hacking – Page 2 – Cubicgarden.com…

Where next for the quantified self?

The guardian has a article titled What next for the quantified self…

The quantified self movement – the idea that tracking metrics about yourself can lead to self-improvement – appears to be gathering steam. With products such as the FitBit One, Jawbone Up and Nike+ FuelBand boasting impressive sales numbers (the FuelBand reportedly sold out within four hours of its launch), it seems that self-tracking is finding traction and on the way to becoming an ubiquitous feature of daily life.

But how exactly can it break into the mainstream, and where does the future of the movement lie? Here are the five key areas where I see the quantified self going next.

The focus is on breaking into the mainstream which I’m not so bothered about but interesting the areas they identify.

App collaboration
Agreed… The fact you have all these companies feeding date into their own ecosystems. Theres many projects to free the data from the ecosystems but thats just the start of the problem… don’t let me get my dataportability hat.
Real-time health tracking
Yes the push towards real time is real and you can understand why…Faster, quicker, etc
Evolution of game mechanics
I welcome an evolution because to date the game mechanics which have been used are pretty dreadful. I mean I’m a big guy, so whats the point of showing the amount of calories my super healthly friend is consuming. It almost like a kick in the teeth… “hey you fat boy think about your friend Joe when you have that last spoon of rice!” Yeah up yours… Actually talking to my NHS dietation way back when, she suggested the gamification of such things was very bad and should be discouraged. And before you think well she didn’t get it. I’ll tell you she was young (25ish) and had an android phone. An evolution in thinking wouldn’t go a miss, not that I’m saying run zombies run is a bad idea.
Fix the food problem
Yes this is a big problem, and everything I’ve seen before to solve this problem is painful. Even my idea of taking pictures of everything I had to eat wasn’t ideal. Its just not acceptable to pull out your phone, hover above your dinner and take a picture in a restaurant. Yes I know people do it, heck I did it a lot but I can understand the weird looks I was sometimes getting. And heck don’t get me started on the eatery.
Google Glass (or wearables)
The article goes off on one about Google Glass and privacy concerns… When actually the link to the quantified self is tedious at best. Regardless, as an extension of the phone it could be useful for solving the food problem maybe…?

Where I think the Quantified Self should go is (where its going already) mindhacking, workhacking, dreamhacking and narrativehacking.. There’s more areas it could and has gone but I won’t go there/describe them right now…

Use your imagination. Self improvement through data and numbers, enough said (smile).

Can’t wait to see and hear tales from the edge at the quantified self europe conference 2013…

Media ahead of the curve: Welcometothescene

Does anyone remember welcometothescene by Jun Group?

I wrote about it a while back here and here.

For me this was way too early for a lot of reasons but in a world where hackers are dominating the headlines and endless war against piracy this series could actually work very well now. The style is also being duplicated by the likes of some recorded google hangouts I’ve seen recently.

The drama slowly unfolds and although I’ve not seen series 2, I expect the risky move to do very slow drama has been reconsidered. It wasn’t gripping but intriguing enough…

The method of distribution at the time was very radical, creative commons licensed and freely shared on bit torrent (and even e-donkey, geez do you remember that?). Even created in sharing friendly formats like Divx, Xvid, etc… Although quite a obvious move now… back in the day this was pretty amazing and people lapped it up as soon as they could get there hands on it.

Yes Welcome to the scene deserves a place in my ahead of the curve series.

Hacking my john lewis umbrella

I bought another John Lewis Umbrella recently while in Bristol.

My good friend Ross (recently joined twitter), said I was nuts buying such a expensive umbrella, but I explained its the only way to deal with Manchester’s changeable weather. The Umbrella is strong and seems to deal with the gusts much better than most other umbrellas. Plus its small and compact so fits in my laptop bag, or my inside jacket pocket. Yes it was in the lady section of John Lewis but only because theres this stereotype than men carry golfing size umbrellas.

He made the point that I could buy about 17 cheap pound shop umbrellas for the price of my John Lewis one but I love the up and down button and you can’t beat it when going in and out of doors. I did try the M&S umbrella but it felt cheap and unstable in comparison, plus it didn’t have the up and down mechanism (manual sucks).

Anyway, after using it straight away after buying it to keep the rain off in Bristol. I noticed it wasn’t so snappy as the ones I’ve had in the past. Which got me thinking maybe theres a way to hack the umbrella so its snappy and much more responsive?

Yes folks, its time to hack my umbrella… and I’m not the only one but I’m doing it for different less flashy reasons

Of course if I do start hacking it, there will be photos and a detailed analysis of the hacking.

