Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I always wondered why XBMC wasn’t available on Android, its been on iOS for a long while now. I assume its the different types of hardware which might have caused the massive delay?
Well its happening and today there was an announcement on the XBMC site with the above video to show its true.
Exciting time! Still waiting for a Nexus Q port 🙂
Armin Van Buuren… I always knew he was the nice guy of the Dj world and this just confirms it….
His thoughts about how hard it is to warm up 5 people is spot on and is a massive respect for all djs who play because they love the music. Actually after hearing this, I’m rethinking setting up Startupbar again.
Found via Simon Lumb
I use Dropbox for general stuff and syncing across all my different devices including Ubuntu and Android tablets and phones. However I use Spideroak for actual machine backups…
Why?
Well I like what Spideroak do about security and privacy. Compare this to Dropbox’s terms… and what happened last year!
This was confirmed when I heard Steve Gibson’s Security now on Cloud Solutions.
Cloud Solutions
After catching up with the week’s news, Leo and I examine ALL of the various cloud-based synchronizing, storage and backup solutions we could find. I survey each one in turn, and Leo chimes in with his own personal experience with many of the offerings. We conclude that SpiderOak looks like the winner, though Jungle Disk is still in the running.
Zero knowledge encryption is very useful and although I know theres way to encrypt in Dropbox (I actually have considered using them myself for somethings) I don’t really want to encrypt and decrypt on my Android device each time.
For me right now, there quite different parts of the market (although Spideroak do have dropboxes too) and I’m happy with that for now.
The geometry set part2 by Cubicgarden on Mixcloud
Concept is simple, take a selection of tunes which are something to do with geometry in some way, then bust out a mix. If you think you can work out the link with geometry for each tune, feel free to comment below. Oh and part 1 is here.
Hope you enjoy…
Really surprising how many people have heard TLC’s No Scrubs but never heard Sporty Thievz’s No Pigeons…
When I was in London, this always got played out and about. Always caused a massive rumble on the dancefloors.
Just remembered it when someone played TLC’s No Scrubs on my system on the weekend of my #geekBBQ
At Google a lot was announced but one of the other things which didn’t receive much attention was Google Now…
Its deceptive because whats really going on… But if you read the Tim Burners-Lee piece from years ago, where he outlines the semantic web as masses of agents skimming over a universe of rich data (big data).
The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs. The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services (including other agents) become available. The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.
I’m not saying Google just built the first agent. that would be stupid. But what they did do is capture Tim’s vision is a extremely nice way which you can see would be instantly usable for many.
Its easy to see why people write it off as a siri copy but in fact it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Like Perceptive Media, context informs the answer. I’m already seeing this happen on my Google Tasks manager Any.Do. Its looking deep into my calendar, my current phone calls, etc to understand what I want to write a task about. Leo Laporte said Now was creepy but to be honest, if it can truly help me so I don’t need to clog my mind with alternative directions, will I be able to make my appointments, etc. Then I got to say personally thats a good thing.
We’ve been sitting on Breaking Out for months slowly improving it as the browsers caught up with what we were trying to get them to do (WebAudioAPI is very topical at the moment). When we first started there was no way it was going to work in anything but the latest chrome. However things are starting to change…
Anyhow because of the wait to get things working correctly, we picked a date to release much later than expected. That date slotted right in between the end of the Euro 2012 and The 2012 Olympics. That date co-insided with SMC_MCR’s July event, the event where I first talked about Perceptive Media openly for the first time.
The event hosted at the excellent Cornerhouse Cinema was great. First up was Elliot Wood discussing the process behind his most recent digital art installation in Korea with studio Kimchi and Chips. Really interesting as there were some key points which matched some of our thinking. Mainly around openness and generative/organic systems.
After the break came some announcements and then Perceptive Media with me and Tony.
We quickly ran through our reformatted presentation from the EBU in April, to lay the context for those who were not at the SMC event in February. Afterwards we went into a live demo of Breaking Out the audioplay.
The audience enjoyed the play and seemed to respond well to part of the play I’m not going talk about now.
After hearing the audioplay we switched to a panel discussion with me, Tony Churnside, Henry Swindell (from the BBC Writers room) and Sarah Glenister (the writer of the script from the BBC Writers room). We also had Mark Boas and Mark Panaghiston (from Happyworm, the developers) on Skype just in case.
The questions were coming thick and fast, at one point I counted about 20 hands up of the 60 strong audience. Lots of questions about the idea of Perceptive Media and quite a few about the storyline. It was great having Henry there because he laid it out from the writers point of view. Sarah jumped in and gave her point of view writing the script, something she just published on the BBC Writers room blog.
The event was a big success for ourselves, SMC and everyone involved. The feedback we got was great and we did record the event for the purposes of research.
Following on from the launch. We’ve watched the prototype spread to quite a few places.
The BBC unveils its first perceptive media experiment and you can try it now – Martin wrote this pretty much live from the event and its gone a few places. And it appeared on Techmeme for a couple of days.
