I don’t blog as a profession, the fact that I do has never gotten me an interview; for the mostpart not even so much as an interested ‘hmm’ from people I want a job – or to do buisness with.
This is I suppose part of the reasoning behind the eclectic nature of this blog, I post about various things, I’ve gone off on tangents – I’ve even made innocent remarks that have led to extremely abusive comments that resulted in police enquiries. Like most bloggers I imagine, I actually dislike any sort of negativity toward my blogging – its a hobby for me, not a lifestyle choice; I doubt it would be any different for a ‘pro’; but I like to at least selfishly believe that what I do here, is valuable to some of you who visit.
People often don’t realise the work thats involved in keeping an active blog even remotely interesting: if all your going to talk about is the meanderings of your inner world, you might end up developing a following after a very long time, but the effort-value trade off to me, and the whole revealing personal details, they’re not my style. This might explain, if you ever wondered why I post those articles from ezinearticles.com every so often. Apart from the obvious ploy to get people to click on the banner advert (which I make no bones about, they’re a good host, I use them and I get something if you click on the link and use their service. seems fair to me), I usually do it to keep an active ‘conversation’ going. Theres nothing worse than a silent blog!
Without speaking for other bloggers, when I make a post I generally try to research the subject, at least enough so I know enough about the subject that I can carry a short conversation about it. Mainly because, perhaps, thats how I like to write – as if I’m having a conversation with you; only inexplicably you’re letting me do all the talking.
If you blog as a hobby, why not post a link in the comments?
I went to the Dublin Twestival (@dubwestival on twitter) last night. It’s described as a ‘festival’ of twitterers to meet, drink and chat, and to give to charity.
In fairness ‘festival’ is a bit of a stretch, the Dublin Twestival was hilarious for the pure fact that me and Phil were quite possibly the youngest people at the event, of about 120+ and had somewhat of a 30-40s singles club vibe for a while.
That said, it was good fun! Free drinks were definitely had, while they were available. It was all for a good cause, the water charity, so a couple of raffles were held…..I won twice!!! how awesome is that?!
We spent most the night just joking about how we were the youngest there, talking geek, and how the crowed seemed much more ‘normal’ than we expected.
I won a ‘vibrating directors chair’ and a normal wooden directors chair – carrying them home, in addition to my bag which was already overladen with two laptops (my new laptop was delivered to work a couple of hours earlier), after having a few drinks, was…interesting!
It was only a matter of time that someone would hack together a system to link up a Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA) by OCZ to make a pretty simulation of a mind controlling the input of a computer program.
This is a video of mind-control of the Besmoke fluid simulation project.
With a combination of software and hardware, the Wiremap project aims to create 3D wiremaps in real 3D space using materials and tools as simple as projectors and thread.
The Future of Computing is Google – Should We Be Worried? By Jonathan Huie
I didn’t just say that Google is the future of the Internet – that is scary enough – and virtually true today. I said, The Future of COMPUTING.
Google has always been a gentle giant – unlike the bravado Microsoft. No rantings and ravings – no pronouncement that “our way is best,” or “we know what is good for you.” No, Google’s way is to welcome open standards and actively promote their competition. For example, their tool to move a blog off their (free) Blogger service is fully as complete and usable as their their tool to transfer a blog onto Blogger. Try getting your data out of a Microsoft product such as Outlook or Hotmail.
Perhaps Google has learned from Microsoft’s mistakes. Gentle wins in the long run. This is really good for Google, but is it good for the rest of us. Because Google take such great pains to offend no one, because it is so capable, and because it now has tremendous momentum, Google is taking over more of the world of technology every day.
Google completely dominates my own professional life as an author and blogger to an extent that is more than a little concerning. Google search and Gmail are the least of it. My blogs are on Blogger, but I could use another service. It’s not even Picasa, or YouTube, or FeedBurner.
AdSense/AdWords – that’s the stranglehold. Google is essentially the only channel for a small business to either advertise of receive advertising revenue on a website or blog. Yahoo and others aren’t even on the radar. If I had to, I could use Yahoo’s search engine, but if I lost AdSense/AdWords, 80% of my professional activity would vaporize.
In its own gentle giant kind of way, Google is now creeping up on computing and enterprise information sharing. Shared calendars and shared documents for starters – moving quickly toward a complete collaborative computing environment. Just watch – for most users, personal and corporate, the only local software will be a browser, perhaps Google’s Chrome. Google’s individual and collaborative on-line productivity and authoring applications will dominate for all but the most demanding users.
Should we be worried? Perhaps not, but don’t become too complacent.
Jonathan Lockwood Huie is an author of self-awareness books. He has been dubbed “The Philosopher of Happiness” by those closest to him, in recognition of his on-going commitment to seeing Joy in all of life.
