15.6.17

upcoming


i figured i should probably let you all know what i'm actually doing so you can poke me if i don't seem to be alive anymore. there's three things that have been on the back burner for way too long due to crappy health and crappy IRL stuff that i'm now working on as "resurrected projects":

- an implantable haptic compass (the 'Southpaw' project). an extremely kind person has helped me get enough together that i can now start looking around for hardware and a microprocessor - i know i've said this before but to that person, thankyou from the bottom of my shrivelled up little heart. you have helped so much & i would not be able to get any prototyping off the ground without you. to the engineer that commented re. what components might work best: thankyou also! that was really useful info & i will post a proper reply to you soon.

- proper instructions for how to manufacture / acquire / install nodes. i've had to hold back on this one because of some ethical problems brought up by two different people irl: the issue was more or less, is it right to give people these instructions when they don't have any experience with this sort of thing & may therefore do serious damage to themselves? i.e. if someone uses my instructions to try and install their own, fucks it up hardcore, loses a fingertip to sepsis and then blames the fuck out of me, is it actually my fault in a moral sort of sense? legally i am pretty sure it wouldn't be (but not completely sure, to be fair) but i have had to have a couple of long discussions about the whole thing (i also mentioned it to Kevin Warwick, whose take on it was pretty good advice.) in the end i decided it goes against my principles to withhold information deliberately, even if that info could possibly be dangerous. i believe we all have the right to use our bodies as we choose, even if that means we get hurt. i'm going to release the procedures with as much "safety information" as i can come up with - meaning i need to put in a lot more stuff about possible pain control, spotters, aftercare, what to do if it goes majorly wrong, etc etc.

- i'm also screwing around with this new XNT chip. nothing really new there but could get some videos up for you all or something. i'm not sure what apps exist for NFC devices - i've got a phone that's compatible but all i found so far is Dangerous NFC for protecting the tags and TagWriter for messin' with em. there's probably a lot more out there. it'd be nice to have something protecting my logins again, been a long time since i had that keyboard that required my tag to be present before it would let Windows log in.

- Paul's documentary is still chugging along as ever & will be available in late September this year. it ought to be pretty good i think; he's a damn good filmmaker.

i'll be at my parents' over the weekend coming up (Fri 16.6 to Mon 19.6) but will probably drag machine with me. have fun on Father's Day

cc

L

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice to see you're still around and moving forward with your projects. You are a trailblazer. Radical human enhancement isn't only for the rich and powerful, it's for everyone, and you are still proving that.

ThomasEgi said...

I forgot to mention. If you'r going for Atmel/Microchip microcontrollers you'll need a suited programming adapter. Building one for a true serial/parallel port works but I can highly recommend to get an USB one. They are easy to find on ebay by the term usbasp and sell for less than 10 bucks. You may wanna get one that can be selected to work at 3.3V. 6 wires to your microcontroller, "avrdude" installed and you'r ready to go.

Dan Campbell said...

Thanks for the update, Lepht.

Looking forward to hearing your experiences, when SouthPaw is done, or watching about, in the Documentary. Whoever she's talking about - thanks for helping our hero change the world, ma'am/sir.

That's a tough subject, about liability. I think for the most part, blogs and cyber-communications in general, is fairly well protected, because of the free speech angle. But yes, Kevin would have more insights into this.

Have a good fun time with family, and see Wonder Woman, if you have a chance. Great flick.

Usul said...

Oh good timing, I was thinking about Southpaw in the shower the other day. Was trying to imagine what it would feel like. And where it would somehow desensitize if you didn't move for a while.

Keep us posted, sib!

Trey Roady said...

Glad to hear the Southpaw project is still going.

So, funny story, but I got started on some vibrotactile haptics research years back, partially generated by watching your C3 talk years back. I ended up in the doctoral program doing research.

Now, I'm defending in 2 weeks on all of it and I figured I'd stick my head back in and see how things went.

So, thanks for the initial spur of curiosity.

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