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Monday, May 26, 2008
Geekyoto: Summary
So, to summarise the previous posts and to reference the ones I haven't gone into more detail on, here's the list of talks from top to bottom (I hope!):
And that was that, a long day, really interesting, lots to take on board and think about.
Some notes I made about slides - the quality of which varied throughout the day:
See all my posts tagged with geekyoto or my geekyoto photos
- Christian Nold talking about emotional mapping
- Alex Haw talking about Spatial Control - and methods for losing it (a very fast talk - would like to see it again but slowed down to a more sedate pace)
- Simon Daniel talking about Moixa Energy's rechargable USBCELL batteries - it was part product pitch and part background information - 15 billion batteries are thrown away each year. He had an interesting quote "People won't buy things just because they're green but will buy them because they are better". The UK currently recycles only 1.5% of batteries - that is a lot of landfill.
- Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman talk about the idea of "A secular and environmentally friendly sabbath"
- Gavin Starks talking about the AMEE product. Consumed by services like carbonaccount and dopplr, Sounds good, might have to try and think of something to use the APIs at some point - maybe the next Madgex Hackday if I can think of a tenuous link to job boards
- Vincenzo Dimaria from Central Saint Martins talking about "Design made in Sicily: a change of perspective" all about tomatoes
- Bruno Taylor talking about "Play in a changing public realm"
- Richard Sandford from Futurelab talking about the Beyond Current Horizions programme - this was the graveyard, post lunch, slot and I don't have many notes from this session unfortunately
- Greta Corke from Diy Kyoto talking mainly about Wattson - another product pitch
- Edward Scotcher who mainly told stories about communication, one about the Fashoda Incident (about which I knew nothing) and others about the more current political situations in Kenya and Zimbabwe. One of his comments was "Are we bold enough to contribute without wanting fame and fortune?" His slides are available here.
- Bryony Worthington from Sandbag who talked about emissions trading, and the permit system and how it isn't a good method for curbing emissions. This was the most political (small p, not big p), socio-economic talk and was a contrast to some of the more fluffy, or product based talks
- James Smith talked about "Can software save the world?" - more specifically two projects he's been involved with from a technical perspective - The Carbon Diet and Do the Green thing (a site which I stumbled across a couple of months ago).
- Jeremy Gould and Mitch Sava talked about using "Government Barcamp and Resolution (of the online kind)" which was about how the government is evolving to make use of technology - like e-Petitions, the no 10 twitter
- David Wilcox presented a video from Steve Moore all about 2gether08 which is a festival "to explore how digital technologies can bring us major social benefits".
- John Gisby did a quick talk about a Channel 4 initiative which is equating to £50 million available for projects over the next 2 - 3 years
- The final talk of the day was Ben Saunders talking about his recent North Pole attempt
And that was that, a long day, really interesting, lots to take on board and think about.
Some notes I made about slides - the quality of which varied throughout the day:
- put any text on the top of the slides so everyone can see it - some slides had key text at the bottom left-hand corner of the slides, which I couldn't see clearly. So a statistic that was supposed to be 95% of something-or-other actually read 5% to me - quite a different message
- always put up a slide with contact details - name, email address, web site - possibly both at the start and end of the talk. Some of the names of the speakers were mentioned so infrequently, and quickly, that I didn't get them noted down properly and have had to do some guessing.
See all my posts tagged with geekyoto or my geekyoto photos
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Geekyoto: Ben Saunders
The last talk of the day at Geekyoto on Saturday was Ben Saunders.
This was of real personal interest as many months ago Jeremy pownced me a link to Ben Saunders web site to follow the progress of his attempt on the speed record of a solo trek to the North Pole. I've always had a fascination in arctic exploration and adventures so this was immediately added to my RSS feed. Unfortunately, he had equipment failure and some dreadful conditions and so
"After 8 days on the ice and at a position of N.83.57.686 W. 074.12.566 Ben Saunders' expedition to become the fastest man to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole is over following the critical failure of his ski equipment."
