March 2011 – Cubicgarden.com…

Best review of Color.com

You can read the whole thing on mike3k’s posterous profile. But others have joined the game of describe the color app.

…And all through it all you are left wondering. Are those screams you hear in the background? 40 million screams each crying out “play play”, “give give”, “stay stay”. As you tap tap, progressing further the game these sounds continue, louder louder. They become more distinct, more fervent. Rattle rattle. A counter point to real progress, an anti-sound. A sound of unknowing. Sizzle sizzle. Of misunderstanding. Fizzle fizzle. Perhaps you are playing it wrong. Tittle tittle. Perhaps it is you who is wrong. Tattle tattle.
Then you realize that the screams are what brought you here. Not to the room with the clock, but the game itself. Scratch scratch. The screams are coming from outside of the game, instead of from in. Thump thump. Luring you within. Bash, bash. You thought this was only a simple MMPRLMG game, but now it is invading your LIFE. Crash crash. The screams are getting closer closer. Will this be a real life monster? A colossal IPO beast made flesh? Its large marketing arm will reach reach, its terrible eyes will glower glower. Do you have the requisite levels of willpower? There is only one thing to do: RUN. Faster Faster. How did all of this become such a disaster?

Yesterday the review was removed from the Apple App Store – I assume the developers were upset the review got more attention than the color app?

Getting people together is what I do

I seem to be a connector…

I have identified there is something in me which gets excited about getting people together. Its almost like my brain releases extra dopamine at the notion of getting people together.

Recently I’ve been made the social committee chair for my flats (islington wharf). Well I kind of made myself it really. But so far we’ve had one drinking meeting and 2 dinners (last friday dining club). The last one was just last Friday and it was good fun for everyone. 12 strangers around a dinner table made for 8 in the northern quarter on Friday night.

On the way back on Friday night, I walked home with Brian and in my slightly drunken (well only really slightly tipsy) state started to talk about my role in the islington wharf community.

I felt my role was as a connector.

When I first moved to London, I knew no one and lived out in deepest south London (Thornton Heath) with my cousins and aunt. After about 2 years while at college at Ravensbourne Design College, I started to get to know more people via my jobs in Central London and of course the college its self. But it wasn’t till about 3 years in London that things really started happening.

I attended in the early days meetups across London and had so-so success with them (best one was when I met Lucas, who I’m still friends with today). Then I attended a few blogger meetups including one where I met lovely people such as Suw Anderson-Charman. Anyway at some point I attended a geekdinner and was intrigued by the simplicity of it. So when I arranged with Tim O’reilly to come to the BBC, it made sense to throw a geekdinner for him too. At that point was my first go at social organization. The rest is pretty much history but you can read a good account of the geekdinners events in over 5 years of blog entries [1][2][3][4].

During the geekdinners I got mixed up with BarCamp via Ben Metcalfe. Once again you can read all about those in blog entries over the years [1][2]. I built a large body of friends who I could go out with almost any time because at least one or so of them would be out doing something at some point during the week.

But then of course I moved to Manchester.

I moved early which meant I didn’t really know many people, in actual fact I only got to know people who had come to previous barcamps I had run. Then I got to know friends of friends, not many but a few. But generally I was alone like I was in London when I first moved there.

Now I feel after almost 4 years in Manchester and its been a struggle I grant you that but I think finally its starting to click…

Theres something in me which kind of thrives on building communities and connecting people.

When I moved in to Islington Wharf, there was a promise of a community and to be fair there was something but I can hardly call it a community. So rather that sit there and moan about it, something in me grabs the opportunity to make things better for myself and everyone else whos not willing to do something about it. My first party which was attended by only a few people but I did knock on every single door on my level and the level above and below. Most people haven’t even knocked on there neighbors door!

Later I arranged a halloween party which was a lot more successful and afterwards kicked off a whole range of parties and friendships. Another idea later was to start a last Friday dining club. Someone elses idea but executed by myself… I’m also flirting with the idea of setting up a cinema club but to be fair I’m putting it on hold since someones already started one. I got a feeling Ben might need some help with it and I’m not certain of the format (but I’ll reserve comment till I go along).

So what is it about me? I just don’t know… But I won’t stop and I’ll be doing what others won’t.

