The Web as filtered (and hopefully enriched ;-) by Adrian McEwen
March 26, 2018
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 26th 2018
Back to the Blog. Always be encouraging and reminding people that having your own little bit of the Internet is important, life-affirming, and good (and not as hard as it sounds).
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 5th 2018
Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results. "Corporations, non-profits, governments, universities and even preschools test, score and hire the ‘best’. This all but guarantees not creating the best team. Ranking people by common criteria produces homogeneity. And when biases creep in, it results in people who look like those making the decisions. That’s not likely to lead to breakthroughs."
Review of The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller."Rather than rely on the informed judgment of people familiar with the situation, we gather meaningless numbers at great cost. We then use them to guide our actions, predictably causing unintended damage."
Using Story to Change Systems. I wonder what would happen if someone funded Ross and Jen to get/help the city write stories about its future? Between them they could pull in the libraries, Writing on the Wall, the tech and maker communities... It'd be like the It's Liverpool 2020 project, but good!
Design’s Lost Generation. Mike Monteiro makes a good case for the professionalisation of tech. I'm still not sure how we avoid scaring off the good people and giving those who enjoy paperwork more prestige, but it's something we need to work out how to solve.
Wirral Wonders. "This joint venture – to be known as the Wirral Growth Company – is ambitious, and I wish the enterprise well, for the good of Wirral and its residents. Yet an investment figure of £1 billion has been mooted, and this is where doubts begin to creep in.[...]Look at Wirral Waters – ten years into a thirty year time frame promoted by Peel, and aided by the council. What is there to show for it? Very little, to the casual observer. Part of Wirral Community College and Tower Wharf, looking out on a waste land." It's hard to see how anyone ever believes the regeneration hype. Maybe we're not supposed to, just to keep disengaged while the powerful get on with consolidating their wealth.
Interesting Things on the Internet: February 12th 2018
The Catalog of Missing Devices. The EFF imagines products that might exist if "content" companies weren't such control-freaks.
Privacy could be the next big thing. Excellent call-to-arms for (good, ethical) companies to work on the we-aren't-hoovering-up-your-data story they tell. George coined the term "data dumb" when we were discussing these sort of issues for Museum in a Box last week.
A conversation about how public transport really works. "transport, nevertheless, takes place in physical space and physical space obeys laws of geometry and physics and no technology is ever going to change geometry—never has, never will". Really good piece on transport, especially in cities.
. Archiving is hard, even when you don't have companies trying to lock you into their solutions so they can profit from the struggle.
No one’s coming. It’s up to us. A call to arms for society getting more involved in defining the problems we want to fix with technology, rather than defaulting to whatever the technologists want to give us.
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 22nd 2018
Google Memory Loss. Seems Google's mission to organise the world's information should have the caveat "where information is defined as things we can monetize". Who could've guessed. Still, a decent argument for joining me in switching to Duck Duck Go as your search engine.
The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed. Lowering the barriers to global supply chains is good, but also makes it easier for a billion get-rich-quick chancers to join in too.
Beyond the Rhetoric of Algorithmic Solutionism. "in a zero-sum context, that means that the resources to do something about the information that is learned is siphoned off to the technology. And, worse, because the technology is supposed to save money, there is no budget for using that data to actually help people. Instead, technology becomes a mirage. Not because the technology is inherently bad, but because of how it is deployed and used."
The Last Chance Saloon. Good, if concerning, questions about whether Liverpool City Council should be involving itself so much in Everton's potential new stadium.
The Social Workings of Contract. There are many times when it benefits both parties to a contract to not strictly enforce all the terms. "Smart" contracts, which pour all those terms into code, don't allow that, which makes them less useful. The sooner us computer geeks realise that messy and imprecise can be a feature, not a bug, the better.
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 15th 2018
15 Years of SparkFun. Great look back at the trials and tribulations of growing one of the biggest names in the maker tech community.
Considerations On Cost Disease. Thought-provoking article about how everything (fsvo everything, obviously) is more expensive and yet not as good as it used to be. Seems like something that's hard to tackle, but important for us to try.
Stop using Facebook and start using your browser. Although if you're reading this, you probably already know that. Doesn't change the fact that we should be looking for ways to make the real web easier to use.
Nationalisation, by any other name? An interesting proposal for a new type of company to experiment with different ways of running "natural" monopolies. More of this sort of thinking (and ideally trying out too) please.
