robtfirefly

Latest Posts by robtfirefly

This is the December 12, 2018 edition of Off the Hook, the hacker-produced weekly FM talk-radio show I’ve been part of for a decade.  I was the head producer on this episode, and in it we talk about a few different news stories, but beginning at 20:55 in the file we talk about the Tumblr purge which goes into effect today.  Special guest Dr. Kit Stubbs, educator and hacker, joins the panel (this week consisting of XioNYC, myself, and Gila) to discuss the cultural shift, not just on Tumblr but elsewhere, and its effect on the LGBTQIA+ communities as well as people in all lines of work and of life.

This is the final thing I’ll be posting to Tumblr, as I’m leaving this site in protest of the change.  This has been a fun place to doodle and keep up with cool folks and their work, but I don’t feel right sticking around anymore given Tumblr’s part in making things worse for everyone.

You can find me elsewhere on Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, and all sorts of other places and email me here.  You can keep up with my artwork and projects via my website and my blog, which I’ll have to begin using regularly again.

Best wishes!

Going through my pin collection, I unearthed a "The Hunger Games" mockingjay which I'd purchased in darker times.

I like it a lot more now that I've given it a Woody Woodpecker paint job.

I did a rotten thing.

Hello!  I've been painstakingly replicating the TARDIS Key as used by the Eighth and Seventh Doctors in the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie.  Now you can buy a 3D print of it or, if you have access to the proper gear, download my file for free and print your own.

The key prop used in the film was an official TARDIS key replica available at the time from 800-Trekker, a now-long-defunct scifi memorabilia catalog, under license from the BBC in the early 1990s. The 800-Trekker key was a unique design largely based on TARDIS keys used on-screen by the Third and Fourth Doctors in the 1970s, but with many noticeable differences from those TV props. Rather than design a new TARDIS key for the 1996 film, the film's prop department just bought a supply of those keys from 800-Trekker and made them the canonical key design used by the Seventh and Eighth Doctors in their movie.

The newly-canonical 800-Trekker keys became very popular with fans, but had already been out of production and in limited supply by the film's release. They were also made of a very soft pewter which scratched and bent easily, so very few good copies of the Trekker key remain in circulation today. I happen to own one of the Trekker keys, ordered myself from the catalog around 20 years ago. Armed with calipers, 3D software, and a desire to replace my prop (which has begun to show noticeable wear, despite my best efforts to preserve it) with something more durable, I modelled this key based on it.

So, you can now order 3D prints of this key in a variety of metals and plastics right here on my Shapeways shop.  (Shapeways, for those unfamiliar, 3D-prints users' designs in a variety of materials on industrial-grade printers.)  What's more, if you have your own access to 3D-printing gear (or you'd just like the 3D source file to play with) I'm sharing that file freely here on Thingiverse so you can hack and print it yourself.

Add a wire loop and chain to wear your key in style, or just hide it in a cubbyhole above your TARDIS door.

Thanks for looking!  Please feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Mojave Phone Booth 196?-2000

In the late 1990s, certain corners of the Internet took notice of a strange anomaly in California’s Mojave desert: a lone phone booth, miles from civilization. The Mojave Phone Booth developed a strong following among telecom enthusiasts, phone phreaks, and other fans of odd cultural artifacts.  People called the booth for days on end hoping to talk to strangers wandering the desert, and pilgrimages to the booth itself became increasingly common.

The National Park Service, bothered by the effect of growing numbers of visiting telephone fans, eventually had the booth removed.  Its legacy lives on, with the booth and its story inspiring literature, film, and music as well as the continuing exchange of fond memories.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

K8 Red Telephone Box 1968

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.  The K8 marked the final generation of the classic red booth before the range was retired.