Summer’s sci-fi movies

There is no doubt this years summer looks pretty amazing for movies. Specially Sci-Fi movies…

The ones I’m excited about include…

Attack the Block – I first thought this was a noel clarke film but it looks equally great
Super 8 – Which seems to be a bit like Attack the block but with younger kids
Cowboy and Aliens – When I heard the title I laughed too, but the trailer was something else
Xmen first class – I’m glad there rebooting this series, it really needed it
Sucker punch – Hey a bit of fun, dispel all believe
Source Code – Looks like Twelve monkeys but maybe not so well thought out
~~Limitless~~ ~~– Seen and to be fair, I’m still a bit shrugging my shoulders about it~~

The effect of the Orange Wednesday ecosystem

There is something really interesting going on in the movie industry… I can’t put my finger on it but something interesting is going on…

In America everyone is going nuts over Groupon to starting to offering movie tickets at a discount. I thought ok, so what, nothing new? We’ve had Orange Wednesday for years and thats has had a massive effect on the industry.

When I say massive I mean, Orange Wednesdays discount code has become the currency for discounts all over Wednesday. Pizza Express now have a 2 for 1 pizza Wednesday. And more locally theres quite a bit of discount on transport tickets and other restaurants for Orange Wednesday customers.

On top of this… The movie industry is coming around to this notion and have starting allowing films to be released on Wednesday. (remember the cinema week use to start Thursday with previews and Friday for the main day). For example Limitless

But the interesting part is that although the numbers through the doors are better on a Wednesday due to the discounts, the kind of people who are going are less of the serious film lovers and more of the general public (I would suggest). General public are great for sales but to be honest they tend not to be fanatical about films and therefor (I would once again suggest) are less likely to come back for another viewing or tell there friends. So overall the film industry will have to fight even harder to keep up the profits they have. They really think piracy is the problem but could it be the cinemas which are the silent killers or the last nail in there own coffins? Its a bit like Apple and Music industry with itunes.

The music industry was so hell bent on catching the music pirates and stopping computers from doing what there great at doing (copying), that Apple slipped in with pandora’s box which looked great to them all. What they didn’t know till later was that pandora’s box (or itunes as its better known), meant giving Apple a massive slice of the music industry… In the same way, the movie industry moving release dates to benefit the cinemas is not such a good move for themselves. (At least the groupon deal doesn’t include shifting the release dates, yet!)

Instead of fighting new technologies, they need to embrace it before someone else close by (like the cinema chains or a mobile phone operator) makes them irrelevant.

The irony is Orange’s cinema adverts are all about the deconstruction of films through humor and putting a mobile phone in where its not really wanted. Humor indeed but for whom?

Of course this is just my thoughts or suggestions and not the truth, you may disagree… But if you do please add a comment. I could be barking up the wrong tree but something is certainly going on…

Northern Quarter Street Party

Coming to Edge Street on the 29th April 2011, a 1940s-style street party celebrating the Northern Quarter. Featuring bunting, cake, punch and so much more.

Northern Quarter Street Party wants YOU! There’s lots of ways to get involved. Want to set up a stall? Bake a cake? Make some bunting? Have an idea about something you’d like to do or see? We want to hear from you!

Follow us on twitter: @NQStreetParty

Get involved here: nqstreetparty@gmail.com

An idea which came out of Social Media Cafe Manchesterlast month was the Northern Quarter street party, an idea of Carole Keating. I was tempted to get involved but thought better of it because I don’t fancy the stress of the event specially with only 1 month left.

I’ve been giving Carole my expertise in setting up barcamps with ultra very low budgets, and so somewhat getting involved but at much lower level that I’m use to.

Carole’s doing a great job but theres so much left to do and not a lot of time to do it in, so I’m seeing what the BBC can do to help. If that link up works, then I can be a little more involved.

Anyhow, I’m sure there will be lots more to say in the very near future.

Paramount goes with no DRM bittorrent distribution

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while but…

In a little over two months time, the long-awaited horror movie The Tunnel will receive its world premiere. Rather than a traditional theatrical release, the movie – which is set in abandoned real-life tunnels under Sydney, Australia – will make its debut online for free with BitTorrent. Simultaneously it will be released on physical DVD, to be distributed by Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures.

I almost fell off my chair when I heard the news that Paramount will be releasing the Tunnel for free on bit torrent with no DRM of any kind!

