Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Nokia most stolen phone

NOKIA mobile phones are the most-frequently stolen handsets in London, reveals The Mirror. They made up half of all thefts, with seven models featured in the top 10. The Nokia 6230 was the most-stolen phone, Samsung D500 second and Motorola.

From the Mirror of all sources. Either way, there is a reason why my mobile has never been stolen, maybe this might have something to do with it. I tend to pick not so beautiful and popular phones. In the usual way, I pick features and functions over style and brand.

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95 Theses of Geek Activism

In the vein of the cluetrain manfesto, Devanshu posted a great post with 95 points about geek activism. Honestly there pretty awesome, but here's my favorate…

  • Violating a license agreement is not theft.
  • All corporations are not on your side.
  • Everything will enter the public domain some day- even Mickey Mouse.
  • Trusted computers must not be trusted.
  • Proprietary data formats must never store public information.
  • Fair use is a good thing.
  • Use multiple operating systems regularly so you truly understand interoperability.
  • Data mining will not stop terror.
  • Express your opinion in public
  • Blog
  • Security is a trade-off- what are you willing to give up?
  • Use Creative Commons
  • Understand the difference between civil disobedience and breaking the law.
  • Support the free, public domain archives of information.
  • Undermine censorship by publishing information censored in oppressive countries.
  • Voicing your views in a Slashdot comment thread is good, in your own blog is better, but in places that non-geeks frequent is best.
  • Have a global perspective in ideas of geek civil liberties, intellectual property rights and so forth. Do you like your country’s policies in this respect? Can you help people from another country?
  • Read more
  • Make sure that if a vendor locks you in, you lock them out.
  • Linux is no longer a philosophy- it is a good piece of software. Use it if it fits your needs.
  • More information available to the most number of people is a good thing.
  • Vote
  • Read our modern geek philosophers- read Bruce Perens, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and even Richard Stallman. Read Schneier to find practical reasons why stupid security mechanisms are stupid. Read them even if you disagree with them- it will help frame your point of view.
  • DRM only keeps an honest user honest.
  • Be proud of being a geek, a gamer, a privacy advocate, promoter of free speech and an innovator without fear of litigation, of government or restrictions on liberties- a geek activist.

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London Geek Picnic – 26th August 2006

Diana Memorial Fountain

Almost directly from Geekdinner.co.uk and following on from my earlier post

This month we're going to do something a little different…

I call it a London Geek Picnic

The geek picnic is simply an excuse to sit around with other geeks, enjoying the sunshine and contributing towards an excellent day of fun. This is also a chance to bring your better half, friend, crush to something geeky but not overally geeky (save it for September).

Who's the Guest?

There will be no guest this time around, so we're providing a soapbox and megaphone for anyone to talk about something geeky. I'm hoping we can get everyone up at one point, even if its for 30secs.
Other entertainment will include Frisbee and anything else people decide to bring

What will you need to bring?

Something to sit on like an old rug, some drinks of your own choosing and something from the list of picnic food and gear. And don't worry besides bringing plastic cups or crisps there will be no other cost. (the list and wiki are being generated)

What about the British Weather?

If it looks like rain a couple of days before, we will cancel the picnic and we'll try again for another better day. If it rains on the day, we can camp out at a local coffee shop till we get sunshine again. I would love to find an alternative venue, if you have one in mind let us know.

How do I sign up?

Unlike previous geekdinner's I need people who sign up to also bring a certain item. So you can now sign up on the wiki by marking your name next to an item or two.

Details

When: Aug 26th 3pm till about 10pm (expect to move on by 10pm)
Where: Hyde Park, London.
Nearest Underground: Lancaster Gate station
Special Guest: You!
Cost: Nothing, just bring something from the list

More details and the link to the wiki (use password ty1t1yyyp1p1) will be published this weekend. Feel free to post a comment to show your interest. please note i moderate comments, they will be authorised asap…

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Thoughts on the bombings in Lebanon

I found this on Ben's blog today and needed to post up this video which really outlines so well who's really paying to price for this pointless and meaningless conflict. Someone once said, Everything is lost in war, nothing is gained. And yes its easy for me to say this from my house in South East London but you know what, like Ben I'm really getting a nasty taste of whats done in the name of a religion.