His talk was excellent, polished and high standard as you would expect from someone who does a lot of fund raising and probably quite a few after dinner talks. He also had the only picture of a polar bear during the whole day! It wasn't just pretty pictures though, he showed us imagery of the ice thaw over the last few years, and also some photos of what the surface looked like after being broken apart so much. This photo:
gives just a small indication of the height of some of the obstacles.
His next trip will be to the South Pole when he will attempt the first return journey to the south pole on foot
"SOUTH will be the first return journey to the South Pole on foot, and the longest unsupported (human-powered) polar journey in history".
He is due to leave in Autumn, so no doubt I'll be following his process again.
This was of real personal interest as many months ago Jeremy pownced me a link to Ben Saunders web site to follow the progress of his attempt on the speed record of a solo trek to the North Pole. I've always had a fascination in arctic exploration and adventures so this was immediately added to my RSS feed. Unfortunately, he had equipment failure and some dreadful conditions and so
"After 8 days on the ice and at a position of N.83.57.686 W. 074.12.566 Ben Saunders' expedition to become the fastest man to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole is over following the critical failure of his ski equipment."
His talk was excellent, polished and high standard as you would expect from someone who does a lot of fund raising and probably quite a few after dinner talks. He also had the only picture of a polar bear during the whole day! It wasn't just pretty pictures though, he showed us imagery of the ice thaw over the last few years, and also some photos of what the surface looked like after being broken apart so much. This photo:
gives just a small indication of the height of some of the obstacles.
His next trip will be to the South Pole when he will attempt the first return journey to the south pole on foot
"SOUTH will be the first return journey to the South Pole on foot, and the longest unsupported (human-powered) polar journey in history".
He is due to leave in Autumn, so no doubt I'll be following his process again.
Geekyoto: Diy Kyoto
One of the two product based talks last Saturday at geekyoto was DIY Kyoto. The key product is Wattson a well designed item which glows with a different colour according to how much electricity you're using, and also shows the electricity usage in either watts or price (you can set your own price). It is based in London, and made in London too.
There is also an associate tool, Holmes which provides a web-based view of your data - Wattson stores 28 days internally and Holmes that to be visualised.
I had a brief chat with Greta Corke (pictured) during a break and it sounded like a more fun (and prettier) version than some of the other similar functioning units. There's a video from Designers Block 2006 here.
There is also an associate tool, Holmes which provides a web-based view of your data - Wattson stores 28 days internally and Holmes that to be visualised.
I had a brief chat with Greta Corke (pictured) during a break and it sounded like a more fun (and prettier) version than some of the other similar functioning units. There's a video from Designers Block 2006 here.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Geekyoto: Play in a changing public realm
Two students from Central Saint Martins did half-length presentations, and the second of these was Bruno Taylor on play.
One of his statements was along the lines that "71% of adults used to play outside when they were young, only 21% of children do now". He also showed some photographs of areas that had been "vandalised" by young people playing on objects that looked like they should have been designed for play, in an area with no real play facilities.
He'd installed a swing into a bus stop to enable play in that environment which looks like a fun idea.
One of his statements was along the lines that "71% of adults used to play outside when they were young, only 21% of children do now". He also showed some photographs of areas that had been "vandalised" by young people playing on objects that looked like they should have been designed for play, in an area with no real play facilities.
He'd installed a swing into a bus stop to enable play in that environment which looks like a fun idea.
Geekyoto: Secular Sabbath
Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman talking about the idea of a secular sabbath. Naomi is from a jewish background, and in the world of the Orthodox jews what can be done on the Sabbath is quite restricted. This includes turning electrical devices on or off during the period - so a water reboiler tends to be used to cope with the need for a cup of tea, and timer switches are used for lighting.
The list of things that can be done, as seen in the slide above, are all rather pleasant sounding. One of the key points was that "behavioural changes don't need to be sacrificial" but that the concept of a day of rest has pretty much vanished - you can go shopping, read emails, work, etc pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
So, how about every now and again having an off-line day - no internet, no mobile phone, no landline phone - spend the day with friends, eating good food, enjoying good conversation? Give the car a rest, and walk around - slow down, de-stress.
Sounds like a pleasant change to me, I might just have to book one in.
