Zagreb was cool, much livelier than Pula. The group at MaMa was really awesome. They are very much less ideological than the people in Pula, but that allows them to be more inclusive and they have a great community. They have a thing called “Skill Sharing” every Saturday, where people come and hang out and show each other how to do cool stuff. There’s a pretty diverse (in terms of age and gender) group of 20-50 or so people who come frequently. They even have a few people in their 50s and 60s who AREN’T old-school hackers, but rather people who learned computers/free software later in their lives. I think that’s really cool.

Saturday Skill Sharing

Oh, and after the meetings, everyone goes out for pizza together. Everyone at MaMa was really friendly and welcoming. They were even willing to switch a whole table of conversation from Croatian to English just for my  benefit. Probably the funniest comment was Marcell talking about people who know just enough about computers to seem like they really know a lot about computers, they’ll drop a phrase like “I had to recompile the kernel,” or “flash the BIOS,” and if you never actually ask them more questions or have a real discussion with them, you’d assume they were totally 1337. He said it reminded him of a guy who’d been teaching him yoga and meditation: At first, Marcell thought the guy was the smartest person in the world. He hardly ever spoke, and when he did, he’d dispense really wise aphorisms. Then after a while, he realized the guy was actually really dumb, and just spoke in nothing but wise aphorisms.

One guy told me he thought it was harder to become a good hacker these days, because lots of the small, but tricky problems have already been solved. These are the kinds of problems that one person just starting out might work on.

I also went to a couple museums in Zagreb. The technical museum was pretty cool. They had a lot of really good exhibits on different subjects. My favorites were probably the section with very early computers, a whole room full of very intricate and informative models of heat engines (everything from a refrigerator to a Saturn V rocket) by Ivo Kolin, and also a big exhibit on Nikola Tesla, including live demonstrations of some of his inventions.

1.21 gigawatts!

I also saw the naïve art museum, which I really liked. I’d gotten kind of burnt out on art museums in Italy, but this one had some really cool stuff, and it was very different from anything I’d seen elsewhere. I especially liked the pieces by Ivan Rabuzin.

Ivan Rabuzin: On the Hills - Primeval Forest, Image Courtesy Wikimedia Foundation, licensed under GNU Free Documentation License (I saw this in person, but Wikipedia had a better photo)

After Zagreb, I flew to Warsaw, Poland. I had a 20 hour layover in Budapest. I went to see the Memento Park, where the Hungarians dumped all the communist statues after the fall of communism there. It was the main thing that I’d missed in Budapest the last time I was there. The park is pretty far outside of the city, and getting there takes about an hour. Once you get there, it’s also kind of expensive by Hungarian standards. The irony of communist iconography being turned into a money-making tourist trap was not lost on me. What better way to remember a morally bankrupt, repressive government than with your very own McLenin’s t-shirt?

McLenin's or East Park t-shirt

So yeah, the Momento Park was a good way to kill time, and it would’ve been pretty cool if it were 70% closer and 50% cheaper.

The rearguard of the revolution?

I went out for drinks with a couple people I met the last time I was in Hungary (the bar had swings instead of seats!) and then went out and slept in the airport (which was much warmer than the one in Milan). My flight left for Warsaw at 7 am. In Poland I emailed some developers and white-hat security hacker types. I’ll probably meet with them when I get back there. Yesterday (!) I caught a train from Warsaw to Vienna, Austria for the Roboexotica festival.

Mojitomatic

This wonderful contraption makes mojitos. As you can see, it’s very ambitious and, unlike some of the other designs which require user-input, aims to totally automate the mojito-creation process. If anything, it might be slightly too ambitious because it has a tendency to jam or break down, but when it works, it works well and produces a very refreshing drink.

Lego Mindstorms put to good use

This robot takes legos, the toys we all remember fondly from our childhood and puts them into service making screwdrivers. The guy sitting to the right of the robot is its creator, an MIT-educated American who used to work for Lego Mindstorms. I remember when I was a kid my parents got me a Mindstorms kit for Christmas one year, but it was during a period when I’d decided I was too old to “play with legos” and so I never did much with it. Oh, if only I had considered the possibilities…

The rimshot-bot

This bot doesn’t actually make drinks, but it does provide another essential cocktail-party service: playing rimshots after the punchlines of terrible jokes. It has two modes, an auto-joke mode where it tells its own bad jokes (“Take my wife, please”) in a synthesized-robot voice and playing accompanying rimshots. It also has a manual mode where the user (its creator, in this photo) can trigger rimshots as needed with a small wireless remote. Earlier in the evening, we’d been trying to explain the meaning of ‘that’s what she said’ to a native German-speaker, and the Rimshot-bot would’ve been most helpful.

