As promised, here's a stencil drawing of the Mexican-style IQ Lamp: .ps, .svg, .pdf. (1:1, DIN A4/ISO 216 paper size)

30 of these are needed to assemble one mexican style lamp, as depicted below. The material to cut these patterns from needs to be a thin (less than .5 mm thick) plastic (or maybe cardboard) which needs to be flexible - but not too flexible, and not glossy. It might be advisable to use energy-saving light bulbs for this lamp. They are entirely hidden inside the lamp and might be good to avoid overheating of the plastic. Assembling instructions, Video, Instructable. Please note that assembling the mexican-style IQ light needs a quite a bit manual force because all pieces are bent a little, in contrast to the original danish design which appears to be assembled without any force. (at least the video clip suggests that.) For mounting a cable/lamp socket you might need to cut a small hole in one of the plastic sheets, to put the cable through.

Once again the photo:

Have fun!

Yes, finally Linux 2.6.19 has been released. So you wonder why is this something to blog about? -- Because it is the first Linux version that contains my super-cool MSI Laptop driver, one of the most impressing attainments of mankind, only excelled perhaps by KRYPTOCHEF, the only tool in existence which does fullbit encryption.

Last friday I posted a little Lazyweb experiment, a hunt for information about a certain kind of lamp sold by a street dealer in Mexico City. A quick followup on the results:

Surprinsingly many people responded, mostly by email, and partly by blog comment. As it appears I am not the only one who's looking for this specific type of lamp. Furthermore, a non-trivial set of Planet Gnome readers actually already owns one of these devices. Apparently counterfeit versions of this lamp are sold all around the world by street dealers and on markets.

The lamp seems to be a modified version of the "IQ Light", a self assembly lighting system made up of interlocking quadrilaterals. It is a scandinavian design, by Holger Strøm, 1973. It is nowadays exclusively distributed by Bald & Bang, Denmark. The lighting system has a very interesting web site of its own, which even includes an HOWTO for assembling these lamps. The Bald & Bang web site has a very stylish video which also shows how to assemble an IQ lamp.

While my mexican specimen and the official design are very similar, they differ: the mexican design looks - in a way - "tighter" and ... better (at least in my humble opinion). For comparison, please have a look on the photo I took from the mexican version which is shown above, and on the many photos returned by Google Images, or the one from the IQ Light homepage. It appears as if the basic geometrical form used by the mexican design is somehow more narrow than the official danish one.

So, where can one buy one of those lamps? Fake and real ones are sold on eBay, every now an then. The Museum Store of the New York MoMA sells the original version for super-cheap $160. If you search with Google you'll find many more offers like this one, but all of them are not exactly cheap - for a bunch of thin plastic sheets. All these shops sell the danish version of the design, noone was able to point me to a shop where the modified, "mexican" version is sold.

Given the hefty price tag and the fact that the fake, mexican version looks better then the original one, I will now build my own lamps, based on the mexican design. For that I will disassamble my specimen (at least partially) and create a paper stencil of the basic plastic pattern. I hope to put this up for download as a .ps file some time next week, since many people asked for instructions for building these lamps. Presumably the original design is protected by copyright, hence I will not publish a step-by-step guide how to build your own fake version. But thankfully this is not even necessary, since the vendor already published a HOWTO and a video for this, online.

Thank you very much for your numerous responses!

Everybody should read Roman Kennke's take on Mark Shuttleworth's OpenSUSE spam mail. It's constructive and sensible.

I hope the Ubuntu people find the strength to resist the short-term bliss of desktop bling for long-term software freedom!

Please learn the lession Java teaches us: resist the temptation of closed source software and develop alternatives as free software!

Let's see how well Lazyweb works for me!

One of the nicest types of lamps I know is depicted on this photo:

This lamp is built from a number (16 or so, it's so difficult to count) of identical shapes which are put together (a mano) in a very simple, mathematical fashion. No glue or anything else is need to make it a very robust object. The lamp looks a little bit like certain Julia fractals, its geometrical structure is just beautiful. Every mathematical mind will enjoy it.

