-
The Social Innovation Camp June 2009 call for ideas is now open!
Once again, we’re looking for the best ideas that use the web to, in the words of Tim O’Reilly, tackle stuff that matters.
Over one weekend from 19th-21st June 2009, we’re bringing together some of the best of the UK’s software developers and designers with those at the sharp end of social problems at the Saltire Centre, Glasgow.
Their mission will be to turn six back-of-the-envelope ideas that could change the world into social start-ups in under 48 hours – complete with working software.
You’ve got until Friday 22nd May 2009 to send us your idea that uses the web to create social change and you could be joining 100 other participants to try and make it a reality.
-
Leah Buechley is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the High-Low Tech research group. The High-Low Tech group explores the integration of high and low technology from cultural, material, and practical perspectives, with the goal of engaging diverse groups of people in developing their own technologies. Leah is a well-known expert in the field of electronic textiles (e-textiles), and her work in this area includes developing a method for creating cloth printed circuit boards (fabric PCBs) and designing the commercially available LilyPad Arduino toolkit.
-
Dear Members of the Cult of Done,
I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.
-
While MacRuby is a younger, lesser known implementation, it has the potential to become a game changer – at least for Mac developers. Based on Ruby 1.9, MacRuby’s main aim is to provide programmers with the ability to write Mac OS X applications in Ruby, making Ruby a first class Cocoa programming language. In what may sound like an utopistic effort, MacRuby strives to provide the high level abstractions, power and syntax sugar of Ruby, without the characteristic performance hit of its main implementation.
-
Over the last week or two, I’ve put together a handful of hacks demonstrating how to do various mashup related things using the Guardian open data on Google spreadsheets, and the open platform content API. So here’s a quick summary – think of it as a single post mashup uncourse…
-
If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. Sure, it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now, but that won’t always be the case—and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud.
With that in mind, I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. These are the post-bureaucratic realities that tomorrow’s employees will use as yardsticks in determining whether your company is “with it” or “past it.” In assembling this short list, I haven’t tried to catalog every salient feature of the Web’s social milieu, only those that are most at odds with the legacy practices found in large companies.
Archive for March 2009
-
Okay, first things first: using coffee to develop film is not something Ansel Adams would do. But it works, it gives your film a distinctive look, and it has a certain MacGuyver-ish flair. Think of it like using a plastic camera- it’s more about having fun than getting technically flawless results.
-
Sinatra is a small Ruby web application framework that packs a big punch. It’s also a lot of fun! You can use Sinatra to write tiny, focused web applications and lightweight REST services very quickly. And sometimes a lean and mean web app is all you need. If you haven’t given Sinatra a look, now’s a great time to get a fresh perspective on web development. Learn how to get the most out of Sinatra from Adam Keys, an experienced Ruby and Sinatra developer.
-
Liquid crystal displays (LCD) come in two main types that are of interest to hobby and DIY makers; Character LCD displays and pixel / graphic LCD displays. This intro “How To” will be covering the more popular and less expensive character LCD displays based on the very common Hitachi HD44780 controller.
-
Civil Service Job Service API
Requirements:* All http requests require a key – this will be issued by CO/CivilService.gov.uk via email to cswebsite@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk
* All data are cached for 15mins. If you have updated a job and don't see the update please wait for the next cycle
* If you are using the API we ask that you cache the data. This will reduce load to the service and allow you to serve up your pages or content faster
* Please let us know if you intend using the service heavily e.g. over 5,000 calls per day so we can resource this site appropriatelyLicensing:
The information available through this API is Crown Copyright. This means you are free to use or re-use this information, including for commercial purposes, once you obtain a click-use licence from OPSI (link: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/click-use/system/online/pLogin.asp) The conditions attached to this licence can be found here (link: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/click-use/index).
-
Resource for all things 555-related
-
"Holding a smoke alarm, battery installed, is somewhat like holding an unwound jack-in-the-box. While you know that it shouldn’t go off, there’s still a nagging suspicion that it might. I get a similar feeling when I check news websites in the morning – somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspect that the world might have caught on fire while I was asleep. So, it made at least some degree of sense to me to build a News Alarm – a device that sounds an alarm when specific new stories are detected ‘off the wire’."
-
"Kreol was created on the assumption that people like to make music. If you are reading this, chances are that you already know how to type and use a computer. By taking advantage of that fact, Kreol breaks down some of the biggest barriers that keep the average person from playing music. Simply enough, Kreol turns the computer's keyboard into notes and chords, while the mouse is used for expressive movements."
This is just stunning – I'm trying to imagine the possibilities in an after-hours office… No word on whether it's a commercial product, unfortunately.
-
You're sitting in an airport or in a cafe, and people want your money for Internet access. They do allow ICMP traffic, though (i.e., you can ping machines on the Internet). Enters ICMPTX. (If you can't use ping, but you can issue name queries, use NSTX: IP-over-DNS.) There are several resources online to point you in the right direction, most notably Case of a wireless hack by Siim Põder. There is a similar, thoroughly undocument program called itun, a simple icmp tunnel that claims to do the same thing. Also, check out PingTunnel which is not IP-over-ICMP, but rather TCP-over-ICMP and, therefore, less useful.
Once you've followed these instructions, you basically have a remote proxy, providing you with access to the Internet. Communication between you and the remote proxy is over ICMP.
-
You're sitting in an airport or in a cafe, and people want your money for Internet access. They do allow DNS traffic, though.