I have to admit I generally dislike the concept of any and all religions its always been the number one cause for segregation and conflict in, and is used ultimately as a control/influence mechanism for society.

I'll leave it be for now, and maybe expand on this subject a lot more in the near future.

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Visualisation of complex data

Spam architecture

I was catching up with mobuzztv today and caught quite a few things in the links, which I felt like sharing.

First up was a link to a guy who has made quite aggressive objects out of his email spam.

The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.

Nice stuff, but I was thinking it would be great to see a real time view of this thing growing over days or weeks then bits getting lobbed off when he purges his spam folder. And this could easily be done with x3d, hey what ever happend to x3d? Anyway, it also seems Alex has a few projects based on visualising complex data like this one called Brecht, a VJ tool based on SQL queries.

Second through the gates, and on a simlar vein is shape of song

The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see–literally–the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.

I don't what else to say but I would love to see these drawn using multiple colours and animated to the music. Which (with my remix head on) could be done using clever use of SVG. Do check out the Gallery to get a feel for what I mean.

Third but somewhat deserving to be last, Brian Eno and David Byrne offer all there song data from there latest album My life in the bush of ghosts under a creative commons licence. Great, and lots of people have already started remixing but there something I can't let go of so easily. Why wrap the whole damm site up in Flash! Its really fiddley and means I can't permalink to any of my favorate remixes or even copy the text for a blockquote. One word…. suck! Although the general idea is good. Shame its let down by some over the top flash wankery.

Oh quick plug for one my favorate blogs about information visualisation, information aesthetics. Now if only someone could make the link between information visualisation and real world remixing of xml and webservices.

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Geek picnic and geek in the park

picnic

So to clear things up before things get confusing. I have been planning a geekpicnic for the last month and totally independant of my thoughts the great guys at multipack came up with a simlar idea called geek in the park. But to be honest, its nothing new, I've been thinking about a geekcamp for a good part of a year and there has been geekbbq's for a while now. By the way, the next one is next week Saturday (Saturday 5th August). So what I'm saying is that Geek Picnic (named to be confirmed) and Geek in the Park are not the same and are aware of each other.

So whats up with the date? Well I searched for stuff which is happening in August. The first major free festival is the Notting Hill Carnival is on Aug 27-28th. There's stuff happening on the weekend of the 19th August including the V Festivial, Secret garden party and others. While on the August 26th there is only South West Four and Creamfields which are both pay only event for ravers (I guess I'm over the hill now). Now there is a BBC Prom but I don't think I need to worry about it too much because there's one almost everyday during August. I also had a flick through Craigslist event calendar and Jigsawuk but there pretty quite for August right now.. So generally the 5th and 12th are maybe too soon and I'm not sure about the 19th. But the 26th August looks great except the weather looks to be not so hot.

More to come… More about the Venue and what will happen on the day…

So whats the deal with the speaker? Well there wasn't going to be one… I was actually planning to pull up a couple of the people who will be there and ask them nicely to speak about their passion. Generally the day would be a chance to just chill out with likeminded people and enjoy the sun and food. Depending on the choice of park we could have a BBQ which I would prefer, as it would be a focus point and at least a common talking point. We could have some music from a battery run device and therefore a microphone and amp setup if needed.

Where will the venue be? Like everything I've been thinking about this a lot too. Ideal it would be Hyde Park, which everyone can get to or even Regents Park. But both don't allow you to BBQ. So looking around I could suggest a whole range of other small parks around Holburn, Euston, etc. But they also don't allow BBQ's either. Battersea looks good but I'm unsure about BBQing. You will also notice I'm starting to work my way out of central London which always causes arguements, but I know for a fact Clapham Common and Wimbledon Park both allow BBQ's.

Talking to Sarah (my wife), she seems to think there's no point in doing the BBQ part. Keep it simple and just have a cooperative picnic in somewhere central London seems to be the message. And maybe shes right specially after the geekBBQ which is happening on the same month. So it looks like somewhere in Hyde Park will be fine.

So in summary, It will be a geek picnic in Hyde Park and should happen around 26th August. I'll write it up fully tomorrow and stick it on the geekdinner website.

