Category: media-and-expression

Hacking together my digital artifacts with a wifi picture frame

My Wifi UPnP digital picture frame

For a long time now…

I’ve been thinking about the problem of digital artifacts in a physical world. I remember clearly, a fantastic conversation I had with the amazing Jas Dhaliwal about this exact subject when he was up in Manchester recently.

He was looking through my book collection and DVD collection and we got talking about how most of the books on my shelf I’ve never actual read through. Not because I don’t read but because of my dyslexia and I far prefer to read digital books. Which begs the question, what am I doing with a ton of interesting books? Why don’t I just get rid of them and buy the digital equivalents?

Well two reasons…

  1. Physical artefacts are much easier to lend to people and much more likely to be taken seriously by friends currently.
  2. Physical artefacts are easier, cheaper and better suited for display.  And I want to display who I am through my choices of the media I buy (rightly or wrongly*)
* Now you could have a massive debate about should you be defined by the things you own or what but… frankly this isn’t the time do that.
As Jas said in the latest techgrumps, its all about the digital artefacts representing you… And with that all in mind, I bought a wifi enabled picture frame for a very good price at my local Currys outlet store.
I bought one before but it was crap because it couldn’t connect to anything on my local network, just remote services. However this one does have the advantage of Universal Plug n Play, which raises it above most of the wifi enabled picture frames.
I complained on the same techgrumps podcast that I couldn’t get anything to talk to it but I finally used Ushare and bingo everything started working. So right now, I got the plan to either,
  1. Install Ushare on my xbmc box so I can share movie fan art and titles from XBMC
  2. Setup a rsync between my xbmc box and my server (already running uShare)
  3. Move the xbmc database to my server which has the benefit of a shared library system.
  4. Investigate the built in xbmc UPnP server
Either way, it looks like I’ll be keeping the photo frame strictly for the purpose of replacing my digital film collection with something an analogue artefact. This is also where a large scale eink display would be ideal.
I’ll post something along these lines on the XBMC forums to see what people think. Maybe they might even be able to help, the recent fan art stuff certainly will help too…

JK Rowling jumps head first into self publishing

Harry Potter

I posted this from my kindle on twitter… Its awkward because it doesn’t post the source but its actually from Ars technica.

By publishing on her own website, Rowling adds: “We can guarantee that people everywhere are getting the same experience at the same time. That was extremely appealing to me. I am lucky to have the resources to do it myself and I think this is a fantastic and unique experience that I could afford to take my time over to make this come alive. There was really no way to do it for the fans or me than just do it myself. Not every author could do this, but it’s right for Harry Potter. It is so much fun to have direct content with my fans. It was an extension of the existing jkrowling.com.”

JK Rowling is sure to make a mint and even more from self publishing… Further more I was intrigued to hear Rowling is green lighting a non DRM format for publishing.

Rowling has opted to keep the e-books DRM-free, meaning that they are not locked into one device or platform. She is instead opting for digital watermarking that links the identity of the purchaser to the copy of the e-book. This doesn’t prevent copyright theft but does ensure that any copies will be traceable to a particular user. This is similar to how iTunes is DRM-free, but embeds user account information within each file purchased.

Great move, and I wonder how the shop owners such as Amazon or B&N feel about this? I’m also wondering if Amazon will finally sort out the disconnect between Amazon bought books and personal documents. For example link to non-Amazon bought books.

The disconnect between self published and mass published will hopefully get much smaller encouraging even more to attempt self publishing.

Textuality almost the idea we had but poorly done

INST MSGS - Episode 11 - U H8 ME

A long time ago Channel4 posted a contest based around writing a play. Having never written a play before me and Sarah (my exwife) went about writing a play based around the interactions of people via social technologies.

The concept was simple, people interacted on stage in different ways, you could see what there really thinking about or mean via a large screen above them. Honestly quite a bit of the influence from my end came from the very early project by Jun Group called Welcome to the scene. (a candidate for something to re-look at me thinks)

I was intrigued when I read about textuality in my cousins movie collection of course in XBMC.