Watch this space…

The White Space Conflict mix

The Whitespace Conflict Mix by Cubicgarden on Mixcloud

Dark side of the sun – Rory Gallagher
Breathe (Blake Jarrell remix) – Anna Nalick
Wonder of life (F&W remix) – Tukan Light
The strings that bind us – Arnej
Please save me (Push remix) – Sunscreem vs Push
Everythings been Written – 8 Wonders
Gouryella – Gouryella
Unexpectation (Dengavs Manus mix) – Vengeance
The Truth (David West Remix) – Handstrong feat Tiff Lacey
Language (Santiago Nino Dub tech mix) – Hammer and Bennett
Nothing else matters – Max Graham feat Ana Criado
1999 (Gouryella mix) – Binary Finary
Constellation (John O’Callaghan remix) – Thomas Bronzwaer
Invisible Touch (Ferry Corsten’s Touch) – Bohina

Another new mix by myself, once again recorded via the analogue input in my laptop because the pacemaker’s own recording system is still screwy for myself. In actual fact I did record the mix twice at the same time, once on the pacemaker and again on my laptop. One sounded far better that the other as you would imagine. In actual fact I’m very tempted to upload the busted pacemaker mix, so people can hear the screwy recording but I’ll have to make it clear on another site (maybe archive.org) what its up there to do.

The mix is recorded while relaxing one day recently in my house. So there’s few mistakes, unlike when I’m attempting to mix while walking the streets of Manchester or heading down the wrong way in Irlam….

I’m tempted to upload this to soundcloud too, even though I somewhat dissed soundcloud for its lack of mix support. But the ability to download and licence the track is killer and mixcloud seem not bothered about ever supporting downloads of the mix. Meaning a whole group of people never listen to the mix because frankly who wants to listen to a mix on there browser? Even with the nice fuctionality they have around tracklistings and all that… Its still flash and worst still its mobile flash and once again Flash kind of sucks even on Android…

I a while ago suggested to Mixcloud the concept of mobile playlists tailored for Mixes, but they didn’t really see the point. But recently I suggested the same thing to Dirty Si and he was a lot more receptive to the concept. Right now when I do a mix, I tend to create a piece of metadata to go with the mix. The NFO file (yep straight out of the darknet) contains the playlist order and any other metadata I feel is required. I would use PLS, M3U or even XSPLIF but I’ve just done something to scratch my own itch. I might switch to using XSPLIF with a namespace for my own metadata and add the SMIL namespace. There’s a whole bunch of hacking which needs to be done in this area…

Hacking the Pacemaker (progress)

At last a break through, someone (musicinstinct2) has cracked the way the pacemaker adds and removes music to the SQLlite database.

My initial experiments involved using the sqlite database browser to open up music.db and enter track information. Then manually copy the tracks over to the device, making up random hash values (as I couldn’t work out how Tonium were creating these hashes). It works! The device doesn’t rely on any particular naming convention, whatever is in the filename field in the database (music.db) is used by the device to load the track.

Fantastic…! Now this is cracked and Musicinstinct2 is working on a open source client to manage tracks. The next stage is to crack and understand the XML file which is attached to every single track uploaded on the device. The bulk of the data in stuck in a XML element called realBeatLocations.

I expect it won’t take long before we have the whole thing pretty much cracked. What would make things move along quicker is if Tonium would publish the source as it was created under the GPL.

Is Design really seedy?

Blackbelt Jones wrote this great post about Seedcamp and the lack of design involvement.

From the Seedcamp about pages:

“There will be a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that will help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business.”

How about designers?

Technology plays alone are starting to lose their distinctiveness in many of the more-crowded areas of the marketplace.

Great service and interaction design are on the rise as strategic differentiators for products as diverse as the iPhone and Facebook.

He's right, The only thing desiresable about the iphone is the interface, the technology is under powered or frankly from 2005. Thankfully its not all bad.

The line between hackers and interaction designers is blurring as they start small businesses that are starting to make waves in the big business press.

As I mentioned, my experience of HackDay Europe was that

“It really does seem that the hacker crowd in London/Europe at least is crossing over more and more with the interaction design crowd, and a new school of developers is coming through who are starting to become excellent interaction designers – who really know their medium and have empathy with users.”

