Sean Voisen

So, here’s the general plan: Transform my OLPC XO laptop into a combination headless jukebox/Chumby-like information kiosk/maneuverable robot. The XO laptop, as essentially a tiny linux box encased in a bright-green and white shell, turns out to be eminently hackable.

The headless jukebox part is going well. Pulseaudio has been installed and works wonderfully as a remote sound server for streaming MP3/AAC/OGG/Apple Lossless/FLAC over WiFi when the XO is plugged in to the home stereo. It appears that Pulseaudio offers two options for remote music streaming: 1) Connecting to the sound server on the remote machine directly or 2) streaming multicast audio over RTP. On a busy WiFi network packets get dropped and RTP is not a viable solution for anyone who doesn’t like frequent gaps in the playback. Direct server connection, even over WiFi on 802.11g, works without problems as long as you’re not using libffmpeg with gstreamer. Then neither MP3 nor OGG playback seems to work on gstreamer applications. Took ages to figure that one out. But now … ah … sweet, sweet music.

“Chumby” functionality is next. Sugar will be disabled in favor of the Blackbox window manager with Adobe AIR for Linux powering a few custom-built widgets. I’m hoping this won’t be too resource-intensive for the modest 433Mhz processor, but that has yet to be determined. And as for the robot part, it appears that the iRobot create provides a nice body for the XO’s brains. Phidgets may provide another alternative.

The hacking continues …

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My latest project, Compassionate Communications launched a few weeks ago, but it appears that I’m just now publicly documenting its release for posterity’s sake. Design and Rails programming was done by me, with significant programming contributions by my good friends Lee and Daniel out in that mountainous region popularly known as Colorado. We just signed on Susan G. Komen as an additional charitable affiliate, so that’s also some very positive news.

Tumbleweed Houses designs and builds some beautiful tiny houses. Working under excessive constraints often lead to better solutions, better products and better experiences. Paradoxically, it can also sometimes lead to greater freedom. Which leads to something I’ve been pondering for the past couple of weeks: What does it mean to live a simple, low-impact lifestyle in a technology-saturated world? Is it possible to live simply without being a complete neo-Luddite? What are the constraints? Does “simplicity” imply physical, material simplicity or does it mean more than that? To me, simplicity = freedom.

Books, music, movies, documents, photographs and other media miscellany now live in bits. Bits are physical only in the most microscopic sense. Why do our homes grow ever-larger when our spatial needs only grow smaller? A strange phenomenon indeed. Obviously, culture evolves far more slowly than the artifacts it produces.

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During yesterday’s impromptu quasi-religious philosophical discussion, I proposed the question to a fellow: “Is it serious? Do you think that this, the universe, is serious?” Many people are uncomfortable with this question, perhaps because they’ve never considered it. I would venture to say that most people automatically assume that the answer to the question is “yes,” as it’s an ingrained part of our Western culture and heritage. Life is supposed to be serious business. I tend to think the contrary, however, but I gather that the true answer is probably “neither and both.”

Also, Thunderbird with the GMailUI extension and GMail IMAP is absolutely brilliant. Couple that with lots of Ubuntu hacking in the past couple of days. Extensive use of Vim, however, has lead to the habit of wanting to use Vim navigation and shortcuts everywhere, including the text box where I write this very note. Fortunately there is a Firefox extension for that sort of thing. Now, if only I could move myself using H, J, K and L …

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From Thoreau’s Walden (p. 12 of the Barnes and Noble edition):

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food would have us believe that despite the nearly 200 years of scientific advances since this passage was written, we’re just as confused about nutrition as we always were, if not more so. He’s probably right.

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Waxing poetic on video about design and programming with Ethan Eismann and Nico Lierman.

Being locked into a single vendor technology silo is no longer tolerable. Information, media and creative projects should be available and accessible without having to pay to keep them that way. The value of open source isn’t readily apparent to the average technology user until after he or she has been locked in to something else, and by then it costs too much in both time and money to break out. Is this the price we pay for beautiful, unified design and experiences? If so, the price tag might be too high.

John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World is a 660-page masterpiece of science writing. If everyone went around thinking about their lives and their civilization within the context of the geological timescale, the world would certainly be a less frantic and less stressed place. A million years is nearly incomprehensible for the human mind, but represents hardly a sliver of the earth’s entire history. Also, denizens of the Bay Area should read book 4, “Assembling California.” Fault lines and earthquakes were never more fascinating and terrifying.

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When I first started blogging back in 2002, the very concept of the blog was new and fresh and I approached the whole process of sharing my every waking thought on the Internet with a certain zeal and earnestness. It was exciting, and I gained a great deal from the endeavor. To be certain, starting a blog was by far one of the most rewarding projects of my life. But over time, my enthusiasm has waned and I’ve started to feel that the traditional format of the blog doesn’t suit my current lifestyle or thinking process. I need something different.

So, being that this site has always been largely experimental, I’ve decided to start a new experiment, the idea for which has sat festering in the back of my mind for some time. I am going to continue to write, as I’ve found writing an essential to both my thinking process and creative expression, but instead of a blog, I will publish my writing in the form of longer-format essays in a separate section of the site. The blog itself will be turned into a digital notebook of sorts where, each day that I have them, I’m just going to capture spurious and miscellaneous thoughts as they arise. Kind of like an open-source brain. Comments for everything except essays will disabled. I don’t know why, I just feel that comments will detract from the process. The Internet is full of far too much noise and not enough signal as is. I will reserve my noise — postings of my daily whereabouts, projects and personal ephemera — for other forums.

I’m not sure where this will lead. My guess is that it may help me to better understand my own thinking process. A process where small questions and small ideas germinate into something bigger and more fully thought-out. But maybe not. I don’t know. Either way, the experiment starts now.

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