Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Robert’s web joins the long list of TV shows built around web based content. However this one is more a combination of Know your meme, Inst msgs and the digg reel. Got to say its certainly a lot more funny that Rude Tube and a lot more topical that the digg reel. Not quite up to the level of Rocketboom when it was still popular but it certainly works for a mainstream tv show.
I’ve been doing lots of research into dreams and sleeping and I just wanted to share this nugget of information.
Why is it So Hard to Wake Up in the Morning?
Your clock is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms. But, says Jean Matheson, a sleep-disorders specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, these preset natural rhythms often don’t align with daily realities—work or school start times cannot be adjusted to fit a person’s sleep schedule. People who have trouble crawling out of bed probably have an inner clock set to late wake-up and sleep times, a condition known as phase delay.
It is possible to adjust your phase-delayed body clock, Matheson says, but at a price: No sleeping in on the weekends. “When people sleep late on weekends, they revert to their natural phase-delayed rhythm,” she explains. This makes it harder to wake up early on weekdays. You can train yourself to wake up earlier, Matheson says, by setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier each day (and heeding its call).
When I was younger, I use to be able to cycle my body clock on the weekend. So I would sleep in late on the weekends but wake up early on weekdays. Now I’m older, I’ve finally come to the realisation that I can’t do it no longer.
Steve Jobs’ work area…Not quite what what I expected to be honest…
You’d expect an empty black slate, cold aluminum, and lighting like an Apple Store, if blindly guessing what Steve Jobs’ home workspace looked like. The reality is, of course, much more human, lived-in, and interesting.
Google Docs are now editable on Android and iOS devices. This means I can finally go a head with my plans for a special niche type of service.
Paypal unveil Micropayments at 5% per 5cents. No idea how much that will be in pound but it doesn’t sound too bad. Of course Facebook have already signed up hoping to get some virtual good action
Escape Magazine seems to have almost no history or mention. There’s my blog post written in April this year and the magforum which has this reference.
Short-lived title from Maxim publisher Dennis aiming to explore the World-Wide Web. The first issue was withdrawn for legal reasons. Jennifer Aniston was on the cover.
Obayifo left a comment he had issue one, the one which was withdrawn. It must be worth a lot of money now? I could really do with issue one to complete my collection but then again I am selling my collection, if anyones interested?
Once again, I really do think Escape was a head of its time. It was .net magazine crossed with loaded or maxim. Its slant towards Internet culture was great. Yes it was a men’s magazine but beyond the front cover it had some very interesting articles. For example in issue 2 beyond the half naked cover of Sandra Bullock you had,
Ok maybe thats not the best advert for the magazine… *smile*
Someone did point me to den of geek which I have to say is not quite as punchy as Escape’s writing staff but its not a bad substitute.
Now time to make a start on the rave flyers…
Werewolf: A simple game of strategy and deception, played by a large group of people. The game is all about making accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, and social engineering.
What is there not to like?
For the last time this year, the chapter will be getting together to play the much enjoyed game of werewolf. This time the venue is changed to the place for digital people, Madlab in the northern quarter.
If you’ve never played before, I swear you will enjoy it. Its not one of those boring card or board games, werewolf is like poker but the cards and chips were eaten by a werewolf.
This will also be a great place to get some practice in before BarCampManchester4 which is that Saturday.
There will also be a surprise announcement on the night from myself, as I’ve been developing something which might be of interest to werewolf players across the nation.
The chapter will be back in the new year with more events… best way to stay tuned is signing up to the official facebook group for the Manchester Werewolf chapter.
Generally the Wittertainment Code of Conduct is….
I’m in agreement with some of these, Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode have certainly put the cat out between the pigeons.
There is loads more I could personally add but this list isn’t bad at all. Now which cinema chain’s going to adopt these rules? Don’t all rush at once…
Inception has been the most pirated movie on Bittorrent for the last month now. 4, 3, 2, 1 week(s) ago. And its had some very strong challengers from Scott Pilgrim, The social network and Wall street: Money never sleeps.
I did notice that when the HD version of Inception did hit the scene, the pirate bay was overloaded for a good few hours.
I’m sure the chief’s hollywood are cursing the scene for being so well organized and getting a hd rip out before they could get the retail DVD out. I’ve personally had my Inception Blu-ray/DVD/itunes (Triple Play) on pre-order for about 2 months now. I’m sure when Amazon do send it out, it will sit on my DVD rack with great prominence (my first blu-ray). Now I need to get myself a inception movie poster because they are great.
