Month: March 2013

Northology podcast ep 8 with Ian Forrester

Ian Forrester

Not long after blogging about Northology and the other great things happening in Manchester, its great to be on the show.

This week Nathan talks to Ian Forrester, a Senior Producer with BBC Research and Development, about his move from London to Salford, his work with BBC Backstage and how narrative and story telling is changing.  He also talks online dating, bar camp, geek dinners and many other things he’s involved in.

The interview was a quick thing and before I even knew it was over. Which means I didn’t quite get everything I wanted to say into the interview.

Judge for yourself by listening here or subscribing here.

A mindmapping standard?

I am having a hard time finding mindmapping apps which support a number of thing.

My idea was to install Freemind/Freeplane and then find a way to edit the mindmaps from Freemind on my Samsung Tab 7+ but can i find anything which supports it? Nope! So I considered the fact freemind might not be the ideal format and maybe I could import and export into freemind for editing on my Ubuntu laptop.

There seems to be no solid universal mindmap format which most mindmapping apps can read and write. It also seems export and import is very hit and miss.

The problem seems to be each one wants to innovate on top of a moving base in a different way and lock their users into using that application. A couple have apps across different platforms. Of course those platforms don’t include Linux making them almost pointless for myself.

What do people use and how do they get around the problem of converting back and forth? It seems crazy that this stuff isn’t described in XML or RDF with SVG for strokes?

Someone tell me something which works on Ubuntu and Android? Please!

 

Quantified self will change the way we tell stories

Adrian Hon

Was first alerted to Adrian Hon’s post when Laura tweeted me about my photo being used by Wired Magazine. I shot it Thinking Digital 2012 and really happy to see them getting some great reuse.

The article is Wearable tech can change the way we tell stories By Olivia Solon and yes they can use the photo as she respected the creative commons licence (see the attribution link at the bottom).

However more interesting is the article its self…

“As we start getting more data, optimising how we make an impact is possible,” Hon said. One example of this is Six to Start’s Zombie Run fitness app, which uses GPS and accelerometers to generate a dynamic story where you are running away from zombies. “We always think about the medium when we are telling the stories.”

I put all these wearables in the quantified self field, something I’m deeply interested in for multiple reasons including Perceptive Media and personal improvement. Adrian is correct, don’t make the mistake of falling into the trap of “thats a game, thats narrative” its all a blur and the best experiences are… I will admit we have had some great conversations about Perceptive Media in the past and I look forward to more of them in the future.

Talking of which, I’ll be at the Quantified self European conference this year hopefully (need to book a ticket). Part of my new going to conferences on the edge where the real interesting things happen.

Seek forgiveness not permission

Seek forgiveness not permission - SOTM

Just come back from another #SMC_MCR (Social Media Cafe) and SomeoneOnceToldMe was talked about.

Of course I added my own which I’ll talk about once it goes up. However Mario highlighted the picture above as a example.

Now for me this is Tom Loosemore’s famous phrase. So famous, I don’t actually know where it originally comes from till now…

I’m now aware thanks to Paul Downey its credited to Grace Hopper…

What’s more she achieved all of this in a world of institutional discrimination against women and whilst working inside an authoritarian bureaucracy, which is probably why she is often attributed with the quote: “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to seek permission“. The breadth of her accomplishments led to her earning the nickname “Amazing Grace”

Tom said “I have stopped using that phrase! See http://vimeo.com/58798945”

Shame because it still rings true… No matter what Tom says now, he’s influence is clear to see. And with that in mind, I rip the picture from the example for my blog. Sure Mario will understand…

Dream journal metadata

I said a while ago how I found a site which is much closer to mydreamscape than anything else I’ve found to date.

One of the key parts was the dream journaling and its interesting to see the amount of metadata lucidpedia requires.

Title, date, dream… is fine and they actually have a level of privacy

If you like, you can annote dreamsigns by enclosing words or sentences with [ds] … [/ds] tags.
Parts of your dream description that you rather prefer to be private when you decide to share this dream with others,
use the [private] … [/private]

Cool but, how about,

  • Sleep time – First state the time when you went into bed and then input the time when you woke up in the morning
  • Image and Video – Add your own Image or YouTube movie to this dream!
  • Rating out of 5
  • Lucidity – Were you not lucid, half lucid or fully lucid anytime during this dream?
  • Characters – Which people that you know from real-life did you meet in your dream?
  • Permissions which are…

Share with Lucidipedia.com users only
Only people with a Lucidipedia account are able to read, rate and comment on this dream record by using Dream Journal.

