Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


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Like my brownhouse:
   screen seamlessly among the knobs
Thursday, September 20 2007
Among my ongoing projects are some that I start and complete quickly (given their size) and others that I start and then leave to linger and slowly fade from memory. The former category includes the solar hydronic system, garage drywalling, the foundation and driveway drainage projects, my comprehensive web-based system for maintaining relational databases, and all the various sculptural things I've built from copper pipe and fittings. In the other category are such dubious projects as the plan I once had for sending computer data over an FM frequency. Several years ago I actually started experimenting with sending modem signals with an FM transmitter, back before I realized WiFi had become so cheap that I might as well just stick with that. Now those FM circuits are languishing in a can in a shelf in the laboratory, although for years they commanded their own square foot of lab floor space, which, by the end, had become thickly blanketed in random cat hairs.
Another languishing project has been my plan to build some sort of computerized art robot, one that could change appearance based on information in its environment or on the internet. Gradually this plan has been supplanted by the idea of building a computerized stereo system with various retro elements (flywheeled knobs, analog readouts, etc.). Inspired by an old oscilloscope, I decided early on that the system would have a tiny, possibly monochrome display which would normally show things like music waveforms. In a pinch, though, it would also have to serve as a graphical user interface (GUI), perhaps showing a tiny 640 by 480 pixel screen allowing me to command an MP3 player. The cheapest solution for such a screen was a CRT-based black and white portable television. But I wanted to base this device around a Linux installation, and (as near as I can tell) it's impossible to get a Linux GUI to function on a composite monitor. It was looking like I was going to need to use a tiny VGA monitor, but such monitors cannot be had for less than $150 even on Ebay.
But there is another solution to this problem if I'd be willing to accept a bigger display: I could build the system around an old laptop. Cheap old laptops don't usually come with screens any smaller than 12 inches (that's compared to the five inch CRT in my $10 Chinese portable television and the 2.75 inch CRT in my dumpster-dived vintage oscilloscope, now sadly inoperative). But a laptop LCD takes up essentially zero volume while being able to make an apparently featureless surface look like just about anything (similar to the skins of live cuttlefish). I could build my "stereo" on a largish black box and fit the screen seamlessly among the knobs, turntables, and tape decks, ready to come alive with sufficient provocation. One can get a relatively powerful laptop (say, a Celeron 600) with a working screen for less than $100 these days. Sure, you might have to add memory, a hard drive, and some sort of powering system, but all that stuff is generic and anyone with a laboratory (or the habits of a packrat) has many answers to those questions. Such a computer would be powerful enough for nearly all home media demands. (Remember, those of you surfing the web with your dual-core Intel computers, most of that power is churning listlessly through the spaghetti code of Norton 360, mostly ending up as electrical heat in the room around you.)


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