No matter what the film is like, Paramount and the guys behind the tunnel have basically won. A film which would have gone straight to DVD somewhere in a junk bin somewhere could just have been elevated to the most downloaded movie of May (maybe).

Someone in Paramount must have done the maths…

The movie budget was $135000 and to be honest any film will easily eat that for a worldwide publicity. On top of that, its a small risk. The copyright owners (the team who created the film keep the copyright and are licensing it to Paramount) have created something which looks like a cross between Blair witch project and Creep so its got limited mainstream appeal. In actual fact, it would have made more sense of films like FAQ: about time travel would have blown away everything else if they had choose to do release in the same way. I also wonder if the process can be popular enough to get stuff back into the cinemas? Bit like my experience of Donnie Darko.

Paramount gets a Kudos +1 from me…

Geek talk sexy part 3: LGBT stand proud

photocredit : bresc

After the overwhelming success of the last geeks talk sexy part 2, we planned to cover LGBT. But there was a certain amount of worry that we were not going to be able to give it the justice that it deserves, simply because neither me, Samantha or Hwayoung were lgbt. Even Simon who joined the team after part 1, was neither. So this was really shooting in the dark for a lot of us.

The fear grew over the coming weeks as the geeks talk sexy got retweeted around. Technicalfault gets a mention here for his crazy amount of retweeting. At some point the event ended up attached as the pre-bollox club event and on the official canal street facebook page. The fear was more about people overrun by people who were expecting a discussion about LGBT generally rather that in the context of geek culture, but we neither have feared it all worked out great and we had our most successful geeks talk sexy to date.

We started late but setup quickly while quite eager people turned up and started to chat. After a weird rearrangement of the tables (blame Samantha for her double rainbow idea) and a series of questions on the projector. We kicked off with me showing the BBC Three documentary from Dawn Porter goes Lesbian a while ago. While we put the finishing touches to everything you couldn’t help but laugh at some of the things Dawn was saying on the documentary. Its really interesting how attitudes have changed.

We started when our special guest for the evening Ben Light turned up.

At the start the crowd of almost 40 people (best turn out to date by a bit) were a little quiet as we explained like the last one, we want to frame the discussions around geek culture oppose to the wider society. So after the recap we kicked started everything by reading out what peoples answers were to the questions we asked at the very start. Unfortunately I put up a earlier presentation and so the questions weren’t exactly what I was thinking, but we did get a general answer to how do/have you meet partners? Generally it was the same as the male and female answers from part 2, which makes total sense. I was hoping for some slightly different answers but everyone was very sensible with the answers.

Then started a conversation about the term LGBT after admitting I had never heard the term before till a volleyball player told me the Manchester Jump team was LGBT. The debate is pretty much the same one that is on the wikipedia page for LGBT. Some said Gay was a better term and some said Queer was even better still.

After this we got on to the debate over Bisexual relationships. I stuck up a post from the Savage love which was pointed to by quite a few blogs I had seen while doing research. The notion that Bi-sexual people were confused or greedy was quickly crushed by many and the similarities between straight, gay, lesbian, bi, etc relationships were discussed in some detail. I threw in a couple of bombs here and there in the way of the Kinsley scale and Bisexual erasure but everyone was pretty much agreed on most subjects except dating profiles with spelling mistakes.

This cause quite a bit of heated discussion and I would have loved to let it continue but we were already running late and the break was rapidly approaching. Hey and who couldn’t resist the lovely cocktails which were available for a generous donation to madlab.

Pina Gaylada, L33t Lesbian, Manchester Trans tea and Bigrasm were the order of the day at the cocktail bar. While people tucked into there cocktails, we setup the 1 minute rants section. To be fair we didn’t have many of them but the lies and lack of english on profiles came up again. I had a good old rant back about people getting far too touchy about spelling. Before you knew it we were on to our special guest Ben Light.

Unforgeable we had some nasty technical problem. Ben used Apple keynote to do is presentation and so we had to use Samanaths MacBook to do the presentation. What followed were a ton of different problems related to the lack of Video memory (who ever says it just works with Apple devices is seriously deluded and should have witnessed the systematic errors Ben and Samantha had to deal with). Anyway in the end, we got it working by reducing the screen resolution down to 800×600 and bouncing back and forth on the PDF instead of the keynote.