The list of things that can be done, as seen in the slide above, are all rather pleasant sounding. One of the key points was that "behavioural changes don't need to be sacrificial" but that the concept of a day of rest has pretty much vanished - you can go shopping, read emails, work, etc pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
So, how about every now and again having an off-line day - no internet, no mobile phone, no landline phone - spend the day with friends, eating good food, enjoying good conversation? Give the car a rest, and walk around - slow down, de-stress.
Sounds like a pleasant change to me, I might just have to book one in.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Geekyoto: Christian Nold
The first speaker at Saturday's Geekyoto was Christian Nold who was mainly talking about emotional mapping. He mentioned some work he's done with communities and groups to map emotional responses to areas. This photo is part of the San Francisco emotion map. Participants are given handheld machines which monitor sweat levels (similar mechanism to lie detectors) to determine the emotional state of the person who additionally annotates their thoughts.
An interesting first talk, and some beautiful maps amongst his slides:
An interesting first talk, and some beautiful maps amongst his slides:
Monday, March 31, 2008
Girl Geek Dinner - Copywriting
Relly of PoppyCopy spoke at the most recent Brighton Girl Geek Dinner last week on the subject of "Personality, Pulling Power and Prizes: Why good copy is your new BFF". Copy-writing isn't something that makes up any element of my job, but is something that I felt was worth knowing about, for this blog, and for who knows what exciting future projects might come my way.
Relly produced some great takeaway material for us, which contains examples of different styles of writing, and includes a Webiblography of useful material. It mentions a few articles from copyblogger - the Copywriting 101:An Introduction to Copywriting one caught my eye. My key learning from Relly's talk was to be authentic in my writing, so to write like I'd talk I guess, without using vocabulary I wouldn't normally use.
Relly produced some great takeaway material for us, which contains examples of different styles of writing, and includes a Webiblography of useful material. It mentions a few articles from copyblogger - the Copywriting 101:An Introduction to Copywriting one caught my eye. My key learning from Relly's talk was to be authentic in my writing, so to write like I'd talk I guess, without using vocabulary I wouldn't normally use.
Labels: Brighton, event, girl geeks, photos
Saturday, March 29, 2008
A yahoo pipe, some php and a flickr feed
Over on the JaneandRichard home page, we used to show a random image from our image archive. However, to add an image to the archive we needed to register it, and this we failed to do very often. As time went on I was putting photos less often on the JaneandRichard images page, and more often on flickr. So, I updated the front page to use a flickr badge based on my flickr feed. This wasn't ideal, as it didn't combine our output.
This morning I decided to do a bit of playing, and so produced a yahoo pipe which takes Richard's flickr RSS feed, and my one as an input and returns the most recent image. I then wrote some PHP (well took the Brighton Bloggers aggregated feed PHP actually which in turn was based on the RSS reader produced by Richard Kendall) and wrote out the RSS description within some javascript. This allows me to replace the flickr badge on the home page with an image based on the combined feed.
In order to make this more useful, I used a parameter feed to allow other images to be produced by the script. So, the code
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://jane.dallaway.com/services/getImageFromFlickrRss.php?feed=http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_friends.gne%3fuser_id=11369209@N00%26friends=0%26display_all=1%26lang=en-us%26format=rss_200"></script>
returns the most recent image added by any of my contacts. The feed parameter needs to have the flickr RSS URL encoded otherwise the script will truncate the output and nothing will be produced.
So here is the output from that script - the latest photo from my contacts:
Update:
There is some cacheing going on at the yahoo pipes end, and so the RSS feed from the pipe doesn't reflect the changes in real time, or as quickly as if you run the pipe manually.
This morning I decided to do a bit of playing, and so produced a yahoo pipe which takes Richard's flickr RSS feed, and my one as an input and returns the most recent image. I then wrote some PHP (well took the Brighton Bloggers aggregated feed PHP actually which in turn was based on the RSS reader produced by Richard Kendall) and wrote out the RSS description within some javascript. This allows me to replace the flickr badge on the home page with an image based on the combined feed.