This particular specimen has been bought from a street dealer in Mexico City, and has been made of thin plastic sheets. I saw the same model made from paper on a market near Barcelona this summer (during GUADEC). Unfortunately I didn't seize the chance to buy any back then, and now I am regretting it!

I've been trying to find this model in German and US shops for the last months (Christmas is approaching fast!) but couldn't find a single specimen. I wonder who designed this ingenious lamp and who produces it. It looks like a scandinavian design to me, but that's just an uneducated guess.

If you have any information about this specific lamp model, or could even provide me with a pointer where to buy or how to order these lamps in/from Germany, please leave a comment to this blog story, or write me an email to mzynzcr (at) 0pointer (dot) de! Thank you very much!

Is anyone who's attending the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountain View right now heading for San Francisco tomorrow? I plan to stay a few days in the city to do sight seeing and stuff. Please catch me at the conference today if you are interested to join me visiting San Francisco!

So, you thought that only Linux users (and other alternative OS zealots) would benefit from reverse engineered Windows drivers? Ha! Far from the truth, it's the Windows users themselves who are benefitting. (Sorry, that link is in German)

Too bad that this specific Windows port actually infringes my copyrights since it links my GPL'ed code against the non-free inpout32.dll. And the guy who did that port doesn't even think it's necessary to put his email address anywhere.

MSI Laptop Owners! Join us and extend the MegaWiki, the new Wiki for all kinds of information on Linux on MSI MegaBooks! (and all MSI built laptops sold under other brands)

The MegaWiki is still rather empty but we hope that it will soon grow as large as our inspiration, the ThinkWiki which collects information about IBM ThinkPads. For that we need your help!

This site will be the new home of the MSI laptop drivers (backlight control, rfkill) and provide modified ACPI DSDTs to fix a few BIOS errors. And more!

To my surprise I have been invited to the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountain View early next month (as a "ROCKSTAR", to quote Mark), to promote PulseAudio. And that although I am not an Ubuntu developer, nor even much of an Ubuntu user. I'll be available for discussing everything Multimedia/PulseAudio related. While I've not been invited because of my involvement in Avahi/Zeroconf I will, of course, also be available for discussion of these topics. As it appears, Canonical is not resentful, or maybe it's just their way to bribe me into registering with Launchpad? ;-)

After UDS I plan to stay a few more days in San Francisco to visit the city. Can anyone point me to cheap accomodation in SF, or perhaps even lives in SF and has room where I could sleep?

In addition my PulseAudio presentation has been accepted at linux.conf.au 2007. At GNOME.conf.au I hope to give another presentation, together with Trent Lloyd about Avahi, everyone's favourite Zeroconf implementation. And finally I plan to give yet another presentation, again about PulseAudio, at FOMS 2007, the Foundations of Open Media Software conference, which happens shortly before linux.conf.au, also in Sydney. FOMS is still looking for more people to speak at the conference, so, please go to their CFP page and send in your proposal if you have something to talk about!

A while ago I played around with Cairo and created a Python tool fring, similar to KDE's Filelight, however not interactive and very simple. Frédéric Back took my code and gave it a little GUI love, and this is the result:

Frédéric added a nice interactive GTK GUI and a fully asynchronous directory walker based on Gnome-VFS which runs in a background thread and thus doesn't block the UI. This makes the user interface snappier than Filelight's ever was. It's a lot of fun to navigate your directories like this!

I would have liked to post a screencast of the new fring in action here, to show how snappy it is. But unfortunately both Byzanz and Istanbul failed horribly on my 16bpp display.

The current version of fring is not yet polished for a public release. In the meantime, you can get the sources from the SVN:

svn checkout svn://svn.0pointer.de/fring/trunk fring

Yes, I am aware that a future version of Baobab will offer a similar view of the filesystem. However, it just was so much fun to hack on fring, and due to the power of Python it was so easy and quick to develop this tool, that we just couldn't resist to do it.