Also great to see Inception is still in position 4 of IMDB’s top 250 of all time right behind Godfather part 2.
So finally we did it, yes the geeks talked sexy at Madlab. @smanthabail, @hwayoung and myself have been planning this series of talks for a while now and after the last change of dates we managed to get over 30 people to sign up to the 1st in a series of talks. Although we did so many signing up, about 20 turned up on the night but to be fair, we all had a great time. We kicked off at 19:30 with loads of geeky cocktails nicely provided by @MadlabUK. My favorate has to be Sex on the geek, which packed quite a punch.
To start we got everyone to write down some geek stereotypes which we then later read out, twittered and dispelled after the break. Here’s some of the stereotypes…
We broke down every stereotype with some evidence for each one. After the break, we started running through some of the rubbish we’ve collected from the main stream press on geeks. Things such as 10 reasons why woman love geeks and my personal favorite 10 real reasons why geeks make better lovers. All before descending down into the pits of the internet with tron style sex, erotic falconry and a live demonstration of chatroulette and the all new adult themed citizenx.
End of the session, I think everyone really enjoyed it but there was a feeling we can or could go much further that even we had imagined. Because of this we are going to juggle things around a little and see if we can go a little further a bit earlier that expected. I’d highly recommend you come to the next one (sometime in Jan/Feb 2011), but it will be much more serious that the last one. I expect number 3 will be much more fun and a lot more erotic.
Continue reading “Geeks talks sexy: What does sex have to do with geeks?“
My lovely hypnotherapist, sent me a clipping from the Metro the other day. Its was a clipping about the ability to record your own dreams.
Although I saw this general thought in a post my boss sent me a while ago, it was good to read something similar in the mainstream press.
I’ve included the text for those who can’t be bothered to read the image.
A real hope of recording our dreams
Dreams could one day be recorded electronically, allowing them to be interpreted, scientists say. Experiments in which volunteers had electrodes surgically implanted deep inside their brains had already allowed researchers to ‘read’ people’s minds, said Dr Moran Cerf. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the development of a dream recorder, he added. ‘We would like to read people’s dreams,’ Dr Cerf said. ‘It would be wonderful to read people’s minds when they cannot communicate, such as people in comas.’
In tests on 12 epilepsy patients, electrodes recorded the activity of neurones in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe, which plays a major role in human memory and retention. The volunteers were shown more than 100 familiar images, such as Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, on a screen. From these, pictures that had triggered responsive neurons in different parts of the subjects’ MTLs were selected.
The patients were then shown two of these images superimposed and told to think about one of them, while the scientists ran the neuron patterns through a decoder. When the decoded information was fed back on to the superimposed images, the one whose neuron was firing more quickly was enhanced, while the other faded.
By watching this online feedback, more than two-thirds of subjects were able to make their targeted image completely visible and entirely eliminate the other picture. By observing which brain cells lit up and when, Dr Cerf and his US colleagues, Christof Koch and Itzhak Fried, said they were in effect able ‘read the subjects’ minds’. The study is published in the journal Nature.
Once again, I really need to get mydreamscape up and running…
Doc Searls writes about intelligence on his blog. But he talks about sleep too…
Smart people SLEEP LATE yells the headline of this opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press. It begins,
Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQs (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with lower IQs usually retire to bed sooner after nightfall.
After that Doc Searls launches into a discussion about what is IQ and how silly the whole notion of a IQ really is… But what got me was the idea of sleeping late and waking up late.
Since #mybrushwithdeath, back in May/June I’ve been changing my lifestyle around. One of those changes is to do with my time I go to bed. Before I would generally go to bed about 2-3am and wake up about 10am on a week day and on a weekend sometimes go to bed about 9am and wake up about 2pm. Yeah quite shocking… But now I’m going to bed about 12am and getting up about 9am everyday (even weekends).
However things are starting slip, not purposely. Although I’m sticking to the new routine, I’m finding once again that I’m much more productive late evening and at night. I don’t know why, I just am.
I got a feeling I’m fighting nature/biology on this one.
Hacked kinect brings futuristic user interface Found via Tdobson on twitter,
Microsoft’s Kinect is a marvelous piece of technology. However with Microsoft trying to lock it with only the Xbox while there could be several amazing uses for it, Adafruit announced a bounty for anyone who develop an opensource driver for it.
