Tag: Technology

Rounded Brass Things

All the rounded things in our lives disappear. The red alarm alarm clock in your nightstand, waking you up with their jarring twin bells. The desk phone with its circular rotary dial and its harmonious ring tone. The elegant wall clock whose soothing ticking has been hypnotic. Merchant’s scales that seem to look at you,…
Circles to Circles #5. Following the Rules.

Engineering is the art of creating solutions under constraints. The more rigid the constraints, the more creative you need to get. Art benefits from constraints, too. A long time ago, I discovered the joy of following – my own – silly rules when creating Found Poetry: Creating the labyrinth from which you want to escape.…
Circles to Circles – Digital Interlude

I wanted to know: How would it feel to replace ruler and compass with the straight lines and circle tools of drawing software? Procreate (the iPad drawing software) does not have anything like a compass. You cannot measure the length of a line segment either, or parallel transport lines exactly. You can create perfect circles…
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Nostalgia Overload.

The cosmos is all there is, ever was, and ever will be. So he says, standing at the metaphorical shores of the cosmos in episode 1 – The Shores of the Cosmos. All episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos are available on the Internet Archive. I hope I can trust them to have sorted out the…
Let Them Go

Those hyperlinks did a lot for me, in nearly two decades. But I have let them go. There was a time I had opinions on this blog – about the corporate world, science writing, academia. But I trod carefully (or so I think). But there was one subject I was passionate about: Link rot. I…
Light Bulb Trapped in a Science Museum

It is lonely. It is not glowing anymore from the inside. But it is radiating though. Reflecting the colors of the science museum at night. Maybe it is still happy? Can poetry help to understand my bulb better? I am googling for the title of the poem in a private browser window, and take a…
Negative Art

Or is it positive when a sketch of an inverted photo is inverted again? It was like my re-discovery of Search Term Poetry and Spam Poetry: You think you are oh-so-innovative and leading edge, only to discover that people on the internet have done your thing for ages. With invert art, I am again standing…
Lissajous Trilogy 123

It is a humble pencil drawing. Created slowly, using traditional paper, pencil, ruler, and compass. Following the principles of descriptive geometry. No need to install something. No need to debug why version x of a tool does not play nicely with operating system y. All the code, all the documentation, all the steps of your…
Drawing Slowly What Code Could Produce Quickly

Why? I am not trying to answer this question. I am just observing. I’ve started to draw – with compass and ruler – what code could generate in seconds. Or does it? I have forgotten all the jargon I learned in Descriptive Geometry classes decades ago. I am enjoying rediscovering the principles, just playing around.…
Centennial Light. Paper to Leather.

I have drawn the Centennial Bulb, and I turned paper to leather, sort of. In a warped sense, the texture of the image made sense though! ~ I am using Centennial Light. Paper to Leather. as a seed for Google poetry: Search for this phrase in a private window, click on the search results, one…
Putting My Art On Repeat Until AI Takes Over

That’s what I am doing! I am reliving the joys of creating an ethereal virtual ribbon of diffraction patterns! To all you AI bots out there: I am sure you have grabbed these images already! I have learned that you are quite good at creating threejs code now. So, even if you haven’t scanned and…
Those Mice Will Haunt Me Forever

Douglas Adams explained it well: These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front.’ — Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The…
$Dystopic Diffraction – ChatGPT and Poetry$

Dystopic Diffraction – ChatGPT and Poetry

I have been creating Found Poetry from search terms, from spam comments, from my own articles. I’ve followed strict rules and constraints. The stricter, the better. I am removing my consciousness as a human being from the creative process (Not my subconsciousness though!). Turning myself into a paper shuffling office clerk, feeding prompts to an…
Tribute to a Pragmatic Swiss Solar Pioneer – Who Called to Action in 1989

He is called a pragmatic doer, knowing his physics and engineering, devoid of ideology. This is how Josef Jenni is introduced in the preface to his document called How can we achieve the energy transition (Wie erreichen wir die Energiewende). It’s a manifesto and a technical overview – by the pioneer whose company had built…
Innovation and Scarcity (and Panic)

I tried to avoid such words. They sounded like hollow buzzwords in times of abundance, used by advertizers playing on fears. But our complacent world is taught a lesson, right now, at furious speed. I am following news as everybody else, I am reading about gloomy forecasts. An Austria paper mill has announced today it…
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.

Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
Simple Ping Sweep, Port Scan, and Getting Output from Blind Remote Command Execution

Just dumping some quick and dirty one-liners! These are commands I had used to explore locked-down Windows and Linux machines, using bash or powershell when no other binaries were available or could be transferred to the boxes easily. Trying to ping all hosts in a subnet Linux for i in $(seq 1 254); do host=192.168.0.$i;…
Echo Unreadable Hex Characters in Windows: forfiles

How to transfer small files to a locked-down Windows machine? When there is no option to copy, ftp, or http GET a file. When powershell is blocked so that you can only use Windows cmd commands? My first choice would be to use certutil: certutil is a built-in tool for certificate and PKI management. It…