Bringing the classic phone box style into the modern era, the K8 took a turn for the minimalist; multi-pane windows, hard right angles, and wooden doors of the past gave way to single large glass panes, rounded corners, and aluminium doors of the future.  While the silhouette still evoked the distinguished red boxes of old, the updated details brought the range to a close with a thoroughly 1960s flair.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

K2 Red Telephone Box 1926

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.   Britain's very first red booth design was the cast-iron K2, which very quickly became ubiquitous throughout London and the surrounding areas throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Britain’s Red Telephone Boxes continued to take inspiration from the K2 throughout the entire payphone era, and copies and tributes to the design can still be found in phone booths around the world today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Motorola MicroTAC 9800X 1989

The MicroTAC 9800X was not only the smallest and lightest mobile phone of its time, it was the first to feature the trend-setting "clamshell" type design where a mouthpiece flipped to cover the keypad when not in use.

Featuring a dot-matrix LED display, very advanced for the day, the MicroTAC and its immediate variants remained in production well into the 1990s and formed the basis for much of the world’s idea of what a "cellular phone" looked like.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Stromberg-Carlson upright phone 1894

When Alexander Graham Bell’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894, American Bell Telephone Company employees Alfred Stromberg and Androv Carlson went into the telephone-manufacturing business for themselves.

The telephone shown here is Stromberg-Carlson’s first upright desk phone, nicknamed "the Coffee Grinder" by enthusiasts due to its unusual shape and side-mounted hand crank.  Few of these unique members of the "candlestick phone" family survive today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Lobster Telephone Salvador Dali, 1936

Surrealist artist Salvador Dali wrote of wanting to know why, when he ordered lobster in a restaurant, the waiter never brought him a boiled telephone.

Dali brought this fanciful idea into the material world in his Lobster Telephone, melding a plaster-cast sculpture of a lobster (a recurring theme in Dali’s work) with a common telephone of the day.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Sharp J-SH04 2001

Manufactured by Sharp for the J-Phone brand, the J-SH04 is generally recognized as the world’s first camera phone.

The J-SH04 innovatively integrated a mobile phone and digital camera, devices many people of the day regularly kept on-hand, into a single unit with the camera functionality integrated into the phone itself.   For the first time, users could use a single device to take digital photos (at a then-impressive 0.11 megapixels) and share them via the mobile network.

The device (and photo-sharing in general) took off among young users and set the model for all future camera phones, devices which forever changed how we take and share photos and document our world.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Reis Telephone 1861

Having worked on his own telephonelike concept since the 1850s, German inventor Johann Philipp Reis successfully demonstrated that his invention could transmit speech over a decade before Alexander Graham Bell would achieve that goal.  Reis' test phrase was “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat,” which means “The horse does not eat cucumber salad.”

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

The President's Red Phone

The Moscow-Washington hotline which existed during the mid-20th-century Cold War was a teletype-based affair, not a telephone, but that didn't stop the imagined concept of a red emergency phone in the White House catching on in popular culture.  One example of this is the Red Phone's starring role in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; indeed, the film's Spanish title is ¿Teléfono rojo?, volamos hacia Moscú, which means “Red Telephone?  We're Flying to Moscow.”

The iconic “Red Phone” image continues to grip the public imagination today, appearing regularly in fiction, art, and even Presidential campaign ads.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Motorola DynaTAC 8000x 1983

The Motorola DynaTAC series was the first commercially-available, completely-handheld cellular phone.  A full charge of the brick-style phone's battery took ten hours, and offered half an hour of talk time.

The phone has since become iconic to the 1980s in general, and Yuppies in particular.  DynaTACs are used by characters of privilege in productions such as Wall Street, Saved By the Bell, and American Psycho.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Gower-Bell Telephone 1880s-1890s

Having operated a Bell franchise in New England for a time, American entrepreneur Frederic Allan Gower set his sights on the original England.  His redesigned telephone was quickly adopted as a standard and declared “the best and most reliable telephone in service” by the British Post Office in 1882, and spread throughout much of Europe within the decade.

The Gower-Bell telephone's distinctive receiver-tubes, which were held to the users' ears, were designed to avoid receiver patents held by Bell.  Despite using Bell's name on his phone for the marketing value, Gower was not anxious to share the wealth with Bell.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Alexander Graham Plane 1978

As the era of novelty telephones took hold in the 1970s, third-party phones of all shapes and gimmicks began finding their way into homes.   Most telephone companies were still discouraging the practice of customers connecting third-party phones to their lines, but interestingly-shaped phones caught on regardless.  Canadian phone company Northern Telecom addressed the issue with their own cute airplane-inspired phone.

The Alexander Graham Plane, part of Nortel's “Imagination” line of contemporary telephone designs, was one of very few novelty phones of the period to be actively manufactured and made available by a telco.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Bell “Gallows-Frame” telephone 1875

Alexander Graham Bell's original telephone prototype used a single magneto-based device as both transmitter and receiver.  The user spoke into the single orifice, and put the device to their ear to hear the response.

The device, which gets its nickname from its elegant mahogany frame, was the first with which Bell demonstrated transmission of voice-like sounds.  Intelligible speech would be transmitted by Bell with a redesigned unit the following year.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Konrad Zuse June 22, 1910 – December 18, 1995

In May, 1941 German inventor and civil engineer Konrad Zuse secured his place in computer history with his Turing-complete Z3, the world's first working programmable computer.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

Joan Clarke June 24, 1917 – September 4, 1996

Working alongside Alan Turing and other codebreakers at England's famous Bletchley Park during World War II, Joan Clarke was considered among the most brilliant mathematicians on staff.

She faced many hurdles in her career due to her gender.  One famous example of this occurred when, as no suitable senior codebreaking position existed at Bletchley to which a female was allowed to be promoted, she was granted the title of "linguist" to grant her some measure of recognition for her work.  Clarke, who spoke no second language, would later recall with bemusement filling out paperwork with "grade: linguist, languages: none."

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

Callie & Izzy Season 2 is coming soon, and here’s the trailer!

I performed voiceovers and served as an audio engineer on this show.  It’s really nuts and wonderful, and I’m ridiculously proud to be part of it.

If you haven’t seen Season 1 yet, binge on it here!

I have some post-it notes illustrated with Tom Servo of "Mystery Science Theater 3000." For today's daily doodle, I added some more Servos to one.

This doodle came about because I’m excited for the upcoming album by those fine folks at Information Society.

I started drawing it right after pressing play on “Dominion,” a track to which those who preorder the album have been granted access, and stopped drawing when the song ended four minutes and twenty-one seconds later.

This plant did not come out looking like the photo on the seed packet.

So I’ve missed a few days of daily doodles.  Sue me! :-D  Life happens, and I’ve chosen not to let slipping on my own self-imposed challenge bother me.  I’ll just do my best to pick it up again.

I drew this at a bar. It doesn’t represent anyone in particular, just this freaking guy.

Doodled this in the laundromat whilst my clothes tumbled.

I don’t know who this is or why he’s saying a lightbulb, I only know that I scribbled him in about half a minute on a sparsely-populated city bus due to not wanting to have my netbook and drawing tablet out on a sparsely-populated city bus for longer than half a minute.

Missed doing yesterday’s daily doodle post because the migraine I’ve spent today with was coming on.  So, today’s daily post is inspired by the migraine which is still, as of this writing, in progress.

I look forward to seeing what it looks like once I can turn my monitor brightness back up to full again.

I’ve drawn variations on this little round bird creature since I was a kid.

I started drawing this last Thursday at the bar as I waited for my friends’ comedy showcase Say Everything to start, finshed it up today, and here you go.

I didn’t want to draw David Bowie today.  I don’t feel capable of accurately portraying anything close to what his work has done for me over the course of my entire life.  My drawing hand had other ideas, no other drawings would work until I got this onto the screen.

I haven’t felt this personally screwed up over the passing of an artist I’d never met since Freddie Mercury in 1991.

Today’s daily doodle was a race against myself, in just under three minutes I drew a pinback button which happened to be sitting on my desk.