Ben focused on LGBT characters in video gaming and it was a fascinating talk (don’t think I’ve ever seen him give a average talk!) Even with the technical difficulties, he was able to show some interesting examples of LGBT characters in popular video games. (I will link to the presentation once Ben posts it to me). The presentation spurred a ton of interesting questions but we had to cut them short because we were running about 40mins late by that point.

After Ben and the Q&A it was a matter of pointing people to common bar as usual. Where conversations continued deep into the night.

I’d like to publicly thank everyone who made it to the event and made it our most popular event to date. Special thanks to Ben Light for the look at the questionable role of LGBT characters in mainstream video games.

Part 4 is still being resolved but we’re certainly going to delve into the world of Poly relationships in geeks talk sexy part 4: the dynamics of relationships.

Enchantment or Social Engineering?

Guy Kawasaki was talking on Itconversation’s Tech Nation the other day about his new book enchantment.

The thing which got me going was something Guy said to Moria

The best way to thank someone once you done someone a favor is to say… No no, thank you and I know you would do the same for me some day…

When I heard this I instantly shouted "Thats social engineering!"

Now to be fair you wouldn’t really expect anything different from the former chief evangelist at Apple.

The question is where is the line?

This has come up again recently when I mentioned the game at geek talk sexy part 2. It looks like we may have a couple of pickup artists who are willing to talk to the crowd about why they social engineer women, in a couple of months.

It is interesting that the persona which pickup artists use is something somewhat close to enchanting. A mystery with small subsets of timely information about themselves.

Meet BBC North – 5th April

Myself on poster

Yes that is me before my bleed on the brain. Wow how scary did I look… Can’t imagine why they would want to use me to advertise BBC North?

Anyway things are going great at the BBC and we’re not far from moving into to Salford Quays. I got the chance to see the floor below where we are going to move to today and I was impressed. The space I thought would be like the broadcast centre or media centre in white city but it felt nothing like that. It actually felt very warm and cozy even with the huge amount of glass.

Can’t wait to get in to the space and make it ours.

Time is like the Temperature?

I’ve been thinking about some of the mystery of the mind, specially since I started my quest to explore ideas and memes with mydreamscape.org after my own bleed on the brain back in May 2010.

I started thinking temperature is quite similar to time?

Time is different for everyone, try getting people to tell the time without a clock
Temperature feels different for everyone
Time has a man made scale
Temperature has a man made scale
Time goes slow when your having fun
Temperature feels suitable (hot or cold) when your having fun
Everyone has a preferred temperature
Everyone has a preferred time
There are places in the universe we can’t really go due to temperature extremes
There are places in the universe we can’t really go due to time extremes

Ok maybe its not a perfect match… but you get the general gist…

When the buisness model gets in the way, its time to move on?

By now everyones seen the ravings about Twitter changing the developer API and telling developers not to build twitter clients.

In a statement issued today by Twitter on its official developer mailing list, the company informed third-party developers that they should no longer attempt to build conventional Twitter client applications. In a move to increase the “consistency” of the user experience, Twitter wants more control over how its service is presented to users in all contexts.

The announcement is a major blow to the third-party application developers who played a key role in popularizing Twitter’s service. More significantly, it demonstrates the vulnerability of building a business on top of a Web platform that is controlled by a single vendor. The situation highlights the importance of decentralization in building sustainable infrastructure for communication.

This I feel will have a massive chilling effect through out the developer community. Ideally people would move to status.net but I fear even this change isn’t enough to push people over and if the people won’t go the developers are unlikely to change focus to status.net and identi.ca.

I can’t quite link the two but in my mind there along the same lines. Cory Doctorow did a interview about why DRM is no friend of business. A very good interview which hits all the right points but theres something about twitter’s api change which is related. Maybe its about building a business model on shifting ground. If there business model and your business model don’t match or go in the same direction, maybe its time to move on?

Goodbye Kingswood warren

I do work for the most excellent BBC R&D and for the longest time, this was the home of BBC R&D, kingswood warren. When the BBC decided to shut it down and move all the researchers, engineers, etc elsewhere there was a massive backlash. I do understand why, I mean this was not just a location for R&D but also the spiritual home of R&D. Freeview, FreeviewHD, Freesat, Canvas (now youview), Dirac, BBC Redux, DAB, etc, etc came from here.