This reminds me of my made up position name while at Ravensbourne, Designer/Developer. At the time I design was far too form based while development was far too programming based. Web designer meant you created HTML pages, Information designer meant you didn't actually touch any data or apis and Interaction designer meant you were too focused on art, hanging out in Hoxton and convince your clients they were always wrong. Things have changed for the better. The grey area between design and development
has been intersected by a 3rd force the hacker. So now you get pursuits like hardware hacking, alternative reality games, product user interface hacking. The fact is that its not about the titles, its about what vision you have in your head and how much effort your willing to put in to it.

Business-wise I think we have yet to see what affect the greying of design, development and hacking will have on startup culture.

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Finally got the Wiimote working with my laptop

After weeks of messing around with many different configurations, tonight (1am) I got it working, thanks to this great forum.

I'm using a Wavelinker bluetooth USB dongle with the IVT Corporation BlueSoleil drivers on my Dell XPS M1210. I have to turn off my internal Bluetooth because it seem to not work with BlueSoleil drivers. The thing which seemed to make all the difference was this ordering.

Open GlovePie
Open BlueSoleil
Press 1+2. Wait for “* Connected” to pop up in the lower righthand corner of your screen.
Run your script.

I found that GlovePie with no Bluetooth Fix or Auto Bluetooth Connect worked for me. GlovePie when opened would launch BlueSoleil for me and within a few seconds I was up and running. I used the script Wiimote identifier to work out if the Wiimote was connected or not. Once it was connected I can then run a more exotic script like the Mouse Control Script.

I've uploading a video I shot, so others can learn how to do the same.

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Hackday officially live – sign up now

As previously mentioned on the backstage blog. Hackday.org is now official and you can sign up and grab yourself a ticket now.

The dates are the weekend of the 16th – 17th June at Alexander Palace (yes now it makes sense why I had pictures of the venue on my flickr stream)

Its a partnership between Yahoo! Developer Network and BBC Backstage, which we've been developing for quite sometime. Matthew Cashmore, Tom Coates, Matt McAlister and many others have been involved in this from the start.

As the hackday.org site says, stimulation will be provided in Food, Drinks, Feeds and APIs. Like BarCamp, you are welcome to ~~play werewolf~~ sorry hack or (sleep) through-out the night. Tomski's already offered his shower for Sunday morning. Its going to be a very cool event. No I won't
be doing a live DJ session from stage 1 afterwards but nor will Beck this time around.

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Linux and homebrew on Xbox 360 and PS3?

So while I was looking around the 23C3 conference notes I found some links to videos about a possible Xbox 360 hacking. The video which can only be viewed on Youtube now seems odd and underwelming. But if its true means you can now using some exploit in the game King Kong run unsigned code on a Xbox
360. Engadget also had a piece about the whole thing.

One of the best things about the original Microsoft Xbox console wasn't the fact that it ran games. Oh no, for many, the best part was the ease at which that low-cost / high-powered device could be hacked to run all kinds of Homebrew applications including a damn fine media center. Now, in a tantalizing bit of showmanship put on by a cloaked hacker at the 23C3 Hacker Congress in Germany, a modified Xbox 360 (note attached circuit board) is shown loading Ubisoft's King Kong game just before displaying a trio of
dancing 360, Tux, and (old) MacOS logos with the words “coming soon.” Could this be a true exploit of King Kong's unchecked and unsigned vector shaders? We don't know, but the ability to execute any kind of code is certainly progress.

This is all fitting because Sony have just released a Yellow Dog linux build for PS3. Engadget once again has the right idea.

We're still holding out until Ubuntu gives us the love we crave. Well, that or until the OSS community get started on making an XBMC-like PS3 interface, since Sony believes all of your home's media should live on the PS3, and not on a media server.

Hey and no better time, XBMC is long from dead. Its been partly ported over to x86 for skinners and developers and this new skin from PDM called clearly shows the pure maturity of the XBMC platform.

And in related news I read Microsoft are releasing another version of the Xbox 360 code named Zephyr (1st one was called Xenon), this time with cooler processor, 120gig HD, HDMI and 1080p support out of the box. Sounds interesting but not as important as the previous news.

If the hack is true, it looks like I'll have to decide between the PS3 and Xbox 360 sometime this year. Maybe it will be a race to see who gets XBMC on it first.

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When’s the xbox 360 going to be hacked?

Not the DVD firmware hack or even the HD/Memory card reading, I'm talling about the (proper) run unsigned code type of hack. I said it would be done within a year. Well theres about 2 months left now. The amount of HD content on my network is growing and I got nothing except my workstation to play it all back on. Plus the Xbox Media Centre has pushed the Pentium 3 733mhz chip to its absolute limit now and the Xbox 360 simply isn't up to scratch for media playback sorry.

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