A bi-weekly talk show by The Restart Project, plus a monthly documentary series produced by brilliant podcaster Dave Pickering, based on fixing triumphs, heartbreaks and wisdom shared at our community repair events – called Restart Parties – here in London. We go into real depth about good and bad design, obstacles to repair of electronics, emotional aspects of ownership, environmentally irresponsible business models, and the “end of life” of our gadgets. This podcast is for you if you'd like to fix your relationship with electronics. Let’s rethink, restart.
https://therestartproject.org/podcast/
Restart Radio: guitars, cloud kill switches and bots
Ben Skidmore, long-time Restarter and professional guitar repairer, joined us to talk about how he fell in love with guitars and learned how to repair them. We talked about how musicians often learn to repair, hack and modify their instruments. We speculated that musicians are creative repairers and modifiers of their instruments because their craft involves creativity.
Then we talked about a much-discussed tech story, involving the disabling of smart-home devices made by Revolv, a company bought by Google. Revolv devices will become “bricks” on 15th May, when the cloud-based servers they require will be shut down. It is a cautionary tale.
Lastly, we talked about bots – and both the infamous Microsoft chatbot, that was turned into a fascist over night, and a “female” PA bot that Ugo was forced to interact with last week.
Links we mentioned
- Profile of Restarter Ben Skidmore
- Ben’s About.me page with links to his guitar shop
- Forbes “Nest Revolv Shutdown Debacle Underscores Business Model Challenges for the Internet of Things“
- Arlo Gilbert’s original rant about Revolv
- Ars Technica: “Microsoft Terminates Tay AI chabot after she turns into a Nazi“
- Amy the Robot
[Feature image “ES-333 on Bench (2)” by Flickr user RoadsideGuitars is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0]
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