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Dabbler, at last someones adding distributed to the mix

Dabble beta

At long last dabble has added distributed back into the mix. Dabble can be thought of yet another video hosting service but actually you would be overlooking its main feature. Its more like del.icio.us than anything else. Simply put its a bookmarking service for online video. So no matter where your video sits, google video, archive.org, youtube or even on your own site, you can bookmark it and share it with anyone via dabbler.

In the usual style you can also add tags and create playlists for other people and friends. Its such a simple idea and although dabble is very rough around the edges, I can see myself using this a lot. I actually rememeber this type of service being applied to Podcasts but it was so simple and clever, it actually is a shame it doesn't do audio too.

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Calendaring, oh the fun…

This is a post while listing to the Inside the net podcast titled Calendar Swamp. Leo and Amber interview Scott Mace about the current state of Calendaring and more importantly will we ever get close to interoperability.

So generally Scott offerss some useful tips but doesn't quite have the ideal solution quite yet. Now I'm not saying I do either but I thought I'd outline my current setup which is messy but kinda works.

My calendaring setup

So generally I use Plaxo to sync between all my outlook running machines. It does a good job if you disable some of the things which could be seen as spyware. I also run Thuderbird for my email and have the Thunderbird Plaxo extension simply so my Thunderbird address book is pretty up to date. But I don't sync Thunderbird that much, unlike my outlooks which I sync pretty much everyday for all my contacts, calendar, tasks and notes. I'm still using the free version of Plaxo but I'm going to try the paid for version to see how I like it. The Mobile phone syncs with the desktop PC via Activesync. If Activesync would sync with more than two computers, I would sync it with my laptop which I have done in the past. You will also notice I'm now using Outlook 2007 beta on my laptop, mainly to test the iCalendar, which at the moment I'm not impressed with at all. I did for a while have the Mozilla Sunbird application running and connected to Google Calendar but I didn't use it enought really. The last thing about my arrangment is WebIS mobile sync which is a Windows Mobile Application which syncs directly with Plaxo. Its not free and only syncs contacts at the moment but there waiting for Plaxo to open up the calendar, tasks, etc api's then the price will jump from 12 dollars to 20 dollars. So I'm going to try it out for 30days and maybe disable contacts activesync's contact ability.

So its not a bad setup and things do work but I want to say I've not found a way to fit in Eventful and Upcoming yet. I'm also interested to see how Google calendar does against 30boxes and the new Plaxo web calendar.

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del.icio.us vs. emailing

Michah Dubirko wrote this entry titled del.icio.us, blogging a while ago. I would take it slightly differently, and compare it to email. Since Del.icio.us applied the feature to send friends bookmarks to their bookmark inbox I've been really tempted to stop sending email too but I don't know if friends are getting them or not?

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The Orange project revealed

Tom sent me a link to the guardian article titled Public get to star in Orange ads. It outlines exactly what the Orange project was about. Because of the registration I'll blockquote the important parts.

Orange has turned to Pop Idol-style auditions to find members of the public to appear in an advertising campaign, with the chosen “stars” encouraged to record footage to be put on websites such as YouTube.

Candidates for the ads, which launch on August 1, were found through a text message and press campaign asking for people to take part in the filming of “a secret project in a stunning location”.

The campaign will form the latest stage of the mobile operator's “Animals” campaign – featuring a raccoon, canary, dolphin and panther – with each designed to represent the usage habits of different types of customer.

People who responded to the ads were interviewed and divided into the each of the animal personality groups. For example, dolphins are fun-loving people like Cheryl Tweedy and Charlotte Church, while raccoons are more like Carol Vorderman or Gordon Ramsay.

The four groups of people will be given a Big Brother-style task and the ads will film the different ways they tackle them.

The campaign, created by the agency Mother London, will comprise one 60-second “introductory” commercial and four 30-second spots focusing on the performance of each animal group.

Orange is hoping the posting of “making of” clips by consumers online will drum up word-of-mouth publicity about the campaign.

The ads are being filmed in Spain.

And to be honest it all makes sense when you look at the questions they asked you for while signing up. But generally its a let down and I'm kind of glad I didnt get on it.

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