Makie Alpha – 3d printed custom dolls

This post is syndicated from Life at the Feeding Edge.

Posted on May 18, 2012 by epredator

Today Makies went live as an alpha. In case you had not been following this exciting new startup it is one that blends 3d printing with design. It lets you wizard up your own customised figure (lets say doll). The bulk of that figure is then custom 3d printed, but then some of the elements like clothes and accessories are added using more traditional methods. The site is in very early adopter mode as whilst you can design lots of Makies there are a subset of clothes available on checkout. Also this is the first limited edition run of 100 (I think I got in at number 50)
my makie
If you want to know who is behind all this then check out the team at MakieLab. I first got to hear about this because Alice Taylor (who as then at Channel 4) was going to come to one of our BCS animation and games development SG events to talk about how they used games at Channel 4. She was unable to come and do the talk at the last minute and had to be a little bit vague as she was in the process of resigning to go start Makielab up, but I didn’t know that :) So when I saw her next we chatted a bit and got an tiny insight into what might be going on.
So, as an early adopter, 3d printing fan and as a sometime children’s TV presenter this really intersects a lot of things. So Feeding Edge is going to be the proud owner soon of a cute Makie.

Posted in 3dprinting, future | Leave a comment

Herring and Lee and Lee and Herring

This post is syndicated from Words and pictures.

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Tony


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A few weeks ago I went to see this year’s show from Richard Herring, ”What is love, anyway?” at The Lights in Andover. Although Richard didn’t think the show went down very well, I enjoyed it. It was a more thought-provoking and personal show than the previous ones I’ve seen, made all the more poignant as he had just got back from his honeymoon. There were some touching moments in the show, which was devoid of much of his usual bluster. It was a refreshing change for a comedian who specialises in playing myriad different versions of himself.

The following week I got a call from the Theatre Royal in Winchester, saying that there had been a return for Stewart Lee’s show. I had tried to book a few months ago but the show had already sold out, so went on the waiting list. Some poor so-and-so wasn’t able to go, so just one week after watching Richard Herring live I was watching the other half of the erstwhile comedy duo.

I’d not visited this theatre before. It’s an impressive space, not large but very ornate. The show was great, although it’s hard to explain why. Stewart’s style is confrontational and he deliberately divides the audience. The first ten minutes consisted of a stream of uncomfortable put-downs directed at a woman in the front row, who couldn’t work out how to turn her phone off. The material must have been used before but I still can’t work out if the whole thing was a set up.

I bought the Fist of Fun Series 1 DVD set after Richard’s show and he signed it. I remembered to take it to Stewart’s show too. So after seeing Herring and Lee, I can now watch Lee and Herring whenever I want.

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Here’s one we made earlier

This post is syndicated from Notes from a small field.

Posted on May 13, 2012 by jt

After a week of camping in the living room, the new kitchen is starting to take shape. Most of the major bits are in, just not quite finished yet; the sink looks like it might work but produces a nice flood if you try and use it!

Here’s how things have been going over the last week, starting with a nice big empty room… if only we didn’t have to put a kitchen in it!

All the new plumbing took a while but is way better than my DIY attempts in the last house. There should actually be space in the cupboard under the sink for things other than pipes this time!

Once the plumbing and wiring was done, the kitchen reappeared in no time at all, and the room still feels bigger than it did with the old kitchen in, which is nice.

We almost finished the week with a working kitchen, plus a top of the range cardboard bistro table!

Really looking forward to being able to move back in next week, although it will be a bit longer until the tiles and floor get done. Mainly because we have to actually choose the tiles and floor; time to head to top-tile-warehouse-r-us…

Posted in bistro table, house, kitchen, Life, the Universe, and Everything, new house, plumbing, tiles, Ultraplan | Leave a comment

Digging through what Twitter knows about me

This post is syndicated from The lost outpost.

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Andy Piper

I joined Twitter on February 21, 2007, at exactly 15:14:48, and I created my account via the web interface. As you can see, my first tweet was pretty mundane!

