Eric Harris-Braun

Lots of things have been in flow since I’ve posted here, but here are few tidbits to explore:

• A conversation about what happens when valuable things become free.
• The Weave!
• World of Wisdom Podcast episode…

Say that we agree to define collaboration as a group’s ability to coordinate effort to produce some work output.  I believe that the effectiveness of collaboration improves in direct proportion to:

Consider playing soccer or football blindfolded. Unless you have gotten really good with echolocation, playing the game becomes impossible for the simple reason that you stop being able to answer the questions “where is the ball?” and “where are my teammates?”.

Usually I am more energized by building tech than by talking about it, but I am so excited about what my son and I did over winter break, that I just have to share about it here.  In an odd kind of busman’s holiday, I spent a good chunk of my time off writing a Holochain application.  Coding with my kid is just pure pleasure for me, but I have to describe the additional incredible experience of having spent 4 years building a tool, and now suddenly being able to use that tool to build what it was meant for: creating collaboration applications.

As is pretty obvious I don’t write much here.  My focus for the last 4 years has been pretty singular on getting Holochain and Holo built.  And writing takes me a long time.  I also have a hard time writing to the void of the Internet, I need to be in a direct conversation to share well.  Recently a friend made an open invitation to respond  “about what you’re seeing and thinking in the world right now.”  and he provided these prompts:

The Wikipedia defines “Killer App” as a marketing term for “any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology.” Not surprising that the term comes from marketing, that branch of business devoted to competing for customers and trying to kill off the competition. But if we remove ourselves from the context of dog-eat-dog, and then start from that definition and work backwards to come up with a single word that it defines, well, “killer” hardly seems right. “Mother” fits much better. Those applications that seed the growth of whole new realms, we ought to call Mother Apps.

I haven’t written much lately, I guess I’ve been busy… mostly with two things: Cancer & Ceptr.

Currently, my time is about living with a spouse with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer and all that it takes to support her as well I can. My work is about building tools for a post-monetary society; creating a new meta-language to allow a vast expansion in social forms that is currently limited primarily by the world’s current statement of value: money.  These two worlds have recently come together in ways worth writing about.

And, YAAP (Yet Another Arduino Project), the Micro Arduino Gaming Platform Interface. Finally I’ve done the “shareable value” part of putting together an instructables for how to make the retro-game controller I built for (and with) Will for Christmas. I love this video of Will demoing it:

Seems like end of the year is DYI electronics projects time for me as the Sound Alarm happened round this time last year too.  Well, I’ve been having a ball making Arduino stuff, this time as Christmas presents.  This time I got my documentation act together even more and made a construction tutorial on instructables too!   The code for Das Blinken Bonken is on github, and here’s a video of Jesse showing off the game:

I’ve just completed my second Arduino project, a sound level detector which sets off an “alarm” when there’s the sound level is to high for too long.  I built it for use in a school that wants to provide visual feedback to students when they are being too loud.  The “alarm” is a string of flashing LEDs that’s controlled by an IR-remote, which I reverse engineered using the the arduino itself and the excellent IRremote library to figure out which codes activate the LED string. The IRremote library includes an example that dumps the codes and code types that remotes typically use.  So I just ran that example with my arduino hooked up to an IR detector from adafruit.  It was really quite easy to do.