As you might have heard, my friend Ryan and I are putting on a weekend long bicycle workshop in upstate NY on the weekend of June 25-27th. This is the first time we have put on this workshop and have been unable to register any participants as of yet. However, our shortfall is your gain. We would like to do this workshop in the future and we feel your participation and feedback will be great help for the workshop’s future development. Thus, we are sending you a personal invite to join us for the weekend for a greatly reduced $100 per person! This price includes: five great meals, lodging, rides, and workshops. This is all in the context of Woodbourne, NY at a house that is on 15 acres of land. You will be responsible for getting yourself and your bicycle to the location. For registration and more details visit:

http://www.catskillsworkshops.com/catskillsworkshops/Workshop_3.html

If you are interested or have questions, please write to: catskillbiketours@gmail.com

We’re limiting the group to 10 participants, so act fast to secure a spot. If you will not be able to attend, please forward this to others (co-workers, friends, family) who might be interested.

Please join Not An Alternative, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and Upgrade NY! this Thursday, June 10 for the opening of Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus, an exhibition which examines models of participation and participation as a model in art and activism.

Re:Group proposes that with participation now a dominant paradigm, structuring social interaction, art, activism, the architecture of the city, the internet, and the economy, we are all integrated into participatory structures whether we want to be or not. The exhibition showcases work that subverts existing systems or envisions new alternatives to the ways in which individuals can take part, or choose not to take part, in social and cultural life.

Re:Group features work by thirteen artists, designers, hackers, activists, and collectives exploring both the potential and limitations of participation, networked collaboration, and distributed labor. From the “crowdsourced” projects Ten Thousand Cents and White Glove Tracking to the tactical media art of The Yes Men and Ubermorgen, from the urban interventions of John Hawke and The Institute of Infinitely Small Things to the open platforms of Ushahidi and MakerBot – the exhibition represents a diverse range of critically and socially engaged work that rethinks the institutional practices within urban planning, civil engineering, transportation, industrial design and production, relief work, and the news media.

The exhibition not only presents completed work through gallery installations, but also functions as a platform for new collaborative work. Through workshops, master classes, and discussions led by the exhibiting artists, the processes and methodologies behind the work are opened up to gallery visitors and invited communities, providing an opportunity to extend and reinterpret the artists’ ideas in new and unexpected ways.

RE:GROUP: BEYOND MODELS OF CONSENSUS
JUNE 10 – AUGUST 7, 2010

OPENING
Thursday June 10
5pm curators talk
6pm – 8pm reception

Eyebeam Art and Technology Center
540 West 21st St, btw 10th & 11th
New York City

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
John Ewing, Christopher Robbins & Carmen Montoya – Ghana Think Tank
Giana González – Hacking Couture
John Hawke – Mandatory Minimum: We Have Moved!
The Institute for Infinitely Small Things – Corporate Commands
Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima -Ten Thousand Cents
Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings – Wish You Were Here: Postcards from our awesome future
MakerBot Industries – MakerBot
Christopher Robbins – Work Projects Administration 2010
Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth – White Glove Tracking
Ushahidi – Crisis Map of Haiti
Ubermorgen.com – [V]ote-Auction
The Yes Men – Good Cop 15
YoHa (Yokokoji, Harwood) – Social Telephony

CREDITS
Curated and organized by Eyebeam, Not An Alternative, and Upgrade! NY
Produced and sponsored by Eyebeam
Curatorial team: Paul Amitai, Marco Deseriis, Not An Alternative, Stephanie Pereira, Mushon Zer-Aviv
Exhibition design: Not An Alternative and Paul Amitai
Brochure and environmental graphic design: Not An Alternative
Technical management and installation: Marko Tandefelt
Exhibition installation and construction: Nicholas Fraser, Kory Hellebust, Titania Inglis, Takayuki Ito, Not An Alternative, Jamie O’Shea

CALENDAR OF EVENTS
Thursday, June 10
5-8PM Public opening & curators talk

Friday, June 11
10AM-12PM Breakfast with the Artists

Wednesday, June 23 – Friday, June 25
Collaborative Futures book sprint
organized by Mushon Zer-Aviv and Michael Mandiberg, Eyebeam