I remember discussing this exciting cool “new Web 2.0 site” with Kim Plowright @mildlydiverting in Roo’s office in Hursley a couple of days before, and before long he, Ian and I were all trying this new newness out. It was just before the 2007 SXSWi, where Twitter really started to get on the radar of the geekerati.

But wait a moment! It’s impossible to pull back more than just over the last 3,000 tweets using the API, so how was I able to get all the way back to 5 years ago and display that tweet when I’ve got over 33,000 of them to my name?

It’s a relatively little-known fact that you can ask Twitter to disclose everything they hold associated with your account – and they will (at least, in certain jurisdictions – I’m not sure whether they will do this for every single user but in the EU they are legally bound to do so). I learned about this recently after reading Anne Helmond’s blog entry on the subject, and decided to follow the process through. I first contacted Twitter on April 24, and a few days later faxed (!) them my identity documentation, most of which was “redacted” by me :-) Yesterday, May 11, a very large zip file arrived via email.

I say very large, but actually it was smaller than the information dump that Anne received. Her tweets were delivered as 50Mb of files, but mine came in nearer to 9Mb zipped – 17Mb unzipped. I’d expected a gigantic amount of data in relation to my tweets, but it seems as though they have recently revised their process and now only provide the basic metadata about each one rather than a whole JSON dump.

So, what do you get for your trouble? Here’s the list of contents, as outlined by Twitter’s legal department in their email to me.

- USERNAME-account.txt: Basic information about your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-email-address-history.txt: Any records of changes of the email address on file for your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-tweets.txt: Tweets of your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-favorites.txt: Favorites of your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-dms.txt: Direct messages of your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-contacts.txt: Any contacts imported by your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-following.txt: Accounts followed by your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-followers.txt: Accounts that follow your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-lists_created.txt: Any lists created by your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-lists_subscribed.txt: Any lists subscribed to by your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-lists-member.txt: Any public lists that include your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-saved-searches.txt: Any searches saved by your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-ip.txt: Logins to your Twitter account and associated IP addresses.
- USERNAME-devices.txt: Any records of a mobile device that you registered to your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-facebook-connected.txt: Any records of a Facebook account connected to your Twitter account.
- USERNAME-screen-name-changes.txt: Any records of changes to your Twitter username.
- USERNAME-media.zip: Images uploaded using Twitter’s photo hosting service (attached only if your account has such images).
- other-sources.txt: Links and authenticated API calls that provide information about your Twitter account in real time.

Of these, let’s dig a bit more deeply into just a few of the items, no need to pick everything to pieces.

The “tracking data” is contained in andypiper-devices.txt and andypiper-ipaudit.txt – interesting. The devices file essentially contains information on my phone, presumably for the SMS feature. They know my number and the carrier. The IP address list tracks back to the start of March, so they have 2 months of data on what IPs have been used to access my account. I’ve yet to subject that to a lot of scrutiny to check where those are located, that’s another script I need to write.

I took a look at andypiper-contacts.txt and was astonished to find out how much of my contact data Twitter’s friend finder and mobile apps had slurped up. I mean, I don’t even have all of this in my address book… given the fact that the information contained the sender email addresses for various online retailer newsletters, I’m guessing that Google’s API (I’m a Gmail user) probably coughed up not just my defined contact list, but also all of the email addresses from anyone I’d ever heard from, ever.

Fortunately, there’s a way to remove this information permanently, which Anne has written about. I went ahead and did that, and then Twitter warned me that the Who To Follow suggestions might not be so relevant. That’s OK because I don’t use that feature anyway – and in practice, I’ve noticed no difference in the past 24 hours!

I use DMs a lot for quick communication, particularly with colleagues (it was a pretty reliable way of contacting @andysc when I needed him at IBM!). That’s reflected in the size of andypiper-dms.txt, which is also a scary reminder to myself that I used to delete them, but since Twitter now makes it harder to get to and delete DMs, I’ve stopped removing them and there’s a lot of private data I wish I’d scrubbed.