The NSFW-bot

This bot combines old-school punchcard computing with old-old-school dick jokes. The user first punches holes in a card, then inserts that card into a slot on the wall behind the mannequin, and pulls a comically-oversized lever. The marks made on the card determine through a secret, proprietary algorithm what type of drink the user receives. The drink is then peed out into a waiting cup. Sadly, in this photo the card-apparatus and lever are mostly obscured, but I liked it because the girl managed to look mildly skeeved-out by the robot, but is still DRINKING A DRINK THAT JUST CAME FROM HIS PLASTIC WANG.

3D-printing shotglasses

This was arguably the most high-tech of any of the robots. It’s a homebuilt 3D-printer design, put to good use here creating shotglasses from molten, non-toxic plastic. It took about 20 minutes to complete an individual shotglass, and every one has its own unique imperfections.

Chassis the beer-serving bot

This guy might be my favorite bot of the show so far, mostly because it corresponds closely to what everyone imagines when you say “drink-serving robot”. Also, it pours beer, which I like. Basically, it roams around the room carrying glasses, and you can put your glass under the spigot in the middle to get a nice cup of beer. It’s not very autonomous, the whole thing is remote-controlled, but it’s much more mobile than most of the other designs. I like the retro-futuristic styling, and it has a few really nice little touches. The “mouth” of the bot is actually a gauge that shows how much beer is left in the keg, and the bot also includes microphone/speaker that communicates with a wireless headset so the bot can talk to people. Last night, Johannes from Monochrom was singing a surprisingly passable version of the Terminator theme over the headset (“Dah-dah-dah-duh-DAH!”).

If you live in California, you can hire Chassis to appear at your own party. Note to Pomona College administrators: This would be a better use of funds than Death-By-Chocolate.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!

This is RoboVox, a giant statue of a robot standing outside the gallery where Roboexotica is being held. I saw a talk by his creator, and he admitted that RoboVox is “more of a monument than a robot,” but it’s still pretty impressive and imposing. The “vox” part comes in because there’s a special phone number you can send a text message to, and the robot’s eyes and mouth will light up and it will read your text out in a booming, synthesized robot-voice. If anyone wants to mess with random Austrian passersby, RoboVox will be up at least until this Sunday, and you can send a text to: (0043)68110679782. Watch out though, international texts can be pricey. Oh, and I’ve already made it say “All your base are belong to us!”

Mmm...snacks

This bot carries snacks it the plastic tub it carries. I think it has the ability to roam around a room, but it was stationary when I saw it. If you approached the bot and moved or made noise, it would light up and open the lid on the snack container. The snacks have changed over the week I’ve been here, but they were mostly pretty standard bar-fare: pretzels, chips (aka “crisps”), bugles, etc..

"The future of cherry-serving robotics"

These were two little crane-like robots created by Bre Pettis to put cherries into cocktail glasses. The retro-aficionados out there will recognize the controllers as Atari 2600 joysticks. Using a controller with only a two-axis joystick and one button to control a bot with 6 different servo motors was pretty tricky The button cycled through different modes, with each joystick axis controlling two servos in each mode, but it was really not intuitive and took some work to manipulate the cherry into your cocktail glass. Usually, two users would race against other with the winner being awarded vodka in their cherry-glass. The children in this photo got soda instead.

So Roboexotica was featured on BoingBoing Gadgets, the recently-launched BoingBoing spinoff which is kind of exactly like Gizmodo, Engadget, Gadgetizer, GadgetVenue, Wired GadgetLab, TheGadgetBlog, and Ubergizmo. Clearly, the world was crying out for a new gadget blog.