What Do You Call a World That Can’t Learn From Itself?. "So just as Americans don’t get how bad their lives really are, comparatively speaking — which is to say how good they could be — so too Europeans don’t fully understand how good their lives are — and how bad, if they continue to follow in America’s footsteps, austerity by austerity, they could be. Both appear to be blind to one another’s mistakes and successes."
Why is Southern Rail like an aircraft carrier? I think this captures some of the reason behind the last link - this focus on the appearance of things going well, rather than the work of making things go well.
Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear"I used to find it odd that these hypothetical AIs were supposed to be smart enough to solve problems that no human could, yet they were incapable of doing something most every adult has done: taking a step back and asking whether their current course of action is really a good idea. Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations."
Computer latency: 1977-2017. In terms of speed-at-responding-to-us, modern computers are lots worse than those of the 80s. My first computer takes 2nd place, and my third computer is 5th. I expect the one I'm typing this on is far down the list.
My Internet Mea Culpa. I'm not sure where I sat on believing the elders of the Web, but my critical faculties have taken too long to develop and have had too little impact thus far. There is much work to do if we're to realise the promise of computers and the Internet. This Twitter thread from @seldo has some good thoughts on the topic.
Bernard Stiegler: “The time saved through automation must be granted to the people” [translation]. "The work of tomorrow will be discontinuous [intermittent]. Periods of employment will alternate with periods of acquiring, developing and sharing knowledge. The right to the contributory income will be “rechargeable”, based upon the number of hours of employment. In case of problems, the system will be accompanied by a minimum living wage [revenu minimum d’existence] – as a social protection system accompanying the scheme."
The Origins of Anti-Litter Campaigns. Given the success of the plastic bag tax, should we be reintroducing returnable deposits on cans, bottles, etc?
Universal Basic Income explained. Not included for the UBI side of things, but for the passage about what companies are for from Ludicorp's about page.
Interesting Things on the Internet: December 4th 2017
The Disruptors. Interesting article about how finance controls the world. The observation that investment funds have effectively created a monopoly layer one level up from firms themselves becoming monopolies is particularly interesting.
Unapocalyptic Software. I think the article that Tim is responding to was an earlier Interesting Thing on the Internet, and this is a good alternative take.
Breaking Cliques at Events. Good advice that I need to try harder to heed. I think I do a reasonable job at observing the related Pac-Man rule, but I'm not the best at saying hello to newcomers.
How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met. Facebook happily building up a profile on you based on data they've hoodwinked (I'm sure it's all strictly within the law, as ever) other people into giving them.
Interesting Things on the Internet: November 6th 2017
The Gig economy Limps on. The "limp economy" rather than the "gig economy". "It was not the nature of work itself that changed in this period, but the relationship of workers to their employers and to the state."
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 23rd 2017
I haven't experienced imposter syndrome, and maybe you haven't either. 'Do these people doubt themselves? have moments questioning whether they deserve to be where they are? Of course they do! It is a key part to being a humble, likable, open-minded developer. They aren’t “suffering” from a “syndrome”.' Perpetual confidence is a bug, not a feature.
The Ethical Minefields of Technology. "Instead of looking at technologies programmed to enable human beings to better navigate the world I see technologies optimized to help corporations better navigate and manipulate human behaviour.”
13 things I learned from six years at the Guardian. Lots of good insight on what's important for organisations in the modern world, including this gem: "people who do the flashy things are plentiful, and people willing and able to graft on the stuff that just incrementally makes things better are in sadly short supply."
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 2nd 2017
The Coming Software Apocalypse. Interesting appeal for more formal verification in software. We do need to get better at building software, although I think formal verification should be matched with more design or systems thinking education/recognition too. Having had to write a bunch of Z (a formal specification language) during my Computer Science degree, I wonder if TLA+ is actually usable. Z was painful to use, and I had first-year degree maths too, so it's not that I'm completely inept at maths.
The 21st floor. Harrowing stories of the families who lived (and survived and died) on just one of the floors of Grenfell Tower. It continues to be a disgraceful affair, and Chelsea council and the Government aren't showing any signs of improving.
Introducing The National Algorithm. Excellent look at the development of modern army uniforms, and how to create a true Dutch camouflage.
The worm has turned. All the regeneration-types claiming that Liverpool Waters will attract company X to the city would be advised to heed "selection of a firm’s headquarters usually comes down to one thing: where does the CEO want to live or spend more time … full stop."
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 18th 2017
Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch. The end-game of advertising-as-business-model. I see it more from Instagram than Facebook, although that's also owned by Facebook. Twitter does this too, but at least you can turn (most of) it off.
