The recent few days of hot weather seems to be coming to an end. To celebrate it while it still lasts, here’s a photo Andy took yesterday of some friends enjoying the sun on the steps of Hursley House. Left to right: Hanan, James, Rob, Helen, Alice and me.
If Darren wasn’t out in Arizona (taking even more amazing photos) with Ian, they both would have been on the steps with us above. I’m not sure if they would have been eating ice creams or would have stuck with the traditional cup of tea though.
Reminiscing about childhood games last night, my friend Arthur wondered out loud how marbles are made. Nick and I googleraced to find the answer, and (unsurprisingly) both ended up finding the same bit of video.
‘How It’s Made‘ is surely one of the most interesting series on Discovery (perhaps beaten by Mythbusters). The marble video caused us to go on a mini knowledge quest, in which we learned how many other things were made. Golf balls, bubblegum, jawbreakers all have extrusion in common with marbles (though are fractionally less cool), while filing cabinets are about as interesting as they deserve to be. Aren’t the internets brilliant?
I was at Game Camp 08 on Saturday. It was held in Sony’s 3Rooms building near Shoreditch which is amazing. Imagine your dream flat, but full of rather more PS3s and PSPs than you could ever need. That said, the Sony branding wasn’t actually overpowering, and the venue was a very good choice.
The day was held in the style of a barcamp, with sessions run by participants. There were sessions on ‘How to play Doerak, a semi-russian card game’, ‘ARGs, are they f****d’?', ‘Playing SLorpedo (mixed reality naval warfare in Second Life)’, and many many more.
Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian organised the event and has since written up a conclusion as well as a quick review of one of the busiest sessions, Matt Biddulph on ‘hacking game controllers with Arduino’.
I joined the IBM Hursley ETS (Emerging Technology Services) team just a few weeks after their first Rocket Day in 2005. Today was version 2.0, and it was the most fun team-building day out you can imagine; a field full of geeks and their (water, air and coke-and-mentos powered) rockets, cameras, access to good food and great beer. Good times.
Best of all, Rob made a video which includes some footage captured using a tiny camera fixed to the nose of one of the rockets. There’s a long version on YouTube. Here’s the short ‘trailer’ version (music by yours truly).
A few years ago, I was playing more online poker than was probably healthy (though only ever invested about £10 in online poker at my peak had built it up to well over £100, which I inevitably lost. Frighteningly quickly. (Though not before I extracted the original £10.) I don’t particularly want to start again at the moment).
Reading (this is an addiction anyone would be proud of. I regularly get through 5 or 6 books in a month).
I bite my nails (and I hate it. If you see me doing this, tut at me or something).
EVE Online (I recently suspended my account, since I wasn’t playing it nearly enough to make the monthly payments worthwhile, so my character is currently in the equivalent of hibernation. The past two Christmas holidays have been marked by obsessively shooting space-based pirates though, and I’m sure I’ll get back into it one day).
The addition of an Xbox 360 has meant I’ve been recently hooked on some excellent games. (Call of Duty 4 is amazing, and having played through the single-player game I got sucked into levelling up in the multi-player game until I reached ‘Presetige’ mode. Grand Theft Auto 4 came out this week, and I think it’s already my latest addiction. For a few weeks anyway).
I seem to have a slightly addictive personality. But doesn’t everyone?
Ever since the Dedicated Followers of Fashion post about laptop stickers used a photo I’d snapped of Cory Doctorow’s heavily stickered ThinkPad, I’ve been a(n even) keen(er) observer of laptop stickers and their owners. I’ve been avidly photographing them, uploading them to Flickr and tagging them ‘laptopstickers‘. Here are a few examples.
(Sparse. As with Dan, you’d know Ren is a game geek pretty easily)
Having bought a MacBook Pro in January, I decided it was finally time to plaster it with stickers. It helps me get past the new-car feeling of having to keep it perfect, and since there are a lot of identical MacBook Pros out there, some personalisation is helpful. I figure that I’ll keep adding them, and if they peel off I’ll just add more. It’s a bit of a release not to be so concerned about the way it looks, though I was ironically obsessive about getting the right stickers before I began.