Hector Martin developed the driver and won the bounty. He also released the driver as libfreenect. Now we have the first application which use libfreenect to use Kinect as an input device.
Interesting stuffs await!
Amazing!!! Kudos to the hackers, I can’t wait to hear what’s next…
James (my savvy neighbor) said mydreamscape is like the Flashforward Mosaic project. And he’s not far wrong. I’ve been calling it the flickr for dreams but the Dream Mosaic project seems like a better description (if you seen Flashforward of course)
So after all the thinking about what to use to get mydreamscape up and running, I think I’ve finally come to a decision.
( WordPress + Buddypress ) + digress = mydreamscape.com
I tried out elgg but felt it wasn’t developed enough for what I trying to do. So I’m using WordPress 3.01 as the base install, buddypress which adds a social networking system on top of wordpress then digress as the annotation technology. I had planned to use the W3C’s Annotea Server but it looks like a real pain to setup and it would require a series of browser plugins to use effectively. This might not be so bad, but its off putting for most people and frankly with javascript and html you can achieve quite a bit. Enough to be better that comments but not so much its becomes academic.
Right now I’m struggling with the wordpress themes because buddypress and digress each have there bits and its a matter of getting them to work together in one single theme. Once I got that going I’ll be going signing up a couple of alpha users. If your interested in the alpha, drop me a email.
Most people know how much I really hate Facebook, although in the last few months I’ve slightly warmed to it for certain things.
Recently I scanned all my old negatives into jpgs, and I’m not sure what to do with them?
Normally I would upload them to Flickr.com like most of my photos but to be honest I only upload the best of my shots to flickr.com (even though I have a pro account and I have done for the last 4+ years). It just didn’t make sense to upload the old crusty scanned pictures to flickr.com. So I had a think and decided that the best place to publicly put them is on Facebook. Yes the EULA still really bugs me and It probably means Facebook now owns my photos but heck, there so old and crusty, that I don’t really care. Better online somewhere that lost in negative form forever?
On the upside, most of the photos are from when I was in school, so most of the people in the photos will be on facebook too. This means they can tag the photos to death and write stupid comments which make youtube comments look like degree essays in comparison. Oh and of course there will be the crazy (its taking over the web like crazy) "I like this" button for those who can’t be bother to say anything meaningful… (Geez I’m so snotty about facebook, I should really stop being so darn negative about it)
I also reckon theres roughly about 300 of them once you take out some of the duplicates (I did the scanning over a few days and didn’t really do a good job of splitting the done and to do piles, so shoot me). No one really wants to see my photostream full of old crusty photos for almost 300 photos… Heck not even I want to see that. So I’ll use facebook as I’ve been using it previously, a massive dumping ground for publicly available data. I’ve marked the photos as public, so it will be interesting to see what that means in the great scheme of things.
I’m aware there is some facebook event later today but I doubt its anything which will change my view on facebook or using it.
So old friends of mine, do check out the tip of the iceberg collection i’ve uploaded so far under school days (I was tempted to write skool daze but I don’t want to encourage the super lameness which comes with facebook stuff). I’ll upload the rest once Facebook stops telling me to update my flash player or I can be bothered to deal with the crappy html uploader.
Oh yeah I’m aware that this does get fed into facebook via rss. So no offense meant to my lovely facebook friends… Actually screw it. Isn’t all this so AOL 2.0???? What did you all think about me making it public instead of just my little network? Whooo the public Internet is so scary 🙂
In a recent Techgrumps podcast we ripped into the notion of Apple including an App Store in the next release of OSX Lion. This is from the Apple…
We took our best thinking from Mac OS X and brought it to the iPhone. Then we took our best thinking from the iPhone and brought it to iPad. And now we’re bringing it all back to the Mac with our eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system.
When I first heard about the App store I laughed it off thinking well you know what Ubuntu has a app store as such (repository) but the major difference is in the way they are run.
Ubuntu’s repository is a pretty straight forward open democratic place and if you don’t like it, you can remove there repository and put in your own. I have for example in my app store (as such) ubuntu’s ppa, canonical partners, covergloobus, gloobuspreview, handbreak snapshots, jessyink, ubuntu desktop, gwibber daily, xbmc, dropbox, getdeb and opera ppa’s. This is very similar to the approach Boxee has done with its own repository. So ultimately I choose what I want and where I get it from. However, the question is, will the Apple OSX app store also follow this route or will the paranoid Apple force developers to go through Apple’s own process to get apps into the app store?
Something tells me the answer is very obvious…