Recently in Howto Category

HOW TO: Connect an anemometer to the Internet:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/06/how_to_connect_an_anemometer_to_an.html

(I don't like Pachube's walled garden approach thought. We need a federated free equivalent, like StatusNet .)

"Binary Code View", an offline net.art show in London:

http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/06/04/binary-code-view-london/

How exactly do you own a net based artwork?:

http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/06/04/owning-online-art-selling-and-collecting-netbased-artworks/

Art from its own data visualisation (not as good as my encoding of a LeWitt literally as itself, but still fun):

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/03/fine-art-pie-packed.html

RSS feed icon pillow (want! or maybe I should make one...):

http://makersmarket.com/products/rss-feed-icon-pillow

I bought a 3 Wireless Broadband USB Stick to use with my Fedora subnotebook.

If you are looking for electronic versions of old public domain books and journals you can get good results by using Google Books and archive.org together.

Start with Google Books, which has more metadata and more search options than archive.org. Despite much-publicised metadata failures on some books, most books have useful date, author and title information, and many can be searched inside. I've found that the useful search constraints are date (for example 1850 to 1900 when searching for Victoriana) and then one or more of author, title, exact phrase or subject keyword.

Always use the advanced search interface -

http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

Don't limit the search to "Full Books Only" unless you are searching specifically for epub format ebooks. Epub is a great way of getting a structured copy of a book that you can read on a mobile device, copy and paste from and translate to other formats, but many more books are availabe as PDFs. The only problem with PDF versions of books is that Google Books doesn't provide downloads for all of them.

Once you've found the title of a book you want but that Google doesn't provide a PDF download for, search for that title on archive.org. It will almost always be there but you may have to select the correct edition, or choose between different versions from different libraries or from projects other than Google Books. Go to the book's page and don't click on "Download PDF" which sends you back to Google, who don't have it. Instead click on the link to "All Files", then download the PDF (or the DJVU, or the text extracted from the DJVU) from there.

There's nothing to stop you searching archive.org for authors, title words of keywords as well. archove.org is used by projects other than Google Books. gutenberg.org has the texts of many old books as well, and provides html and epub versions of illustrated books as well. But as a new resource with some rough edges, Google Books is a useful new research resource for historical sources.

Furtherfield have published an essay by me on how digital artists can work to help improve Wikipedia's representation of digital art by becoming editors and participating in Wikipedia. There's been some good discussion of the article on mailing lists, and hopefully the article has demystified Wikipedia's editing process a bit for artists and encouraged people to get involved. Click here to read it -

An Artists' Guide For Editing Wikipedia

Wikipedians will notice a curious omission from the article - I don't mention NPOV. I did this deliberately as I didn't want to distract from discussion of the ideas that I have seen people on mailing lists having practical problems with. Which is why the article focusses on notability, sources and deletion. Hopefully it explains some of the rationale behind them and how to work with them to make better articles for Wikipedia, for society and for digital art.

http://identi.ca/tag/wikimediahatesart

I have a lot of respect for the Wikimedia Foundation, everyone I've met from it have been great people and I use their software and projects daily. I was proud to take part in the Wikipedia Loves Art event earlier this year. But as an artist I am disappointed and offended by Wikimedia's treatment of a contemporary art project.

Whatever lawyers who charge for each letter they send out on your behalf may tell you, and whatever your opinion of contemporary art, there are strong precedents in the US supporting free speech under the first amendment for artists who use trademarks. To demand that artists transfer resources to a trademark holder or face legal action is therefore not just a chilling effect on free speech but legally shaky.

The EFF, to their credit, point this out here -

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/wikipedia-threatens-

And details on an artwork and lawsuit that provide an important precedent can be found here -

http://www.barbieinablender.org/

Wikimedia's response has been to disparage the concerns of the artists and the EFF -

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-April/051505.html

Other web sites have picked up on this, and are supporting the artists -

http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2009/04/wikipedia-threatens-artists-for-fair-use.html

http://freeculturenews.com/2009/04/23/wikipedia-accuses-web-site-of-trademark-violation/

The problem with Wikimedia's over-reaching application of their trademark to the material detrement of artists is a chilling effect on freedom of speech. Wikimedia owe the artists and the EFF an apology. This behaviour really is beneath such an excellent organization.

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright 2009 Rob Myers <rob@robmyers.org>
# Licenced under the GPL 3 or, at your option, any later version.