Anyway, the photo they chose for the story features none other than yours truly, driving Chassis! His creators were very kind in letting me drive their expensive, awesome robot. He’s fairly simple to control, with a two-joystick tank-tread-style control scheme. But the joysticks are analog, and his motors are actually pretty powerful. It’s easy to push too far and send Chassis careening across the room. Also, one joystick is a bit more sensitive than the other (“He has a limp,” they tell me) so you have to learn to correct for that if you want him to go straight at all. There are also buttons on the remote that make him blink, wink, dispense beer, or rotate the little metal fan on his head.

They also let me try the headset and take a turn doing the voice for Chassis, frightening small children when the robot talked to them (I was nice!) and amusing drunk adults.

Gina the Vodcow

This one was kind of basic. You “milk” the cow’s udders in order to get vodka. Then, if you want ice, you have to reach into the anus (they have special gloves) and there’s an ice tray in there. Juvenile? Yes. Funny? Definitely.

Slow and steady wins the race?

This robot was named ‘Sloth’, after its method of locomotion. It crawled back forth across the room, suspended from a steel cable. The motion of the arms was impressively well orchestrated, and it had to be in order to keep its balance on the cable. It also dispensed shots (whiskey?) into the shotglass underneath. Towards the end of the week, one of the sensors that reversed the direction of the crawl started malfunctioning, so its creator had to hang around and manually reverse the direction.

Distillobot

This was kind of a low-tech steampunk-looking thing. It was distilling its own alcohol, so it gets points for being the only bot at the festival to actually produce alcohol. The horns allow you to hear the distillation occurring, and there’s a little mouthpiece that lets you aspirate the final product.

There were three different panel discussions:

1. Smartass reloaded? AI and the Future Role of Cybernetics
2. Rest in Pieces? Cyberpunks, Cyborgs and the Complexities of Discourses
3. The Policy of the Artificial: Strategies, Tendencies and Perspectives

The discussions were pretty interesting. However the participants in each panel were randomly assigned, not by area of expertise, so the conversations had a tendency to drift off topic. The second panel, in particular devolved into a love-fest for Twitter. One girl even said, “You’re no one if you’re not on twitter,” which was apparently intended to be a clever song reference, but just came off sounding pretentious since nobody knew the song. At this, I chortled audibly, and Johannes dragged me up to the front (“Who’s laughing back there?”) to discuss my distaste for Twitter.

This I did, reluctantly at first, but with gradually increasing vehemence. I believe I said, and still believe, that Twitter takes the worst elements of blogging and exaggerates them. It promotes self-absorbed navel-gazing, instantaneous, knee-jerk posting-without-thinking and obsession with irrelevant minutia. The one-hundred-and-forty character post limit virtually assures an absence of serious reflection. I’m not saying people who use Twitter are necessarily shallow people, but it is a tool that promotes shallow thinking.

In any case, I give the Twitter-loving audience credit for not immediately burning me at the stake. My aversion to Twitter did become my most well-known personality trait for the rest of the festival, though. Sample Tweet: “Roboexotica panel: finished. Having dinner with @melochka and the guy who hates twitter”

There was a talk-show, hosted by Johannes Grenzfurthner and one of his Monochrom colleagues, Roland Gratzer. They introduced themselves as members of AANRBGEA, the Association of Atheist, Nanotechnology Researchers and Board Game Enthusiasts of Alabama. Which is, if I do say so myself, the greatest organization that never existed. They did an admirable job of staying in character for the entire talk show, but Johannes does a really terrible Alabama accent.

AANRBGEA members

They had several guests on the “talk show”, mostly Americans, as it happened. Mitch Altman, perhaps best known as the inventor of the TV-B-GONE that wreaked havoc (can you ever wreak anything except havoc?) at CES last January.

Eddie Codel, a SF-based video producer who makes Geek Entertainment TV, and talked about his current project: a documentary about California wildfires and the creation of a sort of survivalist wiki. I have to admit, the idea of combining the Bay Area “lets make a wiki!” culture with the “government’s trying to take my guns” survivalist culture sounds like it would produce interesting results. On the other hand, if I don’t trust wikipedia to tell me when Grover Cleveland was born, I’m sure not going to rely on a wiki site for information crucial to my continuing to live.

