How to fit a normal bulb in a BC3 fitting and save £10 per bulb

Standard 2-pin bayonet cap (left) and 3-pin bayonet cap BC3 (right) fittings compared
Summary for mystified international readers: In the UK new houses/flats must, by law, have a number of light fittings which will ‘not accept incandescent filament bulbs’ (a ‘green’ idea). This has led to the development of a proprietary, arbitrary format of compact fluorescent [...]

Normalising paranoia

This is brilliant. Chloë Coulson, Erland Banggren and Ben Williams, three Ravensbourne graduates, have put together a project looking at the “culture of fear”, the media’s use of this, and how it affects our everyday state of mind.
The outcome is a catalogue, WellBeings™ [PDF link] accompanying a specially printed newspaper, The Messenger, designed [...]

Smile, you’re on Countermanded Camera

Image from Miquel Mora’s website
We’ve looked before at a number of technologies and products aimed at ‘preventing’ photography and image recording in some way, from censoring photographs of ‘copyrighted content’ and banknotes, to Georgia Tech’s CCD-flooding system.
Usually these systems are about locking out the public, or removing freedoms in some way (a lot of [...]

Ticket off (reprise)

Last year we looked at the way that the pricing structure of no-change-given ticket machines is often – apparently – designed to lead to overpayment, and I posed the question of whether councils/car park operators actually draw up their budget based on a significant proportion of customers overpaying.

I’m still no closer to answering that last [...]

Limiting frequency of cigarette use

 Images from nicostopper.com and Popgadget
Nicostopper is an electronic dispenser which holds up to 10 cigarettes, and releases them one at a time at programmed intervals, to help pace and restrict the smoker. The screen “will also flash “self-help” messages each time to make you feel guilty as well” (Popgadget). It’s styled fairly discreetly to look [...]

The fight back: loyalty card subversion

It’s inevitable that for every attempt to cajole or impose control on users, there will be some people who seek to avoid or circumvent it. As Crosbie Fitch put it in a recent comment, “humans are designed to explore the parameters of their environment and to adapt to them”.
Supermarket loyalty cards are an interesting example [...]

Sniffing out censorship

Image from News Sniffer
News Sniffer’s Revisionista monitors alterations to published news stories from a variety of sources by comparing RSS feeds, sometimes revealing subsequently redacted information or changes of opinion (e.g. note the removed phrase in the first paragraph of this story about Cuba). While many of the changes are simply re-wordings for clarity or [...]

The Tell-Tale Part

Open the case of your mobile (cell) phone. Do you see a round white sticker, similar to that in the first photo below?

This is a water damage sticker, which changes colour if moisture gets into this bit of the phone, and will be used to void your warranty if your phone stops working for [...]

Countercontrol: blind pilots

In a recent post, I discussed a Spiked article by Josie Appleton which included the following quote:
“Police in Weston-super-Mare have been shining bright halogen lights from helicopters on to youths gathered in parks and other public places. The light temporarily blinds them, and is intended to ‘move them on’, in the words of one [...]

Some links: miscellaneous, pertinent to architectures of control

Ulises Mejias on ‘Confinement, Education and the Control Society’ – fascinating commentary on Deleuze’s societies of control and how the instant communication and ‘life-long learning’ potential (and, I guess, everyware) of the internet age may facilitate control and repression:
“This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that [...]