Unemployment in the UK is now so low it's in danger of exposing the lie used to create the numbers. The graph of job rates by gender is particularly illuminating. The trend of both men/women to converge on the combined-genders line bodes well for equality, although the fact that it's at the cost of rising unemployment levels for men maybe explains some of the problems we're seeing in society. Either way, actually reducing the overall unemployment level is what we should be aiming for (universal basic services notwithstanding)
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 11th 2017
Essential Developer Skills with Tom Stuart. An excellent exploration of what a software developer is, and how you go from a beginner to an experienced dev. Lots of nuggets about the challenges of helping people on that journey.
Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You. In the aftermath of Equifax showing shockingly bad security practices and allowing a massive amount of US citizens' data to be stolen, some sensible actions for individuals caught in it to take.
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 4th 2017
Large Companies Considered Harmful. Lots to like here, and probably not just companies, I wonder if you can argue that part of the reason the unions were emasculated in the 80s was because they'd become too big and powerful. Still, today I think it's easy to see that it's companies who are the bigger threat.
Grenfell Tower - How did it happen?. "Just before filing this article, I visited Grenfell Tower. [...] There, huge and devastated, is the physical presence, the physical consequence, of a thousand decisions made to get things done a bit more cheaply, to make a bit more money, to clinch that deal." I remember feeling as though this might bring down the Government when it happened, such was the level of shock and anger and dismay. Yet now, barely a few months on, it already feels as though it's slipping into history rather than galvanising us into making the country a better, safer place for us all. As if the only thing that matters is that everyone can pass the buck onto someone else and say "we did what we were supposed to" and omit pointing out how, if they'd bothered to look at the situation a bit more broadly and if other people's lives were allowed to—every now and then—come before money, they played a part in the death's of eighty people.
Decentralize It!. "There’s a whole world of fun potential consumer products that let people do computer things that don’t involve reading ads on Facebook or viewing promoted tweets. No one tells you that, but there is."
Interesting Things on the Internet: August 21st 2017
Eliminating the Human. Perfectly capturing something that's bothered me for a while now. Although I totally understand the desire to design human interactions out of everything (given that I'm not great in social/unfamiliar situations myself), I also think that we shouldn't do it. Some of the friction and discomfort is useful for us.
Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance!"a fantasy common among Silicon Valley types: that the best path forward is to scrap existing reality and start over from scratch". Yep, less fawning over the shiny, more recognising the ongoing work of making things work, please.
Interesting Things on the Internet: June 26th 2017
Celebrating Infrastructure. Appreciating the overlooked. The book he mentions will be going on my wishlist.
Dumb servers for personal clouds. Another link from Jon Udell, this time pitching ideas/approaches for personal servers (I'm not going to say personal clouds).
On the referendum #23, a year after victory: ‘a change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points’ & ‘how to capture the heavens’ Long article, but interesting (to me) for two reasons: firstly the discussion about how to build institutions that can build the future echoes lots of what we do (or at least try to do) at DoES Liverpool, and secondly because it's the first time I've seen someone propose an argument for either side of Brexit that is forward-looking and optimistic about what it could achieve. It's a real shame they weren't running with this during the campaign.
Gratitude for Invisible Systems. Good explanation of some of the institutions and commons that we normally take for granted despite them underpinning our daily lives.
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum. Great post on the differences between management and being an engineer. Also describes pretty well how my career has gone - especially earlier on. At STNC, I went from engineer to project manager to software manager (probably the equivalent of VP of Engineering now), then dropped back to engineer with sole responsibility for a key product around the time we were acquired by Microsoft, then became team lead as we built up the networking team around that, and was in line to step up the management chain again but the higher management decided to close down the entire product group instead. Hopping between the two has definitely given me better development practices as well as helping my management skills.
Notes from an emergency, the latest talk from Maciej Ceglowski and it's as on the money about tech, its influence on the world, and what we should be doing, as ever.
The Rock-Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory. 'It follows that currency-issuing governments could (and, depending on how you lean politically, should) spend as much as they need to in order to guarantee full employment and other social goods. MMT’s adherents like to point out that the federal government never “runs out” of money to fund the military, but routinely invokes budget constraints to justify defunding social programs. Money, in other words, isn’t a scarce commodity like silver or gold.' An interesting approach, particularly if you then pair it with...