A very ill and moderately hungover linguist, Evelyn Fürlinger, gave a brief talk about frequency analysis. There was a musical interlude provided by Krach Der Robot (“Da Music Extraordinaire”):

The last guest was Bre Pettis, a New York-based hardware hacker and one of the founders of NYCResistor. He spoke about the DIY movement.

I got a chance to hang out with Bre some more over the next few days, and I was pretty impressed. He’s a guy who really knows things, and is good at just whipping up little projects. At Metalab, I watched him hack together a KAP rig in the span of about 30 minutes. He even made his own bolt because the metric bolts available didn’t fit his American camera.

Perhaps most surprisingly, for somebody who posts a daily videoblog and whose financial livelihood depends on getting attention and building himself as a brand, he is not at all a self-promoting blogwhore. He comes off as very much a normal, interesting person.

Shaping molten plastic for the kite rig

But yeah, I just spent 15 hours on a bus. It wasn’t Greyhound-level terrible. (Note to Europeans thinking of touring the USA by bus: Don’t. Just don’t.) They had a bathroom that was mostly usable, and you could get tea and coffee for not-insane prices, but still, spending 15 hours on a bus is always pretty miserable and I’m totally burnt out.

I did finish reading Nabakov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, which is easily one of the densest and strangest books I’ve ever read.  Tomorrow I’m going to try to get back down to Ljubljana to see some of the Kiberpipa people again, but also to check out Ljudmila, which I somehow missed the first time around.

The train to Ljubljana is like €80, and I refuse to get on another bus, so I’m going to try hitchhiking. Word has it hitchhiking is quite safe and common in Austria/German-speaking Europe in general, as well as the former Yugoslavia. The way I see it, short of being murdered, there’s no way it will suck worse than the bus. And if I am murdered, at least I won’t have to spend another 10+ hours on a bus. Don’t worry mom, I promise I’ll only take safe rides!

Edit: Oh,  almost forgot, somebody stole my ukulele! To be fair, they may not have known it was mine. I accidentally left it on a table in the common room of the hostel in Berlin and went to bed. In the morning, it was gone. I searched and asked to no avail. Strangely enough, I was staying in the same Berlin hostel where I was given the ukulele for free, so there is a certain karmic symmetry to losing it there.

No, I didn't start flying a sign for Graz in front of the opera in downtown Vienna.

It’s also (for me at least) an emotional rollercoaster. As you’re waiting, you’re being rejected by dozens and dozens of cars passing. It’s easy to start getting bummed out and dejected. I even got as far as starting to mentally compose the blog post about how I failed at hitchhiking. It took me almost 3 hours to get my first ride out of Vienna. Although for part of that time I was waiting in the wrong place, and I spent about 30 minutes getting a coffee and warming up in McDonald’s.

Then, when somebody does pick you up, you feel totally elated and awesome. It certainly didn’t hurt that both of my rides yesterday were reasonably attractive women in their late 20s/early 30s. My first driver (from Vienna to Graz) had a really nice little Garmin GPS navigation device (with a less impressive suction-cup mounting system). We didn’t use it much since it’s basically one autobahn straight from Vienna to Graz, but I’m a fan of expensive electronic gadgetry on principle. It’s also reassuring because if your driver has her own fancy gizmos, she seems less likely to try to rip you off for yours.

My second driver was super nice—the kind of nice that doesn’t seem like it exists outside of books and movies until you occasionally encounter it. I must have gotten very good at giving off the friendly/harmless vibes, because within about 5 minutes after picking me up, she took me home to her house to meet her two sons (8 and 9). She didn’t strike me as a crazy, irresponsible mother, either. Her kids were friendly and well-behaved. They seemed amused when I introduced myself in English and shook hands in a grown-up fashion.

She told me she stopped because her mother is Slovenian; when she explained to her boys that she was going to help me get to Slovenia, the younger one asked, “Is he going to visit grandma?” which was cute. She actually made me dinner (!), and then drove me (out of her way!) to Maribor, which is the first town over the border big enough to have a real train station.

By then, it was starting to get  dark, so I didn’t think I’d get another ride. I bought a train ticket from Maribor to Ljubljana for €7.73; even with the added cost of a sharpie marker, it’s still a lot better than an €80 Austrian train. The whole trip took about 9 hours, but, crucially, none of that time was spent on a bus.

