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From The Postdigital Manifesto:

"Cultural phenomena exist in perpetual circulation between digital and analog, between universal access and temporary localisation. This is the point of departure of the postdigital perspective."

The T17 house terminal is an experiment that involves one analog place and one digital computer. It is intentionally "retro" just by remaining mostly offline, usable only on the spot by residents and visitors.

The terminal has, however, inspired ideas that go in the direction of networking -- a local form of networking, where cooperating houses and other objects link up in a decentralized way (kind of like a "Local Area Network").

Today we did two fun things.

First we recycled some digital data into analog. We simply rendered the history of the terminal chat log, from October 2016 to today, into a PDF and had it printed in a booklet at our good friends CopyPro.

The experience of reading this book is quite interesting. And it was useful to have an analog backup solution as the computer itself had to be disconnected for a while, to proceed with the next step...

We got ahold of some blank RFID cards and an RFID reader that we hooked up to the terminal computer. With a bit of programming (Python and Emacs Lisp) our identities as residents became linked up with our house's digital life.

Each resident has been given their own identity card. For now the cards are used only for writing messages in the chat. Press Enter, bleep your card, and type!