The BBC opens up its first perceptive media experiment and you can try it out right now
BBC demonstrates revolutionary perceptive media – Nice
BBC perceptive media brings the next big thing in tv and radio
Angie chan who did the illustrations talks about the project
Metafilter goes off on Perceptive Media – Would love to join this debate but alas I’m not going to get involved in the debate.
Some of you may know the struggle I’ve had over years to find a home media server solution. I’ve tried many things but in the end I just run Ubuntu LTS because I know it well.
Over time, I tried Amahi but being Fedora or was it Redhat based meant screwing about with the format of my hard drives and to be honest I didn’t like the way Amahi wanted to be the centre of everything (or maybe that was ebox?)
Anyway I might have to give it a shot again and see whats changed now its using Ubuntu as a base.
I have not mentioned much about Google IO 2012 and there is lots I could talk about. However I found the Nexus Q a strange device. However while most people are slagging it off, my ears picked up when they said they wanted people to play with it. Well in the usual way, it was hacked in 24hours.
Yes its running android but there is a effort to do a Android version of XBMC too. However because Android and therefore the Q is linux based, it shouldn’t be too hard to get it running? (I say with a massive respect for the hardwork it takes to hack on unknown hardware)
All I’m saying is the multi colour ring could fit with XBMC’s LCD option. Right?
Following up from my posts (here) (here) (here and also now here) about Perceptive Media… I’m very proud to announce Breaking Out, our BBC R&D experiment into new editorial formats.
The prototype requires performs best on Chrome using the new WebAudioAPI, but does work in Firefox, Opera and Safari through a fallback solution (this will eat your bandwidth as it uses WAV’s rather than compressed audio like Ogg Vorbis and Mpeg3). I would suggest keeping memory and cpu intensive applications shut while running the demo because there some serious calculations happening client side.
But most of all I’d urge everyone to leave feedback, no matter how bad or good it is… Then share it around for other people to hear and experience.
Massive thanks to everyone involved in the project…
Writer: Sarah Glenister
Harriet: Maeve Larkin
Lift operator: Anthony Churnside
Producers: Anthony Churnside and Ian Forrester
Media Engine code: Happy Worm
Jplayer Audio engine: Happy Worm
Website code: Yameen Rasul and Matthew Brooks
Illustrations: Angie Chan
With special thanks: Sharon Sephton, Henry R Swindell, Maxine Glancy, Usman Mullan, Elizabeth Valentine and the BBC Writers Room
I’m also happy to say we will be making the Media Engine code available under the Apache License for all you guys who want to hack around with the concept yourself.
Actually there might be some easter eggs in the audio drama to find for those not interested in getting all dirty in the actual code.
We’re really hoping as many people will enjoy it and give their honest feedback to us (good and bad). But its not just the individual feedback we would like to research, its the interconnected stories of how people tell others about it and how they explain it to each other…
How memes spread has always been high on my list of loves and to be honest should be high on the BBC’s research lists (if its not already?) In actual fact there is something about how memes spread and attribution which I think is very interesting and could be a new business model into the future.
Anyway… expect much more about Perceptive Media on the BBC R&D blog this month. In actual fact if you want to be first hear it and respond directly to people behind it like myself, the script writer, actress, coders, etc… Then you should make your way to the next Social Media Manchester.
I was reading about the domino effect on my Kindle via Instapaper the other day on the London Tube prompted after reading this tearjerker story. This bit really got into stuck in my throat, further proving that I’m just a sucker and massive romantic…
At the end was this bit…
Here’s the power of a story: someone hands me one, like a gift (I imagine it wrapped in shiny paper with the bow, the handmade letterpress card, the whole nine yards), and in that gift, I find parts of myself that have been missing, parts of our world that I never imagined, and aspects of this life that I’m challenged to further examine. Then—and this is the important part, the money shot, if you will—I take that gift and share it. In my own writing, sure, but the kind of sharing I’m talking about here is the domino effect: how I hear/watch/read a story, and then tell everybody and their mother about it, and then they tell everybody and their mother, and somewhere in that long line of people is someone who, at this exact point in their life, needed its message more than we’ll ever know.
The power of a story indeed…
You could look at this as a example of why Perceptive media isn’t going to work but actually I disagree. Someone (out there) has written a story which perfectly suits the medium but they don’t know it yet.
Although I hardly use the first two (actually need to sell my HTC Desire on ebay soon) I do find switching between the Samsung Tablet and my HTC phone a bit of a pain. I have done things to make switching a lot easier like installing the Ice cream sandwich keyboard. But theres enough differences to confuse me once in a while.
To be honest I can’t wait for the tablet to get upgraded to Ice cream sandwich… In between I’m getting a lot closer to installing Cyanogen’s Mod 9 version as it seems pretty stable? on the wifi only version of the tablet.
Also need to attempt the Ice cream sandwich upgrade for my Archos, just to see what happens…