Make this dream readable for everyone
Share also with anyone outside of Lucidipedia.com, Anyone you provide with the URL of this dream record would be able to read it. Great for sharing on Facebook or Twitter with friends!

Thats one heck of a load of metadata about a dream…! By the time you filled all that in I’m sure you would have forgotten most of the facts… I’m fascinated by the idea of sticking a video or image into the dream but I’m sure it would be used in the right way.

Pacemaker hard drive problems

Pacemaker fixing

It was always going to happen…

A portable dj device which I tend to walk around with while mixing to myself. I accidentally dropped while in the middle of recording a mix. Ever since its been acting a little weird and worst still crashing mid mix.

The song which seems to trigger the hard drive to start clicking happens to be JS16’s Rosegarden 2.0 ironically.

Anyway after 6+ years of use I think its about time I made some upgrades. The great thing about the pacemaker is its pretty much a Linux PC. So a lot of the upgrades should be pretty simple. Of course the pacemaker community can help with everything…

First the hard drive, going with my wired, tired, expired. Its time to move to a solid state drive. I only tend to use about 30gigs of my 120gigs of pacemaker storage. So I’m thinking about getting a 64gigs or even 32gigs… The drive as you can imagine is needs to be a 1.8inch drive, and needs to be ZIF/PATA rather than SATA. According to the post there are two different ZIF connections 0.2 mm and 0.3 mm, although its not clear which one I actually should get.

While I’m doing that I might as well do a replacement on the battery which lasts about a hour right now. Although I discovered I could charge the pacemaker over USB while using it if the USB is pure power and not a computer. Of course I also have the AC adapter but nothing beats having lots of battery power.

This looks to be better done in a workshop?

Thanks goodness the Pacemaker isn’t made up of custom hardware bits…

Manchester’s got everything except a beach

Castlefield <3

I spent sometime in London over the last few weeks for connected studio and a number of work meetings. I got to see a bunch of people I had not seen for a long while and most asked me…

“So how is Manchester, you don’t regret moving?”

Or something along those lines…

My answer is always something like you should come up and stay sometime, its a great city. Almost 5 years and I’m loving it… The great thing is I’m not the only one spotting the fantastic opportunities available. Specially when it comes to the digital world.

The second factor is the sense that a genuine startup culture is being fostered here. The elements have always been in place for this to occur, particularly that Manchester has the largest student population in Europe with over 100,000 currently studying in the city’s five universities.

These include the University of Manchester, which is playing a really important role in the high-tech space. Meanwhile the University of Salford has recently opened a campus at MediaCityUK, designed to encourage creativity, innovation and collaboration between academics, students, professionals and industry, and develop talent for the creative, media and technology industries.

Between the BBC building a massive base here, TechhubManchester, the stupid amount of bandwidth being put into the city and other stories. Its worth mentioning some of the other things happening…

MadLabUK

Essentially a adult/hacker community space complete with different floors running a number of different community minded events. Its amazing and they have expanded already. The owners (4 of them!) hold it all together and even though they struggle most of the time, theres always something interesting on for the local community. I can’t explain how great Madlab is… Everything from Co-working, room hire to the random Art exhibitions and Hackman meetup. Madlab is also the first place to start dabbling with DIYBio which further demonstrates how great a place it is. Well worth a visiting always…

The Classroom

The Classroom is a welcome treat sitting between the likes of working out of a coffee shop and the likes of Techhub which is much more serious about there startup status. It is a co-working space but closer to the kind of thing I’ve only witnessed in San Francisco. Its still quite new but looks to be growing due to the demand.

Northology

The brain child of Nathan Rae (can be found regularly behind a camera on the Manchester scene), setup to highlight key people in the Manchester scene. I had a similar idea a while ago but it didn’t quite work out (smallworld). However Northology is now on its 9th podcast and doesn’t look like its stopping anytime soon. Who knows maybe it will expand to video one day?

FabLab

Manchester’s fabrication laboratory is next door to where I live. Its still doing a great business and I really do need to find something to build. Easily confused with MadLab but completely different, I need a project just so I can mess with the 3D printer, welders, laser cutters, etc.

…and the many coffee shops and bars in the northern quarter and cholton

There are too many coffee shops and bars in the northern quarter and cholton which are friendly to people who want to work out of them or just chillax on a Sunday afternoon. Unlike many places I’ve been to in other cities which will lock down there wifi, block power points and make you feel like a baby eater for sitting 10mins beyond the end of your allocated tea time. Some of the most notable including… North Tea Power, FYG Deli, Common, Soup Kitchen, Vivid Lounge, North Star cafe, Home Sweet Home, sugar junction, etc, etc…