Category Archives: tech

theremin!

I have GOT to finish building this [tag]theremin[/tag]. It’s almost too embarrassing to tell you how long ago I started on it. (I think Clinton may still have been in office when I soldered up the circuit board).

Mark Weidenbaum's Disquiet

[tag]Marc Weidenbaum[/tag], author of [tag]Disquiet[/tag], recently posted about the “Sound Device” exhibit at the [tag]Root Division[/tag] gallery. (More info on the Root Division website). I’ve been thinking a lot about dot matrix printers as musical devices lately (even before I started hitting the prescription cough medicine), so I loved this.

While you’re over at Disquiet, be sure to read about (and look at pictures of) Doze Green and David Ellis’s January exhibit at Fifty24 in San Francisco, it sounds like it was very cool.

Cyber-Rebels in Cuba

Interesting piece in the New York Times last week about the ways that [tag]Cuban[/tag] citizens work around [tag]Cuba[/tag]’s governmental restrictions on the Internet:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.

Not that long ago I stumbled across an interesting Cuban blog, Generacion Y, which is mentioned in the article:

Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand. “It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the information.”

(There’s an English version of the site, but the translation is rather awkward).