As someone who exists at the intersection of two sorts of information - the physical (newsprint) and the digital (the web), I maintain a tenuous grip on both worlds and a fascination with them both.
My desk is a mess of both electronics and paper, and I spend days poring over magazines, staring at websites and digging around in info of all sorts. It probably explains why I get unfeasibly interested in projects which bring the virtual to the physical (or vice versa). Sometimes they're called ubicomp and sometimes they're just fun.
In that vein, two recent ideas spring to mind that I wanted to share with you.
First up: Things our friends have written on the internet 2008; a paper anthology . The tabloid, put together by Ben Terrett and Russell Davies, is essentially an anthology of blog posts from 2008. It's a nice exercise in turning relatively ephemeral digital information into a packaged, physical format (which is increasingly what we're doing with the newspaper, I suppose).
Meanwhile, there was a microprinter hack by Tom Taylor that involved combining a thermal receipt printer and an Arduino board to produce a regular printout of virtual things that might prove useful (upcoming events, weather forecasts, friends' movements and so on). Tom, who works for Headshift and happened to contribute to a group blog I ran many moons ago, explains the process on his website.
Useful? Perhaps, perhaps not. But there's still something lovely about it.