If the ISP allows DNS traffic to any DNS server (and not just their own), you might consider running OpenVPN on UDP port 53 (thanks to Norman Rasmussen for this suggestion). If they don't, however, NSTX comes to the rescue. NSTX is a hack to tunnel IP traffic over DNS.
-
"I have no expectation of what happens next, but here’s a manifesto. Being interesting is as important as being useful. Making things that delight and inspire is as important as creating value. Old systems are crumbling; the best you can do is be nimble, smart and make some trouble."
Tom's manifesto for what he's going to do next. I can't wait to see what he comes up with.
-
Ages ago I bought an LIS302DL from Sparkfun. One of the old (little bit) messed up ones, but still 3 axis accelerometer with I2C output. No external parts. No pain. Fine!
P1000765_2.png
Before I go in any further investigation. I nee to get it up & running with my arduino (actually an boarduino – but who cares?). Read all the nifty details after the break. -
Use your other computer as additional display for your Mac.
Recycle your old iMac, Powerbook or even Windows PC.
-
Legacy Locker – The safe and secure way to pass your online accounts to your friends and loved ones."Legacy Locker is a safe, secure repository for your digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends and loved ones in the event of death or disability."
A completely new business model for the digital age?
-
Minim is an audio library that uses the JavaSound API, a bit of Tritonus, and Javazoom’s MP3SPI to provide an easy to use audio library for people developing in the Processing environment. The philosophy behind the API is to make integrating audio into your sketches as simple as possible while still providing a reasonable amount of flexibility for more advanced users.
-
OpenProcessing is a 'flickr'ish place for processing community to share their sketches, comment on each other's pieces, etc…
-
In this small howto I will explain howto setup:
a] Howto customizing a bash shell to get a good looking prompt
b] Configure the appearance of the terminal.
c] Apply themes using bashish
d] Howto pimp out your shell prompt
-
Via Infovore – clouds in a small tin box. Genius.
-
"Here at Maxis, we're working on some features to help the community create their own Spore applications. We're collecting these features into a web-based Spore API. Using simple web services, you can access our huge database of creations and creators."
Spore has an API, with code samples. Awesome.
-
An essay by Dan Hill on Sheffield, my new hometown. It's got some embedded video from a fascinating 1973 documentary – 36 years old, but a world of difference.
This is a panda who has been volunteered to donate his eyes in the cause of – well, something or other.
I picked him up in a charity shop for a pound (is there anything sadder than the toy shelf in a charity shop? I can’t help wondering how many toys ended up there after their owners were struck down by childhood leukemia or something) so technically, he’s recycled. I chose a panda for two reasons – one, because I happen to like pandas; and two because their black eye patches mean that you can’t normally see their eyes particularly well. This will become more important later…
The original idea was sparked by the phrase “a bear market” – so instead, this is a market bear. In place of eyes, he’s going to have tri-colour LEDs – which will change colour according to how well the stock market is doing. When it’s going down, he’ll glow red, and when it’s going up, he’ll glow green. And if there’s been no change, the LEDs will just light up yellow.
There’s also going to be a button inside his paw, which will rebase the scale to the current value of the market – so squeezing his paw will switch the LEDs back to yellow, and then they’ll change colour the next time the market changes.
Although you can’t see it from the photos, he’s actually a glove puppet. That’s ideal for my vivisectionist purposes, because it means he’s hollow enough to stuff the electronics up inside. These are an Arduino microcontroller and an Arduino Ethernet shield, which will connect him to the interwebs. Ideally I’d have preferred a wifi connection because then he won’t have cables emerging from his colon, but that’s for the next generation of mutilated soft toys.
The software is in two parts – there’s a server-side component, which grabs the market data from the Guardian website (I’m using the Guardian because their site is nicely laid out for scraping purposes, and they hopefully won’t be too upset if they find out) and then does the calculation to decide whether it’s up or down. That feeds back an “up”, “down” or “same” response when polled by the Arduino sketch – which feeds the appropriate voltage onto the analogue outputs to light up the LEDs. Squeezing his paw fires off a message to the server to rebase the calculations, so the up/down/same algorithm can start from wherever the market is standing at the point of squeeze.
The next stage is to grab the magnitude of the change and fade the LED up and down accordingly – bright for a big change, and dimmer if it’s smaller. But getting my head around the Arduino Ethernet library is a big enough challenge for the moment, so to start with I’m going with the simple version. So far it’s working on a breadboard, so the next stage is to build the circuits for implantation into the eye “sockets” and paw. Extracting the eyes was something of a challenge, because they’re fixed in with fasteners designed to withstand small children gnawing on them – so removal was a case of sheer brute force and application of Tools. There’s a set on Flickr which documents the whole gruesome process.
[Update: Panda vivisection redux]
-
I’ve learned from teaching workshops that many sewers are hesitant to give their bobbin cases a good cleaning as often as they should. It seems as if some are afraid to remove the parts necessary to give their machines a good cleaning and others simply forget.
So my partner in crime, Bill, and I have put together a series of tips and photos that should help you get started.
-
"Developing with the Content API is easy for anyone with a very basic understanding of code.
These steps should help clarify what it takes to get started with the service, but please let us know if you need any help."
-
"The inside looks just like the fabric pressure sensors, except each stitch is connected to a separate conductive fabric tab. The downside is that separate tabs and connections to these tabs take up a lot of space, especially if you want to achieve a tight matrix of sensors. A grid of lines and columns and some code to analyze these (separately power and measure) would allow for much tighter spacing. This version is nice because it is so simple."