WannaCrypt incident report? An excellent suggestion from Russell, about the aftermath of the NHS cybersecurity issue. That concept of building the body of evidence of what's happened, and how it was fixed, is part of why we track our to-do items for DoES Liverpool on an open issue tracker - the Somebody Should list. The information captured in the comments and links between the issues means the closed issues are as important and useful as the open ones.
OpenTech 2017. Great notes from Kevin Marks condensing the full day of OpenTech into a much shorter read.
I tend not to be quite so overtly political with my postings here, or maybe it's not so partisan, but the recent Tories in particular are responsible for making such a mess of the country that it's important to get rid of them at the looming general election.
The Elements of Bureaucratic Style. "An uninformed person could read this email and think that nothing United did was wrong—because it appears United did nothing at all."
Stopped in my tracks. "I love the idea that a computer doesn't know who to tell when it discovers something."
The Silver Lining Of Anti-Globalism Might Be The Creation Of A True Digital Economy. "Amazon’s purpose is not to make authors and publishers wealthier, but to use its capital to undercut existing players, establish a monopoly, and then used that monopoly to “pivot” into other “verticals.” It’s the same extractive model utilized by 20th-century behemoths like Walmart, except the total domination of a market occurs even more quickly." Lots of hope for a better economic world here.
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 20th 2017
Putting strings into databases and then taking them back out again. Lovely post about why we need to make tech and coding less scary. In my experience, people using big words and jargon are generally those with less ability to deliver on what they're talking about. My equivalent of "putting strings..." is that I connect strange things to the Internet. I've found that a much more productive answer to "what do you do?" than talking about the Internet of Things.
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 6th 2017
Tech and the Fake Market tactic. Anil Dash doing a good job of laying out how the big, fawned-over tech companies tend towards monopolistic behaviour. Obviously we'll break them up, as we have with all the monopolies in the past, the question is how long do we wait before doing so?
Lovren: My Life as a Refugee. Although as a Red I might be a bit biased, I think it's good to see a football club putting out a video like this which gives a good perspective on the life and background of a refugee (who then went on to be a top footballer...)
Failing to See, Fueling Hatred. A sensible call to empathy from Danah Boyd. We need more making common cause and less division and infighting, the latter only benefits those already in charge (who are making no progress on making the world better).
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 30th 2017
Money Talk. Open and honest blog post talking about the costs involved in manufacturing, and the challenges and issues when you try to do things better.
How to Culture Jam a Populist in Four Easy Steps. "it took our leaders ten years to figure out they needed to actually go to the slums and to the countryside. And not for a speech, or a rally, but for game of dominoes or to dance salsa – to show they were Venezuelans too, that they had tumbao and could hit a baseball, could tell a joke that landed. That they could break the tribal divide, come down off the billboards and show they were real."
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 16th 2017
A Smuggling Operation: John Berger’s Theory of Art. I'd tried watching John Berger's Ways of Seeing before and not managed to get into it. This article, which came to my attention after Berger's passing, finally gave me a way in to understand things more.
Ways of Seeing - John Berger's excellent series on appreciating art (and how it's not necessarily what the "art world" put forward)
The Cybersyn Revolution. A good (more in-depth than you usually see) write-up of Stafford-Beer's Cybersyn project which aimed to use computing to help manage Chile's economy, back in the early 70s
The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction. Extremely long, but really interesting (and depressing) article about how dysfunctional Westminster is. "Events are over-interpreted because journalists do not want to face the idea that they are usually spectators of over-promoted people floundering amid chaos"
Interesting Things on the Internet: December 19th 2016
The Strange Death of Municipal England. Stark laying out of the disgraceful impact of central Tory cuts to local councils. The numbers involved are just staggering. Eric Pickles, the secretary of state for communities and local government between 2010 and 2015, declared that ‘[…] People blame the bankers, but I think big government is just as much to blame as the big banks.’ This line of argument has allowed the government to present the slow strangulation of local government as a helpful nudge towards reform. I haven't seen any evidence of a similar slow strangulation of the bankers...
It's Not Innovation If Nothing Changes an excellent talk from Megan Deal, looking at civic innovation projects and pulling out commonalities. Lots of head-nodding (both on what's gone right and on the challenges) from my experience with DoES Liverpool.
The Greatest View In Liverpool. Not the best subject, litter, but a perfect digitally-native (not that she'd ever use such a term, and quite rightly too) way of communicating the problem, from Jane MacNeil.
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 31st 2016
A Devil’s Dictionary of Educational Technology. "Asynchronous, adj. The delightful state of being able to engage with someone online without their seeing you, while allowing you to make a sandwich."
