Tag: stuff

Fabbulousness and the taste of masses.

Bruce Sterling allowed Starship Sofa to podcast his novella The Kiosk the other day, and it’s two hours well spent if you’re in the least interested in the (possible) disruptive tendencies of fabbing and rapid manufacturing. Go listen to it before it disappears, then come back here. (You can skip the first ten minutes to get to the story)

Skip the first ten or so minutes, which are of more interest to sci-fi people rather than you, and take notes on which predictions you agree with. Having listened to the story, I had to remind myself that rapid prototyping is still in its infancy and not a foregone conclusion, lest I give up on it in favour of something more bleeding edge.

All those megabytes add up to a whole pile of gigabytes

Even though I don’t consider myself to be a stuff-junkie, I’ve found myself in a situation where I more or less everyday walk around with a bunch of gear. The stuff itself isn’t all that interesting; An external harddrive, a USB2-stick, compact digital camera, iPod & cellphone.

It struck me that I’m a walking storage facility. Let’s calculate a bit

iPod: 40gb
HD: 80gb
USB2-stick: 2gb
Digicam: 500mb
Cellphone: 80mb (Memory Stick + built in memory)

Not accounting for the formatting, that’s 122.580GB of storage that I carry around with me more or less all the time. (Which is why sewing a really nifty backpack is quite high on my to-do list.)
Ok, so the harddrive is usually nine tenths full, as is the iPod. camera, stick & cell are say one third full.

There’s no point to this post, just that it’s all rather cool. If I could only offset my lazy monkey-brain memory with some on the hd, I’d be set!

And of course, I took a look at my desk and there’s roughly 300 cds & dvds (50% of each), a harddrive from a bricket iPod, one 4GB and one 40GB hd that I used in my bondage-iMac & a DSLR with 512mb. A lot of space.

If all the empty and unused space in the world saved data in a forest and there was no-one there to use it, would it make a wooshing sound or would only the trees shudder because someone sooner or later would try to print all that data?