Month: November 2008
Wacom xorg.conf For Lenny Laptop
# This may be useful to someone else
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Generic Keyboard”
Driver “kbd”
Option “XkbRules” “xorg”
Option “XkbModel” “pc105”
Option “XkbLayout” “gb”
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
EndSection
Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
EndSection
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSection
Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “stylus”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “stylus”
Option “USB” “on”
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “eraser”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “eraser”
Option “USB” “on”
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “cursor”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “cursor”
Option “USB” “on”
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “pad”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “pad”
Option “USB” “on”
EndSection
Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen 0 “Default Screen” 0 0
InputDevice “Configured Mouse” “CorePointer”
InputDevice “Generic Keyboard” “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice “stylus” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “eraser” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “cursor” “SendCoreEvents” # For non-LCD tablets only
# InputDevice “touch” “SendCoreEvents” # Only a few TabletPCs support this type
InputDevice “pad” # For Intuos3/CintiqV5/Graphire4/Bamboo tablets
EndSection
Thomas Kinkade, IP Maximalist
Two of my least favourite things come together-
“Thomas Kinkade’s apparent attempt to establish broad intellectual
property rights “over a style and manner of painting and image-crafting””
http://theartlawblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/copyright-in-painting-style.html
New GNU T-Shirts
I did the graphic design for some new tshirts from the FSF –
Order them, and many other fine GNU and FSF products, here –
Mummers Atheism
If God exists and He is the cause of truth, beauty and goodness then His death would remove those qualities from human experience.
If God does not exist then truth, beauty and goodness cannot be caused by him and so their existence in the human experience cannot be dependent on His existence.
These are crayon sketches of two possible positions regarding the relationship of virtue to the existence of God.
In a post on the painter Francis Bacon at OpenDemocracy the author confuses these two positions. Specifically they confuse the preconditions of the former with the consequences of the latter.
They find the exemplification of this mummers’ atheism in the painting of Francis Bacon. Bacon cannot be touched by the grace of God for a very good reason that they neglect to mention for some reason. Despite this, Bacon treats both sacred and profane subjects equally in his art. This is an a-theistic art (rather than an anti-theistic art) but it is not a design for life for atheists or the only possible experience of a Godless universe, even for Bacon.
Marie Antoinette
Somebody has to be holding the parcel when the music stops. Their coronation can be useful for closing any messy chapters in the (art) history books. A career awaits, the messy and unprofessional lived experience of actually doing something needs tidying up for professional presentation.
Charlie McCarthy
The gentrification of the social graph’s captured aesthetics. The managerialist pastoral of relationism applied to reclaiming the messy emergence and sociality of Web 2.0. The Foxy-Whiskered Gentleman playing at being Jemima Puddleduck.
Nelson Muntz
Pointing and laughing at YouTube videos is one thing. Pointing and laughing at the history of art computing is the same thing. This is what semiotics does in as much as it does anything. It contributes to the cultural heat death of corporate information culture.
“Like That” is back in the art section of the site. Make sure you have Jave enabled and take a look!
Pawfal Forum
A forum for artists coding and free software to make and be art, especially the fluxus livecoding environment.
Sign up and ask away!
Open Source Publishing
The excellent Open Source Publishing, who did the design for the FLOSS+Art book that my revised “Open Source Art Again” essay appears in have used some quotes from it (or the older version reblogged by the P2P Foundation) as part of a thoughtful and insightful blog post on their name and what “freedom” might mean for design here. Highly recommended for anyone interested in free culture and/or graphic design.
Freedom Is For People
I have previously argued that we should talk about “freedom” rather than “openness” because the former provides a guide for action whereas the latter ultimately just confuses people.
Openness is not the only term to be wary of. There has been a proliferation of other terms to describe the secondary effects of freedom. These are usually economic in origin, and can be useful in their own domain. But they can be as confusing and counter-productive as “openness” when they displace talk of freedom.
The Commons
Commons are regarded as inefficient, outmoded and even unethical by economists. The lie of “the tragedy of the commons” needs constant refutation. And people argue that you cannot enclose (privatize) intangible goods, despite the fact that you can remove people’s freedom to use work where they encounter it.
Gift Economies
Since it would be irrational under microeconomics to give anyone a gift, gift economies appear economically irrational. The use of custom rather than law to enforce gift giving is also misleading. Gift economies appear simply to be random acts of kindness. Focusing on the economic value of gifts and on the absence of law in customary gift societies can be used to make copyleft appear restrictive and coercive.
Quid Pro Quo
Giving your own work away in exchange for other people’s work, sharing and sharing alike, seems fair and can be socially and economically beneficial. But when the resources being shared and the act of sharing become the focus rather than the people using them and their ongoing relationship to the work, that can mislead decisions that must be made to support the rights of those people.
A related problem is people discussing how to ensure that derivative work is returned to a project, rather than discussing how the freedom of downstream users of the project can be protected.
Reputation Economies
In order to be able to cash out of the reputation economy, people must be able to afford to create reputational value and to protect it. This raises the problem of how to economically induce the creation of reputational work and how to protect it until such time as the creator is in a position to exploit its value. But this value is an epiphenomena of freedom and restricting that freedom will not increase that value.
Peer Production
Production is only part of the lifecycle of a work. Copyright law is already hopelessly skewed in favour of producers, and peer producers will be consumers as well.
Freedom is For People
All of these metaphors or frameworks turn the conversation from individual freedom to supra-human systems. This inevitably privileges those systems over the individual and when decisions must be made to protect the system individual freedom will suffer as a result.
This can be seen happening in real-world projects. Too many people are confusing the idea of gifts as random acts of kindness, or of the “needs” of corporations, with the subject of freedom. That subject must always be human individuals.
The products of freedom can be regarded as forming commons, and gift economies, and reputation economies. But privileging these secondary phenomena over the thing that creates them will stifle freedom.
The subject of freedom must be actual people, not abstract economic models that can lead to the freedom of actual people being compromised.