Taking a peek at the early tweets in andypiper-tweets, I’m trying to remember when the @reply syntax was formalised and when Twitter themselves started creating links to the other person’s profile. Many of my early tweets refer to @roo and @epred and I don’t think they ever went by those handles. 5 years is a long time.

I mentioned that the format used to deliver the data appears to have changed since Anne made her request. She got a file containing a JSON dump of each tweet including metadata like retweet information, in_reply_to, geo, etc etc.. By comparison, I now have simply creation info, status ID (the magic that lets you get back to the tweets via web UI), and the text itself:

********************
user_id: 786491
created_at: Wed Feb 21 15:43:54 +0000 2007
created_via: web
status_id: 5623961
text: overheating in an office with no 
comfort cooling or aircon. About to drink water.

It’s a real shame that they have taken this approach, as it means the data is now far more cumbersome to parse and work with. However, using some shell scripts I did some simple slicing-and-dicing because I was curious how my use of Twitter had grown over time. Here’s a chart showing the numbers of tweets I posted per year (2012 is a “to date” figure of course). It looks like it was slow growth initially but last year I suddenly nearly doubled my output.

Still considering what other analysis I’d like to do. I can chart out the client applications I’ve used, or make a word cloud showing how my conversational topics have changed over time… now that all of the information is mine, that is. It is just a shame I have to do so much manual munging of the output beforehand.

Oh, and the email I received from Twitter Legal also said:

No records were found of any disclosure to law enforcement of information about your Twitter account.

So, that’s alright then…

Why did I do this? firstly, because I believe in the Open Web and ownership of my own data. Secondly, because I hope that I’ll now be able to archive this personal history and make it searchable via a tool like ThinkUp (which I’ve been running for a while now, but not for the whole 5 years). Lastly… no, not “because I could”… well OK at least partly because I could… because I believe that companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google and others should be fully transparent with their users and the data they hold, and that by going through this currently-slightly-painful procedure it will encourage Twitter to put in place formal tools to provide this level of access to everyone in a frictionless manner.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to dig around some more…

Tagged: analysis, analytics, content, data, ownership, privacy, tweets, Twitter, web

Posted in Analysis, analytics, blog, content, data, ownership, Privacy, tweets, Twitter, web | Leave a comment

Old meets new – Learning Korean with Flashcards

This post is syndicated from Life at the Feeding Edge.

Posted on May 11, 2012 by epredator

You may have noticed I have been tweeting a little about my new found activity of the martial art Choi Kwang Do. I also wrote a bit on my personal blog here and here about the ongoing journey that both I and predlet 2.0 have started on with SouthCoast CKD
One of the interesting and enjoyable things about CKD is that whilst the moves and exercises are combat related it is not a competitive sport but about self improvement and dedication. It is as much about the mind and awareness as it is about the ability to punch and kick. As the founder Grandmaster Choi is Korean all the moves and instructions are in that language. I have never been great at learning languages for conversation, but I can apply myself to learn individual words and phrases. It is particularly good that these words and phrases then map to physical space so they work well with my visual and physical memory more than my verbal linguistic parts of my brain. It is this visual memory and use of space that fits with my interest and work in Virtual Worlds. It was also why I started training before CKD using my Xbox Kinect and the #UFC trainer. Shadow punching and kicking with an avatar but sensed and counted by the Kinect sensor got me onto this path.
This years #ufc #kinect (not including #ckd sessions)
Every couple of months in CKD we get to attend a grading to level up on the belt we are wearing (we have one this weekend). Once levelled up then the techniques you learn increase. Each of these techniques have a Korean phrase with them and in attending the classes you start to pick up what they are. As part of the grading you get tested on your Korean phrases too. It is not essential to learn them all but I have found it very helpful and an interesting exercise to try and learn something completely new not tech related for a change.
However I was sitting looking at the lists of words, I have about 100 (even though my belt is a subset of those) and thinking whats the best way to get these in my head. That evening I was watching a recorded BBC Click and along came Quizlet in the web roundup from @katerussell (thank you Kate!).
This simple little web site lets you make word pairs that it then forms into good old fashioned flash cards. These you can then read to yes yourself on, in this case choosing either korean to english or vice versa. It also create all sorts of other tests with the words, pairs games, multiple choose etc. It has been very useful for me so far and as it arrived in front of me serdipitously just as I was wondering what to do it made sense to follow it up.
Here is my attempt at the Choi Kwang Do terms sheet, or a cut down version. Its a start :)