However things had to change… The notion of a R&D lab stuck over a hour away from the rest of the BBC in the middle of a super prime plot of land was never going to fly in 2010. I can’t tell you the amount of times I lost the way to Kingswood Warren!

Sort of emblematic Kingswood was of the shift in R&D as a whole towards much more public engagement I feel.

My Kindle Ecosystem

I pretty much take my Kindle most places and people keep asking me what I feel about it? I always say its great and of course I carry it around everywhere… (in actual fact it would be great if Amazon recognized the fans/ambassadors like myself)

Then they usually ask about the books… What book are you reading?

This is where I tend to divert from the normal kindle owner.

So how do I get news on to the Kindle? Well there seems to be a whole bunch of ways.

Calibre is your long lost friend
No matter what you do this is the first point of call for any ebook reader, even the ipad. It converts ebooks and with the recipes you can point it at almost any website and it will turn it into a ebook for reading on the device. One of my favorite recipes is the Google Reader recipe, turns my unread RSS subscriptions into a nice ebook. And to top it all off, Calibre can be setup to automatically send the ebook to the kindle. Of course I have this setup, so I never have to sync my kindle anymore. In actual fact I only need to plug it in once a month when the battery is low.
Instapaper is simply great
Instapaper most people know about but one of the new features is the ability to send to a Kindle as a kindle compatible .mobi file. No need to wait for Calibre. Plus it also has the option of sending only when there’s a certain amount of clipped content, so you don’t get lots of empty or single page ebooks. On top of that the Kindle treats them as periodicals so, it automatically archives old ones instead of clogging it up with old instapapers.
Klip me with chrome and soon others
Send to Kindle with Klip.me works exactly how you expect. The only thing is it currently only works on Chrome and Safari. They are working on a Firefox version but till then you can use the beta bookmarklet service which does the same thing but not so elegantly.
Email for Free
One of the things which Amazon don’t make very clear is the ability to send emails with attachments to Amazon and have them delivered for free over wifi. This of course totally displaces Amazon’s own conversion service, whispernet and if your like me, don’t really trust Amazon enough to give them access to everything on my kindle (see the whole 1984 issue), then you bought a wifi only kindle.
Your email address is what ever your kindle email is but with @free.kindle.com instead of @kindle.com. This is very handy for example I have sent things from my Evernote to the Kindle for further reading. Of course you have tell amazon which email address are valid, so you don’t get spam on your kindle.
Send to Kindle from Android
Nice little tool if you happen to for example get a tweet to a very interesting but lengthy post but can’t be bothered to read it on the small android screen. Usually I bookmark it using delicious, instapaper or readitlater but now I can go direct to the kindle which is handy.

The biggest problem with the kindle for me is simply once you read something in the google reader ebook its hard to find out who exactly wrote it. I keep meaning to modify the recipe include the blog titles. If I happen to be in a place with wifi, I can link to the kindle webbrowser but then I’m stuck again.

Ideally I would be able to send it to readitlater, instapaper or whatever. I though about using the tweet function but as I’ve discovered the tweets well pretty much useless. Don’t get me wrong it does what it says and its great if your reading a book but its no good for self published stuff.

Finally I don’t understand why but I can’t get my kindle to work with my HTC Desire mobile wifi hotspot (myfi). If I did I might be able to sort out some kind of solution but I can’t work out why…

Saying all this… I still love my kindle

Verifone throws its weight behind FUD

If you’ve not seen the video from Verifone about Jack Dorsey’s Square startup, its well worth watching if you can find it. There is a Parody which sums up everything we’re all thinking.

VeriFone’s business model has been side-swiped (pun intended), so they decided to use Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to counter this, and hope to drive their competition out of business. Remember, VeriFone is the one who makes, and gives away, the app to skim Credit Cards — and they’re talking about trust? VeriFone, go fuck yourself with a cactus. I’m sticking with Square, who won’t rip me off.

The weird part of this whole thing is Verifone creating a proof of concept application at sq-skim.com. Which raises the whole question about hacker ethics.

Verifone putting out a proof of concept app before telling square about the flaw… And making it available for anyone to download and mess with. This is bad form, and if they were not in the business of pushing there own solution (which is much bulker and no where near as elegant) they might have told Square about the flaw and pursued them to fix it.

Verifone are certainly running scared…

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