Science fiction about AI never seems to talk about the interesting stuff, tax and geography and work. "A local job, and it’s associated tax, is potentially displaced by an algorithm charged by the hour run somewhere distant, written by person working somewhere else with the profits and costs, rolled up into intellectual property licensing, moved to be taxed in the most expedient territory. We can’t stop it. We shouldn’t stop it. But it won’t be comfortable if we don’t plan for it."
welcome.js. A lovely hidden way to delight and encourage anyone poking around behind the scenes of James' website.
The Weaponisation of the Working Class. Why is it that the working-class is "listened to" when they talk about immigration, but not when they talk about the dismantling of the NHS, the lack of jobs, university fees...?
Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech. "We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can't fix BART, or have never taken BART."
Reading and writing for our peers. I much prefer reading amateur writers writing about the field in which they're experts, rather than expert writers writing about fields in which they're amateurs.
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 17th 2016
The hazards of a world where mediocrity rules. Maybe not quite to the degree outlined in that article, but you can see a lot of those tendencies in the "innovation" and "regeneration" industries in this country. Sadly.
Technology is a wooden leg. Leila on great form pointing out that all this technology stuff is just a set of tools to use to do something more interesting.
Augmenting journalism. Jon Udell, arguing for an alternate approach to Basic Income to use tech to enhance—not replace—our abilities. I think we can, and should, do both.
GB1900.org. The OS maps for the whole UK from around 1900. Really interesting to see how the country has evolved in the past century, plus you get to help researchers create a gazetteer of all the text on the map.
Draw your city. Another mapping research project, this time looking at how far people think different cities extend. Some interesting contrasts between the different parts of the UK.
Betting on snowballs. I like this idea from Doc Searls, roll snowballs rather than push rocks uphill!
Interesting Things on the Internet: August 29th 2016
The Continuing Journey Of A Media Lab: I Went To A Media/Art Lab And All I Got Was This Lousy Tote Bag. "This is the dark matter of a successful lab; its not making it look like a lab, it’s having a diverse mix of people, supporters, technicians, mentors and cooks; it’s having a sensibility of people doing interesting work who can get on with others or disrupt things." Great analysis from Ross. I'm now thinking "the background radiation of the culture" could be my new favourite term. What Ross talks about is something I got from the recent exhibition I did with him in Oslo, and also some of what Laptops and Looms provides.
I Have A Little List. Russell's list of how big, integrated, seamless systems are generally just good ways to waste money and provide a big seamless way to achieve very little. Do less of this, governments, councils and big corps, and more of the sort of approach Phil Gyford is taking in the first case.
Why Teach Business to Artists? Not just useful for artists, I really like Whitaker's hierarchy of business concept in there. It feels like DoES Liverpool is running roughly at level 2.0, and looking at ways to poke into level 3. I can see me referring to this in future :-)
Hot Wheels road trip. Another superb example of how technology isn't just about efficiency and return-on-investment. Definitely worth watching all of it.
The Rozz-Tox Manifesto. "Item 12: Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out. No one gives a shit."
Anti-racism stand by Liverpool judge, 1944. Lovely piece from the archives. "you can always tell the better class of people in factories, because they are people who do not believe in colour bars and other matters of privilege. I do not understand how in the British Empire, with so many coloured people as its citizens, anything in the way of a colour bar can exist, or ever be allowed to exist by any Government that is worth the name of Government"
On Failure. "failure is not good. But failure is okay. And to that point, we need to make failure okay."
The CIO Problem, Part 1 (and then Part 2). Lots of wisdom on bringing local council, etc. services into the modern age. One highlight: "[you need to understand that] That’s not innovation. That’s just how tech works today."
About the GDS Women’s group. "The Women’s group is for everyone, irrespective of gender, who cares about having an equal and diverse workplace – but that’s not a snappy and concise name for a group. So we're calling it the Women's group." Good to see initiatives like this share what they've tried, and how that's helped.
On the Left. Like Tim Bray, I'm not a political expert, but I agree with pretty much all he lays out in that blog post. "I think the “conventional wisdom” which sustains the current finance-centric rentier economy is thought wise by fewer and fewer. I think the path from here to something saner will have messy and ugly parts. But I’m increasingly sure that our current path, as a society and species, is unsustainable."
"Lighthouses... just stand there shining." Astounding, touching, harrowing to read letter from a rape victim that she read to her rapist. I long for a culture where this didn't need to exist.