# Produce a Plucker version of Free Software, Free Society
# Some texinfo errors not fixed

# Convert eps images to GIFs

convert images/clib.eps images/clib.gif
convert images/code.eps images/code.gif
convert images/flex.eps images/flex.gif
convert images/free_software_song.eps images/free_software_song.gif
convert images/headMain.eps images/headMain.gif
convert images/party.eps images/party.gif
convert images/richard.eps images/richard.gif
convert images/philosophical-gnu.eps images/philosophical-gnu.gif

# Fix texinfo problems

perl -pe 's/@heading\{(.*)\}/@heading $1/' -i fs_for_freedom.texi 

perl -pe 's/^\\input texinfo_times.tex//' \
    -i rms-essays.texi

echo "\
@ifnottex
@alias unnumberedfootnote = footnote
@end ifnottex

@ifnottex
@macro sp1
@sp 1
@end macro
@end ifnottex

@include rms-essays.texi
" > rms-essays-html.texi

# Convert to plucker

makeinfo --html --no-headers --no-split --force -o rms-essays.html \
    rms-essays-html.texi

perl -pe 's/^(<a href="#.+)$/$1<br \/>/' \
    -i rms-essays.html

plucker-build --zlib-compression --stayonhost --bpp=1 --maxwidth=320 -p . \
    -f rms-essays -N "Free Software,Free Society" file://`pwd`/rms-essays.html

UK blogs, boards, Web 2.0 sites: how to not get sued - A Consuming Experience.

Improbulus's notes on a talk about UK blogging law from  Robert ands of Finers Stephen Innocent, and his slides.

Close to a UK equivalent of the EFF Blogger's guide, which is more US-specific.

[Update] MJ Ray in the comments points out that the blog and notes are NC and the slides are all rights reserved. Sorry about that. I've suggested a freely licenced version to ORG, and Francis Davey seems interested. Email them and let them know it's a good idea...

#!/bin/bash
# Copyright 2009 Rob Myers 
# Licenced under the GPL version 3 or, at your option, any later version.

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
   echo "Please enter name of manual directory on server (e.g. FlossManuals)."
   echo "You can find this by going to the printable version of the manual."
   exit 1;
fi

plucker-build --zlib-compression --stayonhost --bpp=8 -p . \
  -f $1 --staybelow=http://en.flossmanuals.net/floss/pub/$1/ \
  http://en.flossmanuals.net/$1/print

<pre>#!/usr/bin/perl# Copyright (c) 2009 Rob Myers <rob@robmyers.org># Licenced under the GPL version 3 or, at your option, any later version.# Install gut (gutenberg to html converter) into your PATH.# Download the project Gutenberg CD image, decompress it,# add this file to the directory contaning the etext directories and run it.use strict;use warnings;use File::Basename;use Cwd;sub html_name{my $filename = shift @_;$filename =~ s/(.*).txt/$1.html/;$filename;}sub absolute_path{my $file = shift @_;"file://" . Cwd::cwd() . "/" . $file;}sub html_to_pdb{my $file = shift @_;my $absolute_file = absolute_path ($file);my $file_root = basename ($file);system ("plucker-build  --zlib-compression --stayonhost --bpp=8 -p./plucker -f $file_root $absolute_file");}sub txt_to_html{my $filename = shift @_;my $htmlname = html_name ($filename);`cat $filename | gut > $htmlname`;}sub process_files{my @txt_files = `ls ./etext*/*.txt`;foreach my $file (@txt_files){chomp ($file);# Don't convert files that have an html versionmy $htmlfile = $file;$htmlfile =~ s/(.*).txt/$1h.htm\*/;if (! -f $htmlfile){txt_to_html ($file);}}my @html_files = `ls etext*/*.html etext*/*.htm`;foreach my $file (@html_files){chomp ($file);html_to_pdb ($file);}}mkdir ("./plucker");process_files ();</pre>

Over at Locus, Cory has a good article on how to write a novel a year despite the joys of the internet and looking after a baby.

The point of my (abandoned) "agile art" series was to apply geek productivity techniques to some aspects of art production. And several of my recent projects have been structured to be produced as many small, quickly produced works. You can't do every project that way, and the projects I couldn't structure in that way have tended not to get finished.

Cory's observation that you can write a page in 20 minutes and you can always find 20 minutes a day has some bearing on drawing and blogging. So I'm going to make sure I find 20 minutes a day for them...