User:C3/T2 assessment

SI contributions

SI25

Radio Week 3 Underwater Exploration

the custom operator with different audio files and parameters

Radio Week 4 Protocols to Freestyle

Radio Week 5 Protocols for Bad customer service

SI25: Lost in Narration

SI26

At some point during this SI Doriane invited us to bring old devices that have a native browser, to explore how things would have displayed on them rather than modern laptops. At some point a joke about making a 3DS only website was made. Initially I got intrigued by this idea and so I started researching software and hardware specifics, and I summed them up in this pad:

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/SI26_nintendo_DS-3DS

After that we gathered with Tessa, Charlie and Eleni and started doing some navigation discoveries by browsing websites and taking notes in another pad (which now is our main one):

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/3DS_Browser_Investigation

We started making our own small webpages but noticed that most CSS we were writing was not working, so Doriane helped us to organize a methodical test and we have written collectively a page to navigate with the 3DS to check which properties actually worked, and which did not.

The Acid-esque page.

Inspired by Tactical design, we noted down a list of things that we know that don't work on the 3DS, and from those we derived strategies that allow us to create content that is visible only on the 3DS.

SI26_3DS-Zine#Strategies

Upon discovering this

writing presentation text + logbook

JS nightmares (I'm being sarcastic[maybe]) For a while we were sure that JS was not supported, until I double checked everything we did so far to write a dry recap of our journey.

an about:blank session in the browser trying to debug some JS.

After finding out JS worked some extra interaction elements found their way into our project.

I found out that even though I don't like writing JS, I enjoy using the browser's console to write code in general, I feel like being able to use JS to target HTML elements, assign CSS rules and adding small functions for interaction LIVE is a great feat, though there are a lot of inconsistencies that I find painful to discover.

General infrastructure of the website

Training with bash lead to a big relief on this one, instead of manually creating pages to manually edit by copy pasting, changing tabs, getting confused, I made use of something I started doing for myself. I created multiple files with touch.

$ touch room_{01..20}.html

I wrote one html page template with what we need for the infrastructure (a elements, scripts, etc.) made a loop that cat the template in every file.

$ for i in {01..20}; do cat template_html > room_$i.html; done

Then manually edited just the links, took 20 mins to come up with a working skeleton of the way we layed out the pages to be linked together.

Failures

"objects in mirror are closer than they appear"

A backup of my user on cerealbox.
I want to do it but I keep making copies of cerealbox as a whole, then manually deleting everything other than my user folder (I tried using curl, wget and httrack). I know this is beyond my current knowledge reach, so I'll do it wrong and then look into web scraping at some point.

Riviera challenged me to install archlinux
Riviera gave an old thinkpad and challenged me to install archlinux on an LVM, for the first 20 minutes after wiping the system with the USB stick I was typing commands in the void, I did not understand the fact that the usual commands we learned in class work only on a filesystem. Also after installing GNOME I was stuck for a week because I did not understand that I needed to manually enable it.

I tried wiping a microSD card
...with what I learned by wiping hard drives and installing linux. I tried different methods (shred, wipefs, dd if=/of=, recursive shred of all files in every folder, chmod on all files to make them rwx... but nothing) but it seems that the sd is stuck in read only mode, after multiple wipes and new makefs now it also is not readable at all times.

Tools

I have started using a lot of the things that we got introduced to during classes, and I am very happy about it :).

• graphviz: Fleshing out the outlines of something I want to make, I never though that after being introduced to flowcharts for so many years I would start using them at xpub.
• python, bash: Scripts! I love scripts, I feel like they're small thoughts that also do something, they don't stop at being just text.
• yt-dlp :handshake ffmpeg: Archiving documentaries all over that will inevitably be removed, turning them into audio, compressing them etc.
• termux: terminal emulator for android
• linux: I don't know how to sum this up, I have approached linux on multiple machines (@lattina, @cerealbox, @muletto, @mulino, @termux,) by doing various things, the tools we use in class help a lot in getting used to it.
• imagemagick: smol images, procedural images.
• free thesaurus
• internet archive and the wayback machine

What, how, why am I making what I am making?

I like to think that I am preparing to share the stuff I am collecting around. I hope that is the case because otherwise I'm screwed.

Observations

After 2 trimesters at xpub I noticed that:

- I am definitively a (selective) learning junkie. Thought it is not always clear to me why something create that brain itch. Anyways, I am generally more comfortable with taking more time on things. Reading a whole book on a topic, doing exercises step by step, making proposals and then trying to do them are some examples to some examples of how I am approaching code. Learning takes time and is all about iterations, so I am walking this journey peacefully for now.

- I like the idea of tools to be excuses to have people come together and do things

- I lurk a lot more. During the breaks we had, I took various dives into the wiki and zulip, at the beginning I was looking for interesting topics from the past, then it became something I usually do when I have some vague idea or when some interesting topics come up during class. It feels weird to say, but one example is the Cookbook, which I forgot of even though it was the first thing I looked at before being admitted into the course.

- As we are constantly exploring alternative tools, I am asking myself one question from time to time: what do I do, how much do I need? Scaling down is something that I am intrigued by, I am also actively trying it...

-Overall, approaching something I know I don't know all about has been an interesting opportunity to practice and learn. Coming back to the personal reader and glossary, I think that the wiki mediation is what makes the iteration less frequent, every time I approach the wiki I think a lot at the way information is displayed, which blocks me. I am writing a lot more on @cerealbox and on @lattina because the lack of interface elements just work for me.

There is definitely a pleasure in challenge aspect to it that appeals to me (Riviera gifted me a computer and then challenged me to install archlinux on a LVM the old way, took me two days, painful, but super interersting :) ). But I also think that it is a general space that is better than other things to have, especially in educational spaces.

Extra

The Repurposing Chromebook stations skill w/ Boris @the interaction station.

sony vaio @klankschool

Phone battery replacement w/ Eleni

Laptop fan replacement w/ Eleni

@muletto arch linux success

Server setup w/ Sevgi

Future developments

scripting text manipulation

scripting procedural graphics

self hosting (@mulino)

workshops/laboratories of device explorations

Keywords

some keywords that I have noted down overtime.

• distribution
• sharing-knowledge
• trouble-shooting
• trouble-making
• processes
• infrastructure
• space
• investigation
• care
• repair
• maintainance
• scripting
• resize
• scale
• compression
• deletion
• myth
• narration