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Playing with sand and water

This post is syndicated from Life at the Feeding Edge.

Posted on May 9, 2012 by epredator

I was really impressed when i saw this augmented/blended reality project doing the rounds. It mixes a physical substance, sand, as the input for the simulation. Being able to hold and use real things with real physics makes what then happens with the augmentation more immersive and real.

A Kinect is used to determine what is going on in the physical world and mapped with simulation software and calibrated projection to deliver it back into the world. i.e. no looking through a magic lens. It is project and there.
The project homepage has a lot more details about the simulation and also a soon to be released download page.
This isn’t a fake special effect its real and the data input, Sand and a kinect show the power of merging physical and digital and that we don’t just have to rely on keyboards and mice any more :)

Posted in AR, future | Leave a comment

Geekery in 8-bits and more

This post is syndicated from The lost outpost.

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Andy Piper

In which I get misty-eyed and nostalgic, geek out over electronics, and think about mobile and the cloud.

Then

On Saturday I went along to the Horizons 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum event, organised by Paul Squires and Leila Johnston and held at the BFI in London. The event ran on both days but I wasn’t able to stay on the Sunday, so I missed at least half of the fun!

Steven Goodwin reads Sinclair User

Although I’m full of nostalgia for the 8-bit era, I have to confess I never actually owned a Speccy or any Sinclair hardware. My friends did, but I was primarily an Acorn enthusiast and our first home computer was an Electron (although the first computer I used at primary school was a Commodore PET).

I fondly remember some of the hacks I did on/with/to the Electron, including soldering a pair of headphones into the motherboard to avoid annoying my parents with the music from various Superior Software titles :-)

Regardless of “allegiance”, Horizons was a really great day. Highlights for me included a fantastic history of computing by PJ Evans from The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (if you haven’t been there yet, you should visit!); Spectranet, an Ethernet adapter for the Spectrum which had me wanting one for no good excuse that I can come up with; and the mind-blowing live composition of a chip tune by Matt Westcott which I saw, but I struggled to comprehend. Matt’s ability to reverse engineer a tune in his head was remarkable.

Oh, and if you haven’t downloaded or bought MJ Hibbett‘s Hey Hey 16k yet, or at least streamed it, you really should.

aside: since Horizons was part of SciFi London, I tried to get Micro Men director Saul Metzstein to drop some hints about his upcoming S7 Dr Who episodes. All he would say was that the western episodes were filmed in Spain (knew that), and that the script for the Christmas episode hasn’t been written yet (didn’t know that).

Now

Components

After the event on Saturday evening, I found it a real struggle to avoid crazy, nostalgia-fuelled eBay purchases, but I did manage to resist! Instead, I resolved to finally get around to building the Fignition I’d picked up at the Hack to the Future event a couple of months ago.

For those who are not familiar with it, the Fignition is a credit card sized build-it-yourself 8-bit computer based around the ATMega chip (the same one used in the Arduino and Nanode Open Source hardware boards). It’s really a remarkable little device – I guess it took me about an hour to assemble and solder, although your mileage may vary. The build guide is excellent and very clear. After performing a couple of power on tests with and without the ICs inserted, it was time to connect up to the TV – and it worked first time. It boots into a simplified Forth environment, which was reminiscent of that BBC BASIC> prompt I am so familiar with from my childhood. The only real downside is that the keyboard – built from 8 clicker buttons – is a bit fiddly to get to grips with, but hey – I just assembled a complete 8-bit computer including video out and keyboard! It’s hard not to be excited.

