blacklog

Sometimes I just feel like making another icon.

I recently moved from Massachusetts to California. The process of packing and unpacking all of my belongings has inevitably influenced my digital life, inspiring me to look over and reorganize every corner of my backup drives, updating and consolidating old files and directories. At some point I came across a text file where I write my login information every time I create a new account on a website. I am used to create a different password every time, usually based on combinations of insults in different languages—I find those easy to remember—and special characters when it’s required. Overwhelmed by the clutter of usernames and passwords, I decided to take some time and rewrite the contents of that file in a more readable format.

The following image is a low resolution rasterization of the result, where each line contains my login information for a different web service. Lines are clustered in categories like “social”, “travel”, “banking”, and so on. There are close to three hundred entries. I am only active on around a third of them, and when I reviewed each account in the browser, I realized a number of them didn’t exist anymore as functional websites. Luckily, none of the deceased contained data that I cared about.

[Extracted from the Tiny Icon Factory. Colored using a Magic Wand Tool]

Does it make sense to feel nostalgic about something even if you still have it?

Graffiti Pizarronero Number 1, Instance 2 by yours truly.

Blackboards and chalks are everywhere around me. From now on I will use them to post short messages about random things as a low-tech alternative to the web. Please don’t erase.

I don’t usually write about gadgets and shit. I don’t really consider myself to be into toys that much either. I am happy with my good old laptop, a camera and a stylus tablet. Never needed anything else. However, today I ran into this little thing while I was shopping for MiniDV head cleaning tapes in BestBuy, and couldn’t help but really want it, experiencing the extreme desire that only hits you when you face a matter of life or death: a Polariod Pogo instant portable printer. There are a number of reasons why I loved it at first sight: It is wireless, it is almost the size of an iphone, the ink is already in the paper, and most importantly, it prints 3×2 inch laminated stickers out of any jpeg file you want. Instant-Custom-Stickers, godammit! I’ve been waiting all my life for something like this.

The people in BestBuy were not going to make it easy for me. The printer box and the brochures explained how to print from all supported cameras and phones, but did not mention computers at all, and the store clerk was convinced that Polaroid Pogo did not support printing for computers, at least yet. Um. Of course I should have known better than listening to him. Dubious about what I heard I decided to wait until I knew more about how hard it would be to print from my Mac. I didn’t think it would be much of a problem in theory, but you never know. I’ve bought some cheap shit like this before that never worked.

Later in the lab, I was ichatting with Mud about the printer, and he showed me a link to a pdf in the Polaroid website that tells you what to do. Pretty simple. I ran back to BestBuy and didn’t care much about not spending money on superfluous things. I have been happily printing stickers ever since, 30 cents each.

The following example shows a 3×2 crop of one of Amy’s Holga Pictures, and my Polaroid Pogo while spitting out a print of the same picture.

I have recently discovered the MIT Science Fiction Society Library in the 4th floor of the MIT Student Center. I feel like an idiot for not having discovered it before, but giving it a second thought, it was probably better that way. I am not sure if I could have afforded to spend my days daydreaming about telepathic detective gymnosperm plants, steampunk robots that will slaughter you if you don’t speak German, or eighty year long space round trips protecting cargos of a few thousand genetically modified frozen teenagers. Today I am as busy as I used to be when I was a student here, but I am not feeling as challenged, and I can comfortably dedicate some space in my memory and imagination to regularly escape into the fantastic stories collected between the shelves of the MIT-SFS library.

Conveniently enough, I have decided to reactivate the picture collecting mechanism in PictureXS, and I will use it in combination with my simple [and overly buggy] Video2Web picture capturing program to keep a visual archive of all the books I will check out [and hopefully read] from the MIT-SFS library. I wonder if I should scan all the covers, they are so remarkably different from anything you see these days in bookstores, and a definite visual treat.