Now to be fair it only managed 3.4 stars out of 10 on IMDB so its not exactly inception but its worth watching to see how the concept we came to was executed by others. If I had the time and resources I would like to still see it as a play.

It was actually proposed to the contact theatre as their young and talented improv artists could maybe do something quite amazing with it, but I’ve never really picked up on it.

Lastly Revision3’s INST MSGS, rings a bell when re-looking at this whole area.

INST MSGS is a web anthology series that dramatizes social media. Based on everything from submitted instant message conversations to found Craigslists ads, INST MSGS shines a satirical light on modern (mis) communication.

Lytro’s light field camera

I first heard about Light Field Cameras from a industral trainee called Matthew Shotton. Although as Tony points out on Twitter, it was the idea of using it for video which drive the project.  He built a system for Makerfaire 2010 which pushed a DSLR along a short track and take pictures at certain intervals.  Once taken he pulled them into a application he built which turns them into a camera which has endless focus points… (we really should have documented this better, oh well next time for sure)

Of course theres many people working in this area and my focus is more about the grassroots and open, but its interesting to see the commercial play.

Lytro are going to release a product soon they say…

Introducing the Salford Cinema Club

Orange Wednesday

I’ve decided to kick off the Salford Cinema Club seeing how the Manchester Cinema Club seems to have gone quiet (last blog post was April 16th 2011).

One of the main reason is because now BBC North is based mainly in Salford Quays we’ve lost the BBC Club in the transition to Media City UK. So we need to make our own entertainment (as such). Orange Wednesday is a interesting concept and it just happens that the Lowry centre not only has one of the best theaters in the country but also a decent enough cinema and a Pizza Express right next door. Even if the film isn’t on there, the AMC 16 cinema is a short tram ride away at the Gmex/Castlefield stop (actually theres a nice short cut from the tram station to the cinema). So everything seems perfect for carrying out my idea of a cinema club. It may not work, but hey nothing tried, nothing gained…

The concept is simple…

Wednesday’s are Orange Wednesdays and a ecosystem has grown up around Wednesdays.

Every week, we’ll head to Pizza Express in Salford Quays to eat 2 for 1 pizza as part of the Orange Wednesday deal and discuss the range of films available at either the local Salford Quays Vue Cinema or the AMC 16 at the great northern (only a short tram ride away). After dinner, we’ll split up and head off to the films in question. Sometimes you’ll get a bunch of people going to one film and other times you may get a bunch of people going to many different films. The purpose of the meal is to capture peoples imagination and hopefully convince enough people that they should join you at the film of your choice.

The Batman Complex

If only… But what a amazing piece of work by a fan.

And so, as promised, this is the follow up to the teaser. Here we have a full length (well, a bit longer than the norm, but hey, what can you do…hahaha) theatrical trailer that delves a little deeper into the story behind The Batman Complex. As explained in the teaser, the gist of the idea revolves around a few fun topics, mainly the whole “what is real?” train of thought, and also every fans desire, deep down or upfront, to be Batman at least once in their lives. LOL. And so, I tried to craft a story where we see what happens when someone takes their dream of being Batman a little bit too far. An idea, after all, is a truly resilient parasite. 😉

While some of it is still left a bit ambiguous (both unintentionally and intentionally – while there’s only so much that can be strung together, I often like to leave a little bit open so as to see what fellow fans are able to imagine/create), I believe it offers a bit more than the teaser. As you might be able to tell, the theatrical trailer takes on less of a “horror” vibe than the teaser. For this extended look, I wanted to focus more on the character aspects (and a bit of the tragedy as well), and attempt to move past the initial shock of the psychological twist. One aspect I tried to hint at was the paralleling descent of both Bruce and Cobb. As Cobb and the team go deeper into Bruce’s mind, they start to encounter the truly dark issues that his subconscious houses. As a result, Cobb himself gets caught up in the obsession of all that lingers in the mind of a Batman. There are a couple fun things in there that are best left to surprise, but all in all, I’m relatively happy with how it turned out. It’s fairly fast paced and doesn’t leave much room to breath, which helps amplify the tension I think. But that’s just me. I hope it works just as well as the teaser did.

