Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Were at it again… The startup bar is back in full force.
This time we have 4 djs, starting up at 9pm and finishing at 2am. This Friday (22nd June) and every Friday (except maybe next week, 29th July TBC).
If your in Manchester and out on Friday night, you can’t do much better than experience the House, Electro and Trance played by some great up-shots in the Manchester scene… Feel free to RSVP here.
Hope to see you all there…
Its one of those things about Flickr which you got to love. I posted a picture from a slide in Bill Thompsons talk at Future Everything.
Micah Purnell the creator of the poster posts on Flickr in the comments and sends me a message and we get chatting. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make his/her exhibition but I saw a good selection of micah’s work on twitter, including the full poster which kick started the whole thing.
Lots of Micah’s work is themed around contemporary themes and I got to say there actually really good. So Good I am considering buying one but I’ll have to wait for a bit.
I am very disappointed with Google… After reading this on Torrent Freak
For many Android users Transdroid is the perfect remote access app for managing their BitTorrent clients on the go. The app allows users to start and stop torrents, search torrent files and even use the barcode scanner to find matching torrent files.
Transdroid offered both a free and a paid version of the app, and judging from the 400,000 downloads people seemed to appreciate it. However, as of this week, Google decided that Transdroid is no longer eligible to be placed in the Android Market.
“I have just received an e-mail from Google that Transdroid, both the free and donate version, have been pulled form the Android Market. This is due to apparent violations in the content policies of publishing in the Android Market,” Transdroid’s developer announced.
The developer of the application has wrote up his exchanges with Google and looks to be building a lite version which doesn’t including ezRSS feeds and Torrent Search.
I guess the good thing about Android is, even if they block it from all the stores, you can still download it and install it yourself.
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…
I have Ubuntu 11.04 on my laptop but I’ve added Gnome 3 and ditched Unity by adding repositories which have Gnome3. Everything kind of works but there are problems as described before here.
So I was happy to see the Ubuntu Gnome Remix project is growing and has a couple of releases such as gNatty.
This all comes at a point when I’m seriously considering wiping my laptop drive and building a version of Ubuntu without Unity from the very start. Problem is I don’t really want to loose all the applications, preferences, etc, etc… So I’ll try and get Gnome3 fully working then maybe one day soon, just do the wipe. I am hoping Ubuntu allow Gnome3 to be a part of Ubuntu or allow such projects to grow and establish themselves.
For some stupid reason which I have no idea… I got 3 calls from a call centre while I was at home trying to work today.
It got to be a bit of joke by the second call because with the first call I got so peed off about what they were trying to tell me I just hung up after 30secs. When someone called again, claiming to be calling from Microsoft customer support, this time I playing along with this call just to waste there time and work out what they wanted me to do so i could warn other people not to follow the steps.
Caller: open Internet Explorer and type in ammyy.com.
Caller: click to download and install ammyy
Me: I can’t do that (lies of course)
Caller: Why not? click the link and choose install.
Anyway that went on and on for about 20mins, and so of course I hit Twitter with some funny bits I was hearing on the phone. By the time I finished… I was doing stuff like using the toilet and saying I was still in front of the windows XP machine (I would have thought the sound of me peeing would be a clear clue that I wasn’t really listening)
By the time it finished, Nic Ferrier suggested I should record them next time they call. So I did, but I didn’t catch the start of the conversation, so I started recording about 10-15mins in. Here’s the recording with a con-artist.
Recording-1 with a con-artist by cubicgarden
It is a scam (so popular its actually called the ammyy scam) as you can guess but weirdly it does actually catch people out… [1][2][3]
Hopefully the recording will help raise the profile of this scam and stop other people falling for this frankly terriable social engineering scam.
Following my post about the advantages of being dyslexic, Cristiano Betta finds this and sends me a link to Dyslexie
Talking to Dave and others about Dyslexic typefaces… They seem to have not taken off simply because there not free, which seems a real shame.
I was thinking how interesting it would be to hack this onto my Kindle…
People sometimes ask me, why do you put on your blog that your dyslexic?
Well I believe its got a lot of advantages… and of course disadvantages…
One of the strange advantages is the dyslexic-dar (modifying the gay-dar term). You seem to get a sense of when someone might also be even slightly dyslexic. There’s certain things people do and say which triggers the radar in my mind. Usually there’s a strange kind of infinity, and it might be down to familiarity of communication and habits.
Tom Pellereau, is one of the final 5 on this years UK apprentice, and I kind of warmed to him a bit. But I kept thinking theres something different about him, something familiar. It wasn’t till I watched the final 5 apprentice show, that it all clicked (clipped a piece from the show under fair use).
I do personally think I have the ability to think differently from other people
Tom and his mum are right, being dyslexic is an advantage when problem solving for example. You just think very differently about problems and don’t get hung up on the same issues. The way you view the world is very different and in a world where thinking outside the box is valued highly this is a precious way to view and model the world.
I can imagine even 30 years ago, this wouldn’t be an advantage but right now, it certainly is… I refer back to Bill Thompsons talk at Future Everything… Designing the future, this is certainly what I feel I’m doing. A world where my strengths are an advantage. Its somewhat empowering to see others dyslexic people embracing it and using it for there own advantage.
A while ago, after my bleed on the brain, the doctors looked at my dyslexia report from 2000. They said, I had been outpacing my projected overview by a long way and maybe the bleed might have set me back to how I was projected back then. If you know anything about me, you would read the report and say nahhh thats someone totally different, maybe they got the reports mixed up? But I think what the report doesn’t account for is the massive change in technology. Maybe without the technology things for me would be very different.
Thankfully I live in a world which somewhat values logic, abstract/intangible concepts and openness.
Jeremy Clarkson has blasted the BBC’s move to Salford – branding the city a ‘small suburb’ and saying he would quit rather than relocate.
The Top Gear presenter used his Sunday newspaper column today to take a swipe at the corporation’s decision to move a string of departments to MediaCityUK.
He described Salford ‘a small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks on it’ and said that he would resign if the motoring programme was moved north.
Clarkson – who reportedly receives a £2m-a-year salary from the BBC – claimed the decision to move five departments to brand new buildings at Salford Quays was based on politics, saying ‘it was a box that has been ticked’.
Clarkson, you can take or leave him. I’m not exactly a petrol head, so I’m only loosely aware of what he does on top gear… But some of his comments are just stupid and well ignorant
Some people simply have no vision and frankly need to roll over and let someone in who does have the vision and maybe the guts to give it a shot. This big head stand in the way of the people who will ultimately save the BBC. In actual fact if you read the whole thing, even with publication bias and all that out the way, its maybe the swan song of a long over-due industry on its very last legs.
10 years of Bit Torrent I wrote in a recent twitter post, after reading Torrent freak on my kindle a while back…
It feels like so much longer and I wonder if thats a sign of real disruption?
It feels like its been here forever and you almost can’t remember before it. Life is forever changed… Imagine life before the mobile phone? No I can’t really either…