I put together some mosaics of common images using dice faces as tiles. So far they only exist in computerized form, but the hope is to buy some dice wholesale and actually arrange some of these on a board. I’m still experimenting with what kinds of source images make for good output, but for now I’ve stuck to simple black-and-white symbols and line drawings. I’d like to start using more grayscale and complex shapes, but the challenge is keeping the image clear at a resolution low enough that the dice are still discernible and reasonable to arrange. (Some of these contain thousands of dice, which is a bit impractical.)
Expanding on last month’s very rough Kindle screensaver experiments, I’ve now put together a real set of ten nice looking close-ups of subway maps from cities around the world and packaged them for use on the Kindle. In order to install any kind of custom screensaver, you’ll need to perform the (very simple) Kindle “jailbreak” hack. Once that’s done, you should just be able to drop the image files into the directory created by the jailbreak.
Earlier this week I read a new essay by Benjamin Mako Hill called “When Free Software Isn’t Better.” Although I found it incredibly insightful, the reaction to this essay hasn’t been universally positive. The criticism has focused on a perceived attack on the Open Source Initiative. I want to address why I think Mako has taken a stance here that’s not aligned with the OSI, and why I also think it doesn’t constitute an attack.
I came across a very interesting map by redditor JPalmz that showed the countries of the world, re-arranged to match population with land area. I thought it was very cool, so I decided to do the same thing with US states. You can see the results below, but you may need to click through to see it full size in order to read the names of the states clearly.
I’m heading out to the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona tomorrow through Friday. I hope to meet lots of interesting people there, talk about lots of interesting things, and hopefully write something up for these pages. Say hi if you see me there!
The Free Culture Research Conference is happening right now at the Freie Universität in Berlin. I’m here and live-blogging it right today and tomorrow, and posting tweets and dents tagged #fcrc, and I’ll probably post some kind of wrap-up later.