I’ve been collecting them for some time, but didn’t want to start putting them down on the lid until I had enough to give a good covering. SXSW was a great venue to pick up fun and relevant stickers, and Coté was kind enough to send me some too.
Incidentally, this is the reason I had the Autobots logo etched onto the bottom of the machine rather than the lid; I’d known since I bought the MacBook Pro that the lid was going to be en-stickered, and the laser etching opportunity, while too good to miss, seemed best placed underneath. It gives a chance for surprise and delight, too.
For the first time in my life, I used a Skype video call with my wife today as an ambient backdrop to life, rather than just as tool for having a conversation.I’d always wanted to try it, ever since hearing my friend and colleague Dave Newbold mention, in a presentation he was giving a couple of years ago about the near future for technology and social interaction, something he’d heard described as ‘ambient Skype’, whereby people leave a voice client running in the background while they are away from home as a way of being almost-there.
Where the marginal cost of bandwidth is at or near zero, you don’t have to constantly talk to make use of realtime online communication tools. You can relax and enjoy being in each other’s company, as you would at home. A bit like Leisa Reichelt’s term, Ambient Intimacy, but less about easily staying loosely in touch with many people, and more about actual intimacy between two people by using a (normally) synchronous tool in an undirected way.
Time zones have often made it difficult in the past. I’m in the US and Rachel is back in the UK, our lives don’t overlap much, and we have to make an effort to find times we’re both online, or revert to text and email. Today though, I had some free time in the late afternoon and badly needed a nap. Since it was early enough to coincide with Rachel’s bed-time, we tried falling asleep together, apart.
I found this to be very comforting. It’s rather reassuring to drift off with the familiarity of hearing each other breathing and (for me) the everyday noises of home in the background. A nice way to reduce the distance during a long trip abroad. I don’t know why we didn’t try it sooner.
Three different physics games I’ve been enjoying recently. You might like them too.
1 - Toribash (Mac, Windows) is my favourite fighting game ever. The physics, rendering and tense multiplayer action make it an instant addiction.
2 - Crayon Physics (Windows) is the freeware prototype of something which went on to become the eagerly awaited Crayon Physics Deluxe (the one shown in the video below).
3 - Phun (Windows and Linux) is a fun 2D physics playground. Experiment with gravity, friction, springs, motors, and more. It looks a bit like this
It seems to be inspired by the MIT Magic Paper demo (shown in the video below).
I’ve been helping out as the ‘chief engineer’ at Speechification for a while, and I’m now proud to be joining Russell and Steve in making Watchification happen too.
The aim of the project is reassuringly simple: in the same way that Speechification curates speech radio from around the world, we want to make it easy for people to find the best bits of TV, both old and new. The iPlayer is great, but there’s so much there. Where do you start? Isn’t it nice when friends suggest stuff you might enjoy? Since word-of-mouth is how I discover all of the television I watch, it’s something I appreciate greatly. So we’re trying to do that. Expect it to grow and change as we get used to doing it, and learn what works. We may have some design improvements coming soon, but more on that later.
With my ‘chief engineer’ hat on, I knocked up a nifty little WordPress hack over the weekend, using the Custom Fields GUI plugin as a starting point. I make it easy for contributors to paste a unique ID from iPlayer or YouTube (or Google Video…) which is then extracted so the blog can automatically build the appropriate embed code for iPlayer, YouTube or Google Video, depending on the video source. Realistically, it’s only a little bit easier than copying and pasting an embed code, but capturing the URL (and the editor, the producer, etc) in metadata allows us to have more fun with the data later too. Here’s what it looks like…
If you’re interested enough in television to want to share your favourite bits of it with the world and would like to become a contributor yourself, let me know (roo at rooreynolds dot com).
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