Recipe for disaster. Some background to the creation of the BBC's online recipe database and thoughts about how/why the BBC is failing to help society debate/frame such non-commercial endeavours.
Redefining capitalism. Some interesting thoughts on how better to define growth and new directions for something better than capitalism.
ANA. Lovely, if rather dystopic, short film about the robot future.
Jane Jacobs: Godmother of the American City. And another, great interview with Jane Jacobs. "There is a sameness—this is one of the things that is boring people, this sameness. This sameness has economic implications. You don’t get new products and services out of sameness. Now, the Americans haven’t gotten dumbed down all of the sudden so that only a few people who can decide on new products for change are the only ones with brains. But it means that somehow there isn’t opportunity for these thousands flowers to bloom anymore."
Guide to Computing. Computers used to be so colourful! Did the designers stop offering us anything adventurous or did we all start only buying what-are-perceive-as-inoffensive options and bring this upon ourselves?
Thoughts about decoupling PGP and email clients. Good to see someone fixing existing systems rather than deciding the only way is to build yet-another-competing-silo because it's easier. Looking forward to being a user of the system Paul builds.
Eye Spy, a Year of Tracking. Great to see the BBC work on privacy, etc. "No-one in the UK should be speculatively accumulating raw data, particularly without notifying people they are doing it."
How the Hillsborough inquest jury ruled on the 14 key questions. I don't have any stories to relate, but as a Liverpool FC fan - and particularly since being back living in the city - this has been part of the background of how life is for my entire adult life. I was 14 when the disaster happened. The extent of the cover-up and smear campaign is disgraceful.
Interesting Things on the Internet: April 18th 2016
Paying Your Own Way (Or Not). Tom Steinberg talks about whether money is the only useful measuring stick. For tech, in this case, but see also all of the assorted "ROI" justifications for the arts, city investment, etc. When do we start demanding that the bankers and accountants justify their existence in terms that the rest of us feel are important (hint: those terms won't be ones that can be reduced to a single number either...)
The divide. Looks interesting... and is playing at FACT at the end of May...
Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto. In-depth look at the issues surrounding spam email and how to counter it. And how to balance that with the scope for privacy invasion that be-able-to-read-email-to-check-for-spam introduces...
Story of cities #21: Olivetti tries to build the ideal 'human city' for its workers. In contrast with the previous link, a look at the work Olivetti did to situate their company in Ivrea mid-C20th. It was arguably moulding the city to suit the company, but I remember a really interesting exhibition I visited when I lived in Turin (but never got round to blogging, sadly) that explained lots of the social/improving-society thinking tied up with those experiments and work. Arguably the main problem was that Olivetti dominated Ivrea (from a percentage of people working there perspective) and so the fortunes of the town and the company ended up too closely intertwined (which is fine as long as the company is doing well...).
Hacking Rambert. Leila Johnston doing an excellent job of documenting what she got up to as a technologist-in-residence, and more importantly asking questions about technology and its relationship with/to the arts.
Interesting Things on the Internet: April 11th 2016
OMATA: A Modern Mechanical Design Approach. Lovely article about OMATA's beautiful GPS bike speedometer. I especially like the term modern mechanical. It sums up nicely the sort of products I'm aiming for with MCQN Ltd.
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 28th 2016
Hardening my Development Machine. A secure system is like the horizon - always further away when you think you've got there. But there's lots of value in chasing after it, so it's good to see Paul sharing how he's moved on with it.
what Thomas Hardy taught me. An excellent piece on education reform or efforts to "fix" education, and how they miss the point.
Cameron, Corbyn, The City and Steampunk. The main article linked at the top is a good read, but the comments thread is (as you'd expect from MeFi) engaging too.
Weeks 167-169. Tom, eloquent as ever in capturing a nebulous concept or feeling or whatever, on the importance of carrying on.
From Adam Smith to Duncan Smith. Text of Paul Mason's speech to the Adam Smith Business School. Interesting thoughts on how we de-financialise the economy and encourage more development in the open source and collaborative economy(NOT the gig economy that masquerades as that)
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 14th 2016
Corbynism and Its Futures. Long interesting explanation and exploration of the state of the political left in the UK. If it's right in its assertion that "elections are almost entirely decided by the votes of a few hundred thousand swing voters in marginal constituencies", then is that an opportunity to focus attention for civic tech and/or new Internet-age institutions to help improve democracy?
Never trust a corporation to do a library's job. Lamenting Google's disregard for its acquisition and subsequent abandoning of the Internet's history, but celebrating the Internet Archive's sterling work to preserve things.