Wednesday, June 30
3PM Expedition & Interactive Performance
with The Institute for Infinitely Small Things

Thursday, July 1
6-9:30PM In Code We Trust: Crowd Sourced Participation in 21st Century Democracies
discussion organized and moderated by Noel Hidalgo and Not An Alternative

Wednesday, July 7
6-9PM Action Research Workshop
with Christopher Robbins, WPA 2010

Thursday, July 8
4-6PM Think Tank the Think Tank
discussion with Ghana Think Tank

Thursday, July 8
7:30-9PM Participationism and the Limits of Collaboration
discussion organized by Not An Alternative

Thursday, July 15
2-6PM Using the Ushahidi Platform & Real-Time Street Action
hands-on workshop with Chris Blow, Ushahidi

Thursday, July 15
7:30-9PM On Networked Solidarity
discussion organized by Mushon Zer-Aviv, Eyebeam

Friday, July 16
Using the Ushahidi Platform & Real-Time Street Action
hands-on workshop with Chris Blow, Ushahidi; Christopher Robbins, WPA 2010; and Reconstruct Art
at chashama, Jamaica, Queens

Tuesday, July 20
7-9PM Thought to Thing
hands-on workshop with Bre Pettis, Makerbot

Thursday, July 22
7:30-9PM Open Retail
discussion organized by Paul Amitai, Eyebeam

Bootable USB sticks are just like bootable hard drives for modern computers. Partition them with parted, use mkfs to create a filesystem on them, use grub-install to give them a bootloader, put a kernel and an initial ramfs on them, configure the bootloader to load them, and away you go.

He even offered me his filesystem rescue debirf image with the latest 686 kernel from debian unstable. Confused ? That’s okay. You’ll never learn Portuguese if you don’t even try to speak it (notably: my Portuguese is going nowhere fast.). Same with debian. So I do have some questions about this advice, but they’re specific and I can look them up and come back to him to make sure I’m understanding.

Nat had a couple of extra suggestions. Like this and this.

I have another problem, though, which is that I’ve learned there are GUI tools for this.

Step One: find an ISO. Which ISO depends a lot on what you’re trying to do, but RIP Linux (which I’ve written about before) is one good option for recovery operations. Maybe you want an Ubuntu Live CD or a Debian Live CD.

Step Two: make sure no one is looking and see if USB Creator happens to be on your system already.

If Step Two works out as planned, you barely need a Step Three.

Myself, not so lucky. MBR 1234FA prompt, what is that? Do I need to fully understand install-mbr? Possibly.

Missing information: what do you do with the drive mounted, what don’t you do? I’m not altogether sure, honestly.

I’m starting over.
Step one: the master boot record. Mine is messy, so I’m going back to dkg’s advice (“Use grub-install“).

Step two: too confusing. Try RIP Linux again, starting from scratch. Unmount all the partitions and run:

sudo ./mkusb.sh -f RIPLinuX-9.3.iso /dev/sdb

Note to my lay readers: this is one of those wreck your system commands. Unless you are 120% confident about what is about to happen, don’t do it. In particular, unless you know for a fact that the USB thumb drive you want to format is /dev/sdb … don’t do it.

Finally: a secret. I was good right up until “put a kernel and initial ramfs on it.”

Stay tuned for the next episode, in which we investigate the disk errors that started this whole project.

I don’t know if I can credit Iyengar (Probably Cory gets some credit) or a job that fits better (probably) or having control over my physical work environment (gee … I wonder) but I’m not complaining.

I have some twitter/google map questions.

Like, how do i make a short link for twitter posts?

You’re looking for a URL shortener. There are Twitter (and Status.net/Identi.ca) apps that incorporate them, or you can use one manually. Bit.ly offers you a lot of analytical tools, bk.ly is Brooklyn specific (see also, ph.ly). Technically, there are zillions of them. I use Twhirl, which shortens URLs with Bit.ly.

To be avoided: Shorteners like Hoot Suite that take over your browser with a popover.

And, how do I make a multi-point google map and share it?

I can’t answer this in good conscience without at least telling you about OpenStreetMap, Open Green Map and Tagzania. Check them out. If you’re committed to feeding the borg, I assume Google’s instructions are accurate.

Any more questions? Don’t hesitate to ask. I might even answer.