As for the future of the project, I’m not sure what’s next. I don’t think I’ll do a second theatrical trailer. Maybe a couple of TV spots, but other than that, I think I’ll let this one remain as it is. We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll be further inspired by some other ideas that’ll come to me in a dream… 😉

Think and a Drink with Frank Rose

Frank Rose

Having been invited to join a panel about new forms of storytelling in Gateshead, with Frank Rose in Newcastle. I was looking forward to meeting him and hearing what he had to say.

Frank ran through a bunch of examples of how storytelling and narrative structures have hardly changed over the years. Most I assume is in his book which he was quietly promoting (I bought a copy, even through I admitted to Frank I would end up buying the ebook version and the book would be lent out to friends who are interested).

The event went pretty flawlessly but there was no real disagreement, so hence no conflict. I did find issue with the lady I was sitting next to (Agnes Wilki). Her comment about quality of content I hear a lot from people within the BBC. So I had to point out that quality can be two things (actual pixel quality and the more subjective idea of quality of the overall concept) some audiences care about one over the other and some don’t care at all.

The overall talk was good but really needed more time for the discussion which started but never really got going unfortunately.

Straight after the talk, was food and the food choice was pretty excellent. The only shame was the lack of flat surfaces to really eat and chat. Frank signing his books the art of immersion and I got talking to a bunch of people including Frank’s wife about the differences and similarity’s of the UK north and south with the American north and south. As she asked me about the BBC’s move to the north of england.

Overall the event was good and well worth visiting if your in the North east. Glad to be part of it and I look forward to coming to more of them in the future. Its also worth mentioning Franks blog on the same subject is full of gems.

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

Cinema foyer

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…

My Kindle Ecosystem

Chrome to Kindle

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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

Hollywood is loving the apps

Inception the App

I had multiple people tell me about the Inception App on Apple iOS devices. I think its interesting but not good enough to make me want to rush out and buy a apple device.

Interestingly, Michael Breidenbrücker is one of the guys behind the app. I know Michael from my course at Ravensbourne where he co-founded Last.FM and decided to go off and develop that away from the fingers of the college. Recently… he’s been focusing on RJDJ which is a music generation tool.

Anyway, the idea of Augmented sound isn’t new but its so so interesting. The rest of the app is well a little bit of a wet squid in my view but hey you can’t have it all. The app is pretty expensive but you do get a copy of the film tied to the app. There is a question in my mind if buying the app for 10 pounds and getting the ability to tweet and like sections is actually worth it.

Ether way, you can see Hollywood jumping into the app market in a big way in 2011. Warner brothers already have a Dark knight app too, while the Unstopable app is Fox’s work and runs on Android (the largest platform now).

I do find it intriguing that Inception isn’t available on Android, I wonder if the lack of content protection mechanism (or plainly put DRM) might be the problem for Warner Brothers? No problem for Fox or even Sony though…

Kevin Rose’s Foundation

CF4_2337

Kevin Rose founder of Digg.com and now technology angel investor. Launched a while ago a new show independent of Revision3. Its called Foundation. The business model behind it, is a little odd.

Foundation is a monthly private email newsletter that features video interviews, product reviews, rants, and early access to pre-launched websites.

How do I get access?

—

Foundation videos will always be free of charge and available on Revision3.com, iTunes, my blog (kevinrose.com), and tweeted out (@kevinrose / @foundat_ion). That said, for newsletter subscribers ($3.99 per month), you’ll receive the videos without ads a week before everyone else, along w/product reviews, rants, rumors, and early access to pre-launched websites. To signup for the private newsletter visit: http://foundat.io/n

Its a bit like what Jason Calacanis did a while ago with his private newsletter.