In order to make this more useful, I used a parameter feed to allow other images to be produced by the script. So, the code
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://jane.dallaway.com/services/getImageFromFlickrRss.php?feed=http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_friends.gne%3fuser_id=11369209@N00%26friends=0%26display_all=1%26lang=en-us%26format=rss_200"></script>
returns the most recent image added by any of my contacts. The feed parameter needs to have the flickr RSS URL encoded otherwise the script will truncate the output and nothing will be produced.
So here is the output from that script - the latest photo from my contacts:
Update:
There is some cacheing going on at the yahoo pipes end, and so the RSS feed from the pipe doesn't reflect the changes in real time, or as quickly as if you run the pipe manually.
Labels: photos, php, yahoo pipes
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Nokia 6110 Navigator and Route 66 satellite navigation
Whilst we were on our recent holiday, we took the opportunity to try out the built-in Route 66 navigation software.
The main observations are as follows:
- The battery life with the navigation system running is obviously impacted. In Liverpool the phone ran out of battery a mile away from our accomodation. We bought an in-car charger for the unit to prevent this from happening at other times.
- The software likes direct routes. Despite having selected fastest rather than shortest it sent us through the Snowdonia mountain park, (the road in the photo), with cattle grids and gates etc. Even when I told the unit that I was in a lorry it sent me the same way.
- It is very optimistic about how long a journey will take. Unlike google maps' directions which I've found to be pretty accurate, at 100% Route 66 seems to expect 60 miles per hour on all road types, including that mountain pass.
- In city navigation is excellent, getting in and out of cities and towns using the navigation system was really good, and really helpful.
- The postcode to longitude/latitude conversion is problematic at times - I don't think this is the software's problem but a complication with low population areas. Something to be wary of - next time I'll check the position of the landmark on the map against any other map or information availabile
In summary, I'll probably still print out google maps, and I'll still have a road atlas in the car, but I'll also let Route 66 guide me in and out of cities and towns.
Cross posted to Jane and Richard's yak and natter.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Busy busy busy at Madgex
It had been a busy few days over at Madgex. We are one of the premium sponsors at dConstruct, running the backnetwork and hosting barcampbrighton over the weekend. To be fair, its been business as normal most of the time, but we did have to pack all our kit away this evening in preparation for an office shuffle.
Our t-shirts turned up this afternoon for dConstruct and then five of us headed off to the Dome to setup our stand for dConstruct and after a bit of fun working out what how to put the thing up, we ended up with a pretty good looking area. I'm meeting Nick tomorrow morning to set up the PCs before registration and then we're good to go. We've also got flyers in all of the dConstruct bags for the various jobs we are recruiting for at the moment (mainly C# developers, creative designer types and an information architect).
I took advantage of being there this evening to register ahead of time, and so am now happily sorting through my schwag, and stickering stuff.
After a quick burger at GBK, where most of the rest of the geek community of Brighton were, we headed off to Heist for a few pre-conference beers at the pre-conference party.
Taken from backnetwork, here is my blogroll prior to the conference kicking off properly - it'll be interesting to see whether it grows over the weekend.
Our t-shirts turned up this afternoon for dConstruct and then five of us headed off to the Dome to setup our stand for dConstruct and after a bit of fun working out what how to put the thing up, we ended up with a pretty good looking area. I'm meeting Nick tomorrow morning to set up the PCs before registration and then we're good to go. We've also got flyers in all of the dConstruct bags for the various jobs we are recruiting for at the moment (mainly C# developers, creative designer types and an information architect).
I took advantage of being there this evening to register ahead of time, and so am now happily sorting through my schwag, and stickering stuff.
After a quick burger at GBK, where most of the rest of the geek community of Brighton were, we headed off to Heist for a few pre-conference beers at the pre-conference party.
Taken from backnetwork, here is my blogroll prior to the conference kicking off properly - it'll be interesting to see whether it grows over the weekend.