Affective Labour and Digital Collaboration. Interesting post looking at types of work and how they're recognised, prompted by discussions at the RCA's Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacturing symposium that I attended last weekend.
Class (American). "The one great instrument of social mobility in the US is college. But it's not the degree. It's the socialization. College – residential college – is most people's one great shot (or not so great shot) at being socialized into a higher social class." I think this all stands for the UK too. Thought-provoking stuff.
What to do when you're not the hero any more."stories are mirrors, but they are also windows. They let you see yourself transfigured, but they also let you live lives you haven’t had the chance to imagine, as many other lives as there are stories yet to be told, without once leaving your chair."
Year in Review: 2015. "What does capitalism mean when the rate of profit can’t beat the lowest interest rate in history? Money has never been so cheap for so long, and people still can’t think of capital worth investing in."
Machining of brass again. A write up from Julian, a friend of mine who's been working on a new CNC mill here at DoES Liverpool. Mostly included here for this paragraph: "Recall that, after 20 years writing the software that generates CNC toolpaths, I’d not ever operated a machine or worked with someone operating a machine in that time period. I’m not unusual among my programming peers. This is an outrageous state of affairs, and tells you everything you need to know about the effectiveness of all those layers of businessmen, managerial staff, supervisors, and resellers who have inserted themselves like slabs of toffee between those who write the software and those who use the software. Even if I wasn’t interested in operating a machine, someone should have forced me to spend some time making at least one thing to a standard of quality at some point in my career as it would have paid off enormously. "
Shields Down. On digging into the real reason people quit jobs.
Paul Graham is Still Asking to be Eaten. Maybe the reason startups get paid so well by VCs is that it's the only way to persuade them not to work on something more valuable to society...
Can they? By the time this is published the title should read "Did they?" as Spain goes to the polls on the 20th. Still, an interesting look at the Podemos movement.
On winning the Turner Prize. It's lovely to see the hard work the Granby community have put in over years being recognised (albeit in a roundabout manner). So I now live ~5 minutes walk from a Turner prize-winning artwork. And I've also exhibited alongside the Turner prize-winning artists - Assemble were part of the Build Your Own exhibition that we (as DoES Liverpool) made Desktop Prosthetics for.
The Day Google Deleted Me. "That's no way to live. Constantly in fear that one day the most powerful information gatekeeper on the planet can decide you are persona non grata."
Interesting Things on the Internet: November 16th 2015
Why I Quit Ordering From Uber-for-Food Start-Ups"We are alive at a time when huge systems—industrial, infrastructural—are being remade, and I think it’s our responsibility as we make choices both commercial and civic—it’s just a light responsibility, don’t stress—to extrapolate forward, and ask ourselves: Is this a system I want to live inside? Is this a system fit for humans?" Not just a choice for food startups.
Resist and Thrive. "It feels like we’ve been auto-subscribed to a newsletter that’s sending increasingly depressing emails. How do we get off this ride?"
Interesting Things on the Internet: November 9th 2015
Liverpool Futurist Excellent architectural round-up of Liverpool, by Jones the Planner. Including some sadly spot on questions about some of the city. "Why would you want Liverpool Waters to repeat all the mistakes of Princes Dock on a grand scale?" Exactly.
Metafoundry 16: Fission-Fusion Society. Deb Chachra eloquently dismantling competition. "[Paul] Graham and I do agree on the disutility of competition, which I cordially despise. I hate how it’s considered to be a motivating force [...]"
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 12th 2015
Haunted by Data. All of Maciej's talks are worth watching/reading and this is no exception. "[Data.] Don't collect it! [...] If you have to collect it, don't store it! [...] If you have to store it, don't keep it!"
as though everyone had value. "This competitive ideology seeps into and ruins everything. It makes every good contingent on that good being enjoyed by a small and shrinking few. As a guy, this competitive urge is a contagion, it gets in everywhere. I love guitars but hate guitar stores; I like lifting weights but I hate the weight room. Those places are poisoned by male competition and the male insecurity that attends it, almost inevitably.". Amen to that.
How we pass the buck. Not just a problem in advertising. It'd be good to find ways to reward taking responsibility rather than rewarding avoiding it.
Brian Eno's BBC Music John Peel Lecture. An excellent lecture about art and its place in the world. Worth watching by everyone, not just those into music or art.
Refugees. A summary of links for more info and how you can help with the refugee crisis, from a good friend of mine. He's been over to Jordan a couple of times to help out.
