For the past 3-and-a-bit months, I’ve been making a podcast with my friend Leila. It’s called Shift Run Stop and thanks to iTunes featuring it on their Podcasts page, it’s recently started getting rather a lot more attention and listeners than we’d ever have hoped. A few people have asked me how the recording and […]
Category Archives: geek
‘Enemy of Chaos’ walkthrough
Spoiler alert: when viewed large, this is a complete map and walkthrough of the wonderfully geeky ‘choose your own adventure‘ meets ‘Fighting Fantasy‘ style interactive book/game, Enemy of Chaos by Leila Johnston. You might have read her previous book, How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People. More recently, Leila’s reading from Enemy of Chaos was […]
P5 Glove – Rock Paper Scissors and other fun
The P5 Glove is a consumer wired glove (tactile but not haptic). I bought one boxed as-new on eBay a while ago for not very much, and I’m glad I did as they now seem to be increasingly hard (and expensive) to get hold of. It contains five analog bend sensors, 3 buttons plus […]
EZi Entertainment Zone
Simon Lumb recently spotted an amazing(ly bad) looking games console in a motorway service station which, shall we say, borrows heavily from the design of of the Wii. I couldn’t resist trying it for myself, and picked one up on eBay for a little bit less than £20 including delivery. Quite a bit less than […]
MIDIguitar patch
Remember the Rock Band / Guitar Hero MIDI guitar thing I made? I have not fiddled with it much since I presented at Playful 08. However, since a few people have asked me for it, here’s the current version of the ControllerMate patch which contains two versions; one for Rock Band (Harmonix) Xbox guitars and […]
Laptop Stickers
I’ve been collecting photos of laptop stickers for ages. Here’s what my ever-changing MacBook Air looks like at the moment (click the image for the Flickr version, complete with notes). I’m always on the lookout for more. If you want me to display your sticker, and don’t mind posting it to me, let me know […]
Browsing my browsing
I mentioned last week that I’d installed MeeTimer and was using it to track my browsing history. Now I’ve built up a weeks worth of data, it’s time to do something fun with it. If I want to eliminate, or at least manage, distractions, it will be useful to know not just which sites I […]
MeeTimer and myware and SQLite
I’m interested in the idea of self-interested self-surveillance. Long before we had PMOG (the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, now called The Nethernet) to make a game of it, Seth Goldstein was calling the idea ‘myware’ and building the (short-lived) AttentionTrust site. As Fred Wilson said at the time, “If someone is going to spy on […]
More Microprinting
I’ve been experimenting a bit more with the thermal receipt printer I bought recently. Inspired by Tom’s daily digests I’ve been trying some of my own. You only get 48 characters per line using the default font. The alternative font (font B) is much denser, with 64 characters per line. The second printout is only […]
Microprinter
Inspired by Tom Taylor’s microprinter project, I’ve bought a Citizen CBM-231 thermal reciept printer of my own. I picked it up for just £20 on eBay, including shipping. It’s great. Tom uses his to print the weather, his diary, where his friends are (according to Dopplr) and more. As soon as I saw it, I […]