they write, so that it doesn't interfere with their storytelling.

David Brin for example said about his books that going faster than light violates physics, so he made a point of inventing *many* fantastical faster-than-c technologies for his books.

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" or some such.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

AN/CRM-114
AN/CRM-114
• •
@dougmerritt @mdhughes @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber that’s why I pretty much only read PKD and reread Dune every ten years: it isn’t really that kind of science
@Jonathan Lamothe @Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄 @screwlisp @DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) @Sacha Chua
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

AN/CRM-114
AN/CRM-114
• •
@mdhughes @dougmerritt @screwtape @me @sacha Snow Crash is sine qua non, but it earned its place for me alone by showing exactly what was wrong with Ready Player One: the heroes were an eccentric billionaire, a consumer, and DRM
@Jonathan Lamothe @Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄 @screwlisp @DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) @Sacha Chua
in reply to AN/CRM-114

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄
• •
@flyingsaceur @dougmerritt @screwtape @me @sacha I like Ready Player One (book) for the same reasons as Snow Crash: Horrific plausible future, and VR and disengaging from the world is not going to save us. Turns out spending your entire life in a hotsuit in your apartment, grinding cash, is the worst possible way to live. Tho in the end of course Wade does win everything, and gets to unplug.
@Jonathan Lamothe @screwlisp @DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) @AN/CRM-114 @Sacha Chua
in reply to DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄
• •

@dougmerritt @screwtape @me @sacha There was also the breathless fawning of Negroponte in WIRED,
web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wi…

But generally other than notifications and health monitoring, I think all gargoyles are a mistake. You should exist in the world, not intermediate it with these goddamned computers.

I say this as someone who was in the '90s the spitting image of "RU A Cyberpunk" from Mondo 2000.

text at URL yellow gradient page, black text, with stiff picture of Nick Negroponte in a suit

WIRED 3.12 - Wearable Computing

web.media.mit.edu
@Jonathan Lamothe @screwlisp @DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) @Sacha Chua

screwlisp reshared this.

in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
• •

@mdhughes @screwtape @me @sacha
> There was also the breathless fawning of Negroponte in WIRED

Yes, but as you may know, by striking that sort of public pose, Negroponte brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the MIT Media Lab.

I have no idea what his true personal beliefs were, but he was quite the fundraiser.

@Jonathan Lamothe @Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄 @screwlisp @Sacha Chua
in reply to screwlisp

Christine Lemmer-Webber
Christine Lemmer-Webber
• •
@screwtape @me @sacha Well, now that is an interesting idea I hadn't considered before... using a headless emacspeak environment :blobcatadorable:
@Jonathan Lamothe @screwlisp @Sacha Chua
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber

Sacha Chua
Sacha Chua
• •
yeah, back in 2002 or so, I got tired of people chatting me up about my head-mounted display, so I switched to Emacspeak. It was great for discreetly navigating my way through manuals, capturing quick notes, etc. I'd love to figure out how to get it working on my phone for even more portability.
in reply to Sacha Chua

screwlisp
screwlisp
• •
@sacha
If your phone is just running a terminal that's running emacs, discrete keyboard and headphones, at that point the phone is operating more like a conventional single board computer as well.
@cwebber @me
@Jonathan Lamothe @Sacha Chua @Christine Lemmer-Webber
in reply to screwlisp

Sacha Chua
Sacha Chua
• •
Exactly. These days, I mostly just use a lapel mic and Fossify Voice Recorder to capture audio braindumps, which I sync with Syncthing and transcribe with WhisperX, using keywords like start section ... stop section to structure things lightly so I can break it up automatically in Org Mode. sachachua.com/blog/2023/12/aud… Haven't found an LLM prompt I like (haven't looked very hard), but the keywords work reasonably well. Reasonable workflow for untangling thoughts and thinking about what I might want to write about. Sometimes I format the transcripts as PDFs with large right margins and put them on my Supernote e-ink notebook for further review. I've been focusing more on improving the braindump side of things, so I haven't prioritized, say, ways to review my Org agenda or flip through manuals (easy enough with a glance at my phone, an action which is totally unremarkable in today's society).

Audio braindump workflow tweaks: Adding Org Mode hyperlinks to recordings based on keywords :: Sacha Chua

sachachua.com

screwlisp reshared this.

in reply to Sacha Chua

Sacha Chua
Sacha Chua
• •
this conversation nudged me to look into upgrading my lapel mic. II want something with two mics, a battery level indicator, a charging case, and pass-through charging. I'll also get a Bluetooth input device. Considering the 8bitdo micro, which apparently people love using together with Anki, so I'm optimistic about its programmability. 😀

screwlisp reshared this.

in reply to Sacha Chua

Christine Lemmer-Webber
Christine Lemmer-Webber
• •
@sacha @screwtape @me If you get back into emacspeak in combination with this kind of wearable computing setup, definitely give me a ping, I would 100% want to know about it
@Jonathan Lamothe @screwlisp @Sacha Chua

screwlisp reshared this.

This website uses cookies. If you continue browsing this website, you agree to the usage of cookies.

⇧