The End of the Internet Dream. I'm torn on this one, I don't believe in mass surveillance and censorship, but I also don't believe in bullying, doxxing... I guess it's that I'm against abuse of power, and that's a constant balance and struggle for society.
"Means Well" Technology and the Internet of Good Intentions"the precise problems of pushing technology on those that you think will need it, the elderly, when it is actually you that needs it to validate the fact you’re not a terrible child to your aging parents."
Change you can engage with. Excellent analysis of how people should be trying to encourage political change (assuming you don't want to start an actual revolution...)
By Hand & Brain. An excellent series of essays about craft, making, and culture, from a bunch of interesting people.
Interesting Things on the Internet: August 10th 2015
You can't fix services with engagement. Excellent insight from Russell. I wonder if part of the problem is that it's easy to hire a "social media" agency to bolt on this service, whereas fixing things properly requires deeper changes to your organisation. Something I touched on a while back.
Labour through the looking glass: 15 early-morning speculations on the Corbyn surge. I haven't been following the Labour leadership contest at all, but the Corbyn-surge has filtered through into my general awareness. I don't know how likely any of Dougal's imagined future is, but it makes heartening reading, and it's good to see someone articulating a better future and one way that it could come to pass.
You're already dead. The last link shows why we sorely need progressive politicians with some actual beliefs. This article, sadly, does a great job of showing how far the Labour party are from anything resembling that. Which is a disgrace.
On Moving Lines and Network Life. Good, level-headed article from Quinn Norton calling for better security and more regulation of software, among other things.
Interesting Things on the Internet: July 27th 2015
Web Design: The First 100 Years. Maciej's talks are always excellent, and this is no exception. "Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower. It works in theory, but there's no room for error in the implementation."
Here’s the solution to the Uber and Airbnb problems — and no one will like it, and digging into that in more detail there's also . The how-companies-are-accountable-to-their-workforce (or the *handwave* not really a workforce, they're private contractors, honest) part needs more development, but there are some interesting ideas in there worth exploring further.
The Verge's web sucks. I'm sure it's not just the Verge, but downloading 9.5MB and hitting over 20 different sites for ads, tracking, etc. in order to read a sinlge article is crazy and bloated.
Interesting Things on the Internet: July 20th 2015
The ethics of digital design. "Startups are optimised for shaking up vulnerable industries rather than assessing the resulting social, legal and ethical impact. Progress itself is the yardstick; whether that progress is in a worthwhile direction is sometimes secondary."
A World Without Work. Interesting things for us to be considering, as software eats the world. Maybe the arts and caregiving could become ways that people show they're "adding value" in order to get paid more than the universal citizen's income?
Some notes on funding 65 just received. Fantastic skewering of the economic-development-business-speak that pervades our lives. "But even if ‘economic growth’ is the primary mandate for the future responsibilities of music, then this isn’t the way to do it. Stop closing community centres. Stop destroying the welfare state. Stop making it impossible for poorer people to have any opportunity to do anything other than constantly struggle for survival, leaving holes in culture that will inevitably be filled by rich kids with nothing to write about."
Labour and the vision thing. I'm not all that interested in whether the Labour leaders pay any attention to this or not, but it's a good summary of where we might find better visions for our future.
Instantiation. Your website is too slow, and it's your fault.
The only way is down: 18 notes on the UK election. I'm glad I got to spend last weekend holed up in Hebden Bridge busy with load of interesting people at a fun-yet-full-on hack weekend. With a few days perspective, this is the best of the analysis I've read on the election result.
New Clues, from Doc Searls and David Weinberger. Commandments, rules... a manifesto for the Internet. And if you haven't read their original Cluetrain Manifesto, go read that too.
‘Community Led’ – Moving beyond victims and heroes. A good reminder - borne of the lovely news about Granby being nominated for the Turner Prize - that the truth is more complicated than the narratives we hear from the media (and each other).
Our better selves are bold and inclusive. It feels to me like this is the crux of choice for our politics. I definitely feel myself get protective, cautious and zero-sum game in my outlook when I'm stressed and fearful for how things might map out, and as a result miss out on opportunities and the possibilities of an optimistic outlook. It's something that I've lost in the past decade, and sorely hope I can get back - that something-will-come-up unassailability that was a core of my character when I was younger (and I don't think it's an age thing, it's something I caught from an ex-girlfriend). An optimistic UK is far better than a fearful, pessimistic one. It's such a shame that our politicians think the latter makes us easier to manipulate for their gