“The Bureaucrat” — A Hackerspace Passport Date-Stamping Machine

In the spirit of the slow, automated writing machine in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, but channeled through laser-cut plastic, hobby servos and ink, “The Bureaucrat” was at the NYC Resistor table at MakerFaire, stamping the date on hackerspace passports.

It was built by Adam Mayer.


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3 Comments

  1. wait, i’m confused. it wasn’t actually stamping out the text to “in the penal colony”, was it?

  2. @tim: no, sorry. i meant to say that it reminded me of the machine from “In the Penal Colony” because it’s a bit slow, and because it’s called “the bureaucrat”, a term which conjures up Kafkaesque visions of endless red tape. 🙂

  3. @johngineer — whew. I’ve been working on a very large robotic chalkboard (using many parts from adafruit, of course) and that’s one of the texts I was thinking about writing out in chalk. glad to know that it’ll resonate with literate geeks such as yourself!

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