** “Today is your day to dance lightly with life. It really is.” – jonathan lockwood huie**
SmartGate is an electronic learning game, that aims to teach and measure the performance of the players. It is fun and engaging, whilst also teaching the player and improving maths skills.
The game focuses on mathematics, each level with their own varying degrees of perceived difficulty. The player should never presented with precisely the same set of puzzles or puzzle types, thus giving the game a high replay value.
The project was completed on the Microsoft XNA framework, using the XNA game studio software; as such the programming language used was C# and where necessary XML.
Microsoft research are developing Kodu (previously Boku), a visual games programming environment.
Kodu is a programming environment which is designed to be accessible by children and adults alike, where you can create games on the Xbox using just the controller.
The core of the Kodu project is the programming user interface. The language is simple and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions. Conditions are evaluated simultaneously.
Although Kodu is aimed at developing a programming environment for games programming, I think the project presents great promise for human-computer-interaction. Thirty years with computers has given us many technological achievments: wireless communication, gigahertz processors, almost inexaustable amounts of storage, but one thing computer technology has left by the way side is human interface. The interface between the computer and humans is vital, its the way we interact with a device which defines its importance – I personally believe this is why the Apple iPhone is so incredibly popular, it got the human-computer-interface just right. I’d go so far to say even that above all other technologies today, interfaces are where we are going to see the most progress and the most profound changes in our lives.
I believe that this is the way of the future, its projects like this where programming will become mainstream, and with our modern world the way it is – and unlikely to change anytime soon, everyone will at some point want to or be required to do some programming in the future. Text based syntax and grammar restrictive languages such as C++, Java etc require a wealth of knowledge before you can concieve of working with code.
If we could all move to a visual programming medium, where intuition and perception are the rules of the game, computer programming could definitely become a mainstream activity.
Background image of a snarling wolf, starburst background behind it.
Two lines of text, one at the top and one at the bottom
????
PROFIT!!
So I created an object-oriented PHP script which you can use to customise your own Courage Wolf images for… profit? or forums, blogs and/or random internet stuff -whichever comes first.
Its just a basic GD script using PHP, but I needed to brush up on my PHP skills.
The Twestival is a global twitter community initiative to get twitterers to meet face to face and to donate to charity.
The Dublin Twestival will be held at 6pm on Thursday 12th February 2009 at the Sycamore Club which has a max capacity of 250 people and free WIFI ‘natch.
The official Dublin Twestival blog mentions that there is no dress code, but you must be an active Twitter user.
Matt Denton on the hexapodrobot forums has a thread about his hexabot robotic CNC router. Its a crazy cool invention, something you’d expect from a science fiction film.
In the video below, you can see the robot carefully carving out a 3D face from some high density foam.
Understandably, the resolution is pretty low at approx 7-8bit, according to Matt. I think though that the ability to move your CNC routing machine around the shop, scaring the bejeesus out of everyone and everything it comes into contact with, its well worth it.
I’m not sure of the actual practical applications of a mobile CNC machining robot, but I’m sure there is one, if only for the creepy cool way it backs away from whatever its just made!
Somehow I’ve managed to avoid most of the weather that Ireland has been experiencing recently, whether by shere bone idle laziness or because we’re just that bit closer to the coast, snow around here has been little more than a light dusting. That was until today, that is!
The Awesomer linked me onto this blog about (conceptual) open source phone development. It seems to be a blog dedicated to conceptuals of how an opensource/mozilla phone would look and operate, in association with Mozilla’s concept series.
The Mozilla Phone is an experiment in the open-source development of a conceptual phone. Put in motion by Aza Raskin of Mozilla Labs as part of its Concept Series, the project is led by Billy May as well as the combined insight of all those with an idea and a keyboard (and maybe a Wacom). While some of the problems will deal with industrial design, a great deal of the focus will be put on physical interface issues and basic user-phone interaction.
The Singularity University is a cutting edge university, with a multi-dicipline facaulty and curriculum, its possibly the best example of the ultimate learning environment. An environment where the smartest and most passionate people from around the world join to learn from some of the best minds on various subjects.
The Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanitys grand challenges.
I’d love the oportunity to be a student at Singularity-U, but the entrance requirements are necessarily strict, with only 30 students permitted in the first year and 120 the year after.
If your interested in making the world a better place, and working with some of the brightest minds of our age, you might consider the [Singularity University]
Evil Mad Scientist labs, one of the most awesomely named electronics outfits out there, has posted an article about the single sided circuit board they made.
For our circuit, we decided to make an LED chaser that would light up LEDs in sequence along the length of the Mobius strip. To do this we chose a smallish AVR microcontroller, the ATtiny2313, which is a 20-pin device with 17 available output pins. With each output we drive a single red LED, and the whole thing can be powered by a 3V type CR2032 lithium coin cell.
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