Anyway I don’t think I’ll be signing up because I’m not in urgent need to watch the videos or know the advice Kevin has. However I have to say the videos are actually really nicely done. Both Jack Dorsey and Jeff Smith have been on the show so far and although there generally interesting I’m not exactly thrilled.

The reason why I mention Foundation is because at the end of everyone episode, theres something which always makes me pluck up my ears. With Jack Dorsey he talked about companies building systems to analyze there own data, something I’m very interested in for the BBC via Channelography. And Jeff Smith touched on work culture, something I’ll be sending to my boss as he plans the changes for media city uk.

The ebook dilemma

My sister and I spoke on Skype the other day and I said to her I finally got around to reading What the Dog saw by Malcolm Gladwell which she bought for me about 2 years ago at Christmas. Yes about 2 years to read a book (of course it didn’t take that long in reality) but it did take a while in between all the other stuff I was doing. I guess I should have read it while I was in hospital last year.

She said she had watched a programme on BBC Three called Kara Tointon: Don’t Call Me Stupid. It was all about Dyslexia. And she had kind of got it. I had watched the same programme a while ago on demand and to be fair I did think it was going to be crap but actually it was pretty good, even though I had never ever heard of Kara Tointon, and to be slight blunt don’t really care.

I’m a hard person to buy presents for and of course I want to make it as easy as possible for loved ones to buy stuff for me if they would like to. Books are a regular choice but they usually end up on my book shelf and read by myself sometimes up to a year or so later. In actual fact I have a fantastic book which Si Lumb lent me a while ago around late Summer. called Last night a Dj saved my life. Its right by my bedside but I’ve never read more that 5 pages of it so far.

We talked about the possibility of ordering a ebook and sending it to me via Amazon’s Wispernet but it worries me. So far I’ve never bought a kindle book, just uploaded ebooks from elsewhere. My problem with ebooks is simply the DRM. Yes I have a kindle right now and there’s readers on most devices and platforms (no linux client by the way, but there is a web client now) but what happens when I don’t? What happens when Sony bring out a decent ebook reader which is colour and half the weight of the kindle (aka the weight of a feather) or maybe someone develops a foldable eink display… How am I going to move my books from the Kindle to what ever? On top of that, don’t even get me started on the sharing aspect….

So in light of this, I suggested to my sister that she should in future just get me Amazon gift tokens and I can use them for books or ebooks. Its not as personal/nice as buying a book but it also works and theres much more chance of me actually reading it.

A kindle review by a art direction student

Anna Frew is doing a masters in Art and Design and is majoring in the conflict of ebooks and books. I met her at a Manchester Social Media Cafe in January and found her very intriguing.

So after chatting for a while we got on to the topic of the kindle and ebooks. This was just after BBC Backstage ebook went live. So I had lots of tips how we did the ebooks and how I generally do most of my ebook stuff. Anyway, she wrote up some of the conversation on her blog while reviewing her new Kindle.

I also like how I can alter the line length on the screen. Reading from line to line is something I struggle with in large bodies of text. Often I find myself lost within a text so being able to narrow the text made it much easier to read longer passages. This is problem common for dyslexic people so I think the kindle has great scope as a tool for dyslexic students with long texts to read. I know I would have appreciated being able to do that with some of my readings. Also being able to have all of the texts you need in one place in light weight form will also increase its selling points for students.

The fact that you can very easily put your own work onto the Kindle is also a great plus. Something which is much more difficult with apple products. This is very useful for presenting my work for assessment. Using the hack ‘Calibre’ also has great potential. This is a programme which allows you to turn any online content into an e-book. For example a blog. This means I can put these blog entries straight onto my Kindle for assessment in an organised way, without time consuming reformatting.

Its also very interesting to see her list of positives and negatives for ebooks.

One person to watch in the future I think… (more of this to come soon)