- Alex Goluszko
- Alex Farran
- Alex Laurie
- Andy Budd
- Aral Balkan
- Bruce Boughton
- Clive Walker
- Dan Glegg
- Danny Hope
- David Stone
- Denise Wilton
- Glenn Jones
- Ian Ozsvald
- James Wragg
- James Box
- Jay Caines-Gooby
- Jeremy Keith
- Jessica Spengler
- Jez Nicholson
- Johanna Hunt
- John Montgomery
- Jonathan Markwell
- Josh Russell
- Natalie Downe
- Nick Tong
- Niqui Merret
- Paul Silver
- Paul Annett
- Richard Dallaway
- Richard Rutter
- Rosie Sherry
- Seb Seb
- Simon Willison
- Sophie Barrett
- Tom Hume
Labels: barcampbrighton, dConstruct, dConstruct07, madgex, photos
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner #5
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the latest Brighton Girl Geek Dinner. Denise Wilton presented on "Designing a web application with character" and whilst it was more fluffy and designy than I am, I still learnt and gained from the experience.
A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.
As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.
A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.
As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, girl geeks, photos, sussexdigital
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
£5 App
Last night was the 4th £5 app evening and the first one concentrating on a hardware project.
Lincoln Smith did an interesting presentation on how a hardware project can be built for a relatively small financial outlay - although not compared to the more usual £5 apps which have been minimum finance but lots of time expenditure. It was really useful to hear the history behind the project - how it came about, and also where he hopes it will go.
After a quick break, with chance to eat more of the lovely ginger cake, it was on with the pitches.
The first was Ian doing a reverse pitch - he wants a skills board - so when he needs to find a designer, or a python developer he knows exactly where to go.
The second was Ben and Danny talking about artmeddler (a working title) which sounded like quite a cool concept - basically a web site enabling an artist to upload their artwork in several different formats - so from the sketch, through to the finished work. The original aim is to enable feedback on when a piece of artwork is finished, so preventing the artist from over working it.
Then onto a few quick plugs - one from Vicky mentioning the jobs we've got going at Madgex, one from Danny for the Geek Wine Thing and the last for the Open Coffee at the University on Thursday (and then regularly afterwards)
Lincoln Smith did an interesting presentation on how a hardware project can be built for a relatively small financial outlay - although not compared to the more usual £5 apps which have been minimum finance but lots of time expenditure. It was really useful to hear the history behind the project - how it came about, and also where he hopes it will go.
After a quick break, with chance to eat more of the lovely ginger cake, it was on with the pitches.
The first was Ian doing a reverse pitch - he wants a skills board - so when he needs to find a designer, or a python developer he knows exactly where to go.
The second was Ben and Danny talking about artmeddler (a working title) which sounded like quite a cool concept - basically a web site enabling an artist to upload their artwork in several different formats - so from the sketch, through to the finished work. The original aim is to enable feedback on when a piece of artwork is finished, so preventing the artist from over working it.
Then onto a few quick plugs - one from Vicky mentioning the jobs we've got going at Madgex, one from Danny for the Geek Wine Thing and the last for the Open Coffee at the University on Thursday (and then regularly afterwards)
Labels: Brighton, event, photos, sussexdigital, £5 app
Monday, July 09, 2007
Brighton Bloggers Meetup
As mentioned the other day I put together a collage of blog screen shots for 279 of the sites listed at Brighton Bloggers. If you look really closely, there are some which are just directory listings, even a couple of blank pages. Anyway, this was produced on A3 and A2 paper thanks to Kirsty and James at Brightenup and taken along to the meetup. It was met with interest although a magnifying glass might have helped :-)
Labels: Brighton Bloggers, event, photos, sussexdigital
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Sussex Geek Dinner
Last night, Glenn Jones spoke about Microformats at the latest Sussex Geek Dinner. This was a talk I'd been interested in hearing at the WebDD event in February, but failed due to the popularity of the session. It was really interesting, and inspiring, and has added another lot of "to do"s for this site, the jane and richard site and brighton bloggers to make the most of microformats. I'm just heading off to install the firefox addin Operator now to see what pages have got microformats embedded into them.
I spent quite a bit of the rest of the evening getting opinions on my request for comments on Brighton Bloggers the other day. Joh, Danny and Rosie had some great feedback and I look forward to following up with one of Joh's ideas shortly.
I spent quite a bit of the rest of the evening getting opinions on my request for comments on Brighton Bloggers the other day. Joh, Danny and Rosie had some great feedback and I look forward to following up with one of Joh's ideas shortly.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, photos, sussexdigital
