Thom Hines
Author's posts
Dec 14 2011
Review: Morse Code Radio
For our assignment on “Dead Technology”, I was lucky to find a perfect, little hand-held Magnavox radio. I was initially worried that it wouldn’t provide a lot of affordances for Scrapyard Challenge, as it is fairly simple, but it had such a nice form factor that I couldn’t not get it. At first I had …
Dec 14 2011
Review: In-Person Video Chat
Playing with the idea that many forms of modern technology have depersonalized the experience of communicating with others, I modified an LCD screen to allow for two people, sitting opposite one another at a table, to have a text-based chat session with other. The screen is (mostly) transparent, allowing for the users to see the …
Nov 30 2011
New Idea: In-Person Video Chat
At the beginning of this project, I decided that I wanted to focus on the continuously lost and found art of communication. We, as a species, have developed countless ways of communicating with one another, always upgrading and changing the technology as go. And yet, most of us have removed ourselves from the most primal …
Oct 31 2011
Deader Tech: Morse Code Radio
As we were first being told about this assignment, I had a lot of initial ideas for exploring the idea of “dead” tech, and finding in what ways a tech becomes dead (obsolescence of the technology vs. obsolescence of the media) or in how we can compare and contrast our modern devices with the old …
Oct 23 2011
Almost Dead Technology WIN
While this was featured on Failblog and the like, I think this is a great repurposing of one type of media for another. Would have been better if it was an old cassette tape container, but I think the idea still stands: link
Sep 16 2011
Scrapyard Junk Walk
Even though I wasn’t here the first week, my neighborhood is perfect for finding lots of tossed out electronics. In fact, we’ve gotten a lot of stuff off the streets immediately around my apartment. Unfortunately, though, the few electronic items we’ve tried have all been broken, but I think that’s partially a matter of just bad …
Sep 14 2011
Reflections on readings
Lessons from the Scrapyard I’ve always had an interest in working with electronics, but since I never really got any practical lessons on how to do it, it always seemed like soemthing that only the technologically savvy could take on and work with. And this article really highlights what I have been wanting to do …