Hitching out of Graz ('SLO' is an EU abbreviation for Slovenia), I'm impressed I managed to get the leaving-Graz sign in the background.

On A2 headed South. I hastily made this more-general sign when "Graz" didn't seem to be working.

Austria is crazy-beautiful, and warm(ish)!

My first driver and car

I was also thinking it would be quite amusing if any of my American friends who attend would bring some sort of small, strange gift to give to Johannes Grenzfurthner. You’ll recognize him as the loud, singing one wearing all black.

Examples of the kinds of things he might appreciate are: Chick Tracts, Burger King body spray, historical memorabilia from the German American Bund, a Kinko’s-bound collection of applied office art works (a.k.a. bored doodles) stolen off the desks of your coworkers, or Sarah Palin campaign buttons. But use your imagination, many of you are more creative than I am. If anyone goes to see the show, be sure to come back here and comment about it.

Right Claw South – The March 2009 Monochrom Tour:

• March 7: San Francisco (8 PM @ Soviet Special, Chez Poulet, 3359 Cesar Chavez)
• March 11: San Jose (9:30 @ Etech/LateTech, Fairmont Hotel)
• March 14: Seattle (8 PM @ Theatre4, 305 Harrison, 4th Floor)
• March 18: Chicago (7:30 PM @ Mercury Cafe, 1505 W Chicago Ave)
• March 19: St. Louis (3 PM @ Webster University, Dept. of Arts)
• March 19: St. Louis (9 PM @ to be announced)
• March 21: Brooklyn/NY (8 PM @ NYCResistor, 397 Bridge Street, 5th Floor)
• March 24: Boston (8 PM @ to be announced)

There’s some acknowledgment of German and Austrian hackerspaces, but we get sentences like, “German and Austrian hackers have been organizing into hacker collectives for years, including Metalab in Vienna, c-base in Berlin and the Chaos Computer Club in Hannover, Germany”

The author of this article is lumping together Metalab, founded in 2006, c-base, founded circa 1995, and CCC, founded 1981(ish?) as though they’re all similar sorts of places. Metalab is relatively recent and operates on a model very much like the American hackerspaces: it’s a platform, with dues-paying members and resources for projects, but nothing in the way of its own agenda or ideology. c-base is much older, predating the late 90s tech boom, and with a great deal in the way of history and self-created mythos surrounding it. CCC predates even the World Wide Web, transcends any one specific location or space (with chapters active in several German cities) and probably belongs alongside institutions like 2600 as founding members of the 1980s hacker culture.

It’s great to see hackerspaces getting mainstream exposure, but it would also be nice to see more recognition of the long history and broad geographic reach of the scene. Say, for starters, a specific mention of any hackerspace outside of the United States, Germany, or Austria. I’ve definitely encountered grumbling from some European hackers about the US-centric nature of coverage of hackerspaces, or of groups (hackerspaces.org sometimes included) pushing an “American” model for hackerspaces. This model includes a rented or purchased space, relatively expensive membership dues (Wired quotes $40 per month as the “starving hacker rate” at Noisebridge, while some of the more anarchist European hackerspaces either have no “members” at all, or charge dues on the order of €15 per year) and fancy equipment (NYC Resistor has their own high-powered laser cutter—which is, admittedly, totally awesome).

I realize that Wired is a US-based media source, so it makes sense that they’d go to American hackerspaces to do interviews and get quotes. I guess it’s just that, as an American traveling abroad, I’m quite sensitive about trying not to fall into the American stereotype of bungling into a situation I don’t understand, and telling people to do it my way. Americans are very much latecomers to the hackerspace scene. In fact, even at the point when I was first proposing this project, in late 2007, most of the American hackerspaces mentioned in the Wired article did not exist yet. During one of my Watson interviews, I was asked, “Why do you need to leave the United States to do this project?” and I answered (at the time, honestly) “Because the kinds of places that I want to visit simply are not in America.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to see these types of places springing up across my home country, I just think the Americans would do well to remember that they are essentially re-inventing wheel, here.

EDIT: Also, since this is pretty much the first time I’ve ever specifically written about hackerspaces in the United States, I think it’s appropriate to throw out a plug for the newly-founded Pumping Station One, in my hometown of Chicago. My friend Dave recently interviewed Eric Michaud, one of the founders.