The board I built was a RevD – the new RevE board has onboard audio in/out (get ready for some fun loading stuff from audio cassettes, again!), and is also slightly modified so that in principle, it is possible to add Arduino-footprint shields. That’s kind of cool, as it means that it might be possible to add a PS/2 keyboard or a network interface.

Ready to test!

What’s “the point” of something so simple, by today’s standards? Well, actually – the simplicity. I went from a bag of components, to a fully working computer in the palm of my hand – no surface-mount components – to a programmable device. It’s “primitive” by the standards of today’s machines, but it’s not that hard to understand how an 8-bit “brain” works, in comparison to the 32 or 64-bit mulitcore CPUs and GPUs in modern laptops and mobile phones. In my opinion, the Fignition, Arduino and Nanode fulfil an important role in helping youngsters to understand the basic principles of electronics and computing.

Next

Last night I headed along to the fantastic Mozilla offices in London.

Mozilla Space, London

The main LJC event was Simon Maple from IBM showing off the new WebSphere 8.5 Liberty Profile running on a Raspberry Pi. I’d hooked Simon up with Sukkin Pang recently so that he could get one of the smart enclosures he provides for the Pi. It was pretty cool to see a full Java app server running on such a small computer – actually almost exactly the same size as the Fignition, only considerably more powerful of course.

The whole talk was live streamed on Mozilla Air – but if you missed it, there’s a video available (complete with semi-professional heckling from yours truly!)

Boot 2 Gecko

What stole the evening for me, though, was two other glimpses of what lies ahead. First, Tom Banks from IBM Hursley came on stage after Simon and showed off the Liberty profile running on a mobile phone. Let me clarify – he was running Android 2.3 on a Nexus One (an “old” phone), running Ubuntu Linux as a virtual image inside of that, and WebSphere inside of that. Kind of mind-blowing! A proof-of-concept and arguably not very useful… not sure when I would want to put a full JEE app server in a phone… but extremely cool. Finally, @cyberdees let Tom and I have a play with Boot to Gecko – Mozilla’s new mobile play. B2G was something I’d heard about, but not touched. I have to say that even in an early form, it’s looking very slick, boots extremely fast – much more quickly than any Android or iOS device I’ve seen – and the device integration (GPS, camera, access to hardware settings, etc) was impressive.

With the Open Web as the platform, ubiquitous mobile devices, and increasingly sophisticated cloud-based backends to interact with, the future is looking pretty cool.

Tagged: #cloudfoundry, #sflzx, 2012, 30 years, 8bit, Arduino, Atmel AVR, audioboo, b2g, boot to gecko, cloud foundry, dr who, drwho, education, events, fignition, forth, Imperica, liberty, London, mobile, mozilla, nanode, National Museum of Computing, perini, photos, rickroll, Saul Metzstein, sci-fi london, sinclair, spectrum, WebSphere, websphere application server, zx spectrum

Posted in #cloudfoundry, #sflzx, 2012, 30 years, 8bit, Arduino, Atmel AVR, audioboo, b2g, blog, boot to gecko, cloud foundry, dr who, drwho, education, events, fignition, forth, Imperica, liberty, London, mobile, mozilla, nanode, National Museum of Computing, perini, Photos, rickroll, Saul Metzstein, sci-fi london, sinclair, spectrum, WebSphere, websphere application server, zx spectrum | Leave a comment

Unshaved yaks with MonoDevelop (and some pre-shaved ones, too)

This post is syndicated from The lost outpost.

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Andy Piper

This yak is ready to go!There’s a cool Cloud Foundry fan site called preshavedyak.com - and last week at SourceDevCon London, we challenged a bunch of developers to earn themselves a nice new preshavedyak hoodie by registering for a Cloud Foundry beta account and seeing how quickly they could get a “hello world” app up-and-running in the cloud. The event saw a bunch of new signups and some great discussions.

The “pre-shaved yak”, of course, is one aspect of what a polyglot open source PaaS is all about – delivering a ready-made, ready-to-host, application runtime environment. We shaved the yak, so you can just go ahead and get productive with your development tool of choice, be that vi or emacs, Notepad or TextMate, or Eclipse / a.n.other IDE. Grab a micro Cloud Foundry VM image and take your pre-shaved yak with you when you’re not connected! :-)

I actually started to write this post in order to comment on something that’s a bit more hairy that, though! I’ve been playing around a little bit with MonoDevelop and ASP.NET (for reasons that will become apparent during this week, I suspect). I’m using the current stable Mono (2.10) and MonoDevelop (2.8) packages on Lion, and they seem to work well. I’ve also recently been learning about Sinatra, the lightweight web framework for Ruby, and one of the node.js equivalents called Express. It turns out that the .NET world has a bunch of Sinatra-wannabes, the most popular of which appears to be Nancy (see what they did there…? dive into the world of Sinatra-themed name-related web frameworks…!).

Nancy’s site recommends installation via NuGet, which is evidently really well integrated into Visual Studio (NuGet is the equivalent of gem in Ruby, or npm in node.js). Unfortunately there’s no MonoDevelop equivalent. Here’s where the yak shaving started! The NuGet FAQ claims that the command line NuGet.exe will run and can be compiled under Mono, but in my experience, that’s not quite true – I could not get the source to compile in MonoDevelop on OS X. I grabbed the pre-compiled version and followed the instruction to get it to update itself (basically you just run it, and it bootstraps and downloads the latest available)… that went fine, but after that, it would no longer work and produced a huge stack trace.

So here, after getting most of a yak’s fleece all over me, is the secret. The prebuilt NuGet.exe will work under Mono on OS X, but it does require a Windows .NET 4.0 DLL (Microsoft.Build.dll) to be in the same directory / locatable in the path – I grabbed mine from my Windows VM install. It also requires that you tell Mono to present a v4.0 runtime. So I whipped up a tiny script to avoid having to type a bunch of paths and switches each time.

Further results of this recent dalliance in .NET land will be coming soon…

Tagged: #cloudfoundry, .NET Framework, cloud foundry, express, Mono, MonoDevelop, nancy, nuget, preshavedyak, ruby, Sinatra, yak, yak shaving

Posted in #cloudfoundry, .NET Framework, blog, cloud foundry, express, Mono, MonoDevelop, nancy, nuget, preshavedyak, ruby, Sinatra, yak, yak shaving | Leave a comment

Come to OggCamp 12

This post is syndicated from Words and pictures.

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Tony

That’s right, the biggest and best free software event in the UK is back! OggCamp 12 is happening on the 18th & 19th August at the Art & Design Academy in Liverpool. I’m looking forward to going back to Liverpool and the venue this time around sounds absolutely amazing. The tickets are free (again!) and available from the OggCamp website. There are also details of the official hotel, social events and parties on the website.

OggCamp is an unconference, which means the people who come along determine what happens. The event is aimed at anyone with an interest in technology, creating and sharing. It’s a bit chaotic and a bit random but always a lot of fun. Last year there were people juggling with fire, people soldering circuit boards and some 3D printing going on.

There were also a lot of talks, on a range of subjects. As with last year, there will be a scheduled programme of speakers on the main stage and other rooms available for volunteered talks. I don’t know who is on the schedule yet, but I know there’s a lot of effort going in to finding some great speakers.

I’m not involved in organising this year’s event, having decided to concentrate on my wedding photography business, but I know it’s in safe hands with the rest of the team. And I’m going to do my best to be there. Last year, tickets were snapped up very quickly, so get one while you can!

Posted in FLOSS, Ubuntu | Leave a comment

Added to my playground: Professor Green – Instagram Tour pics

This post is syndicated from Syd Lawrence.

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Syd Lawrence

Added to my playground: Professor Green – Instagram Tour pics:

I just added a new project to my playground: Professor Green – Instagram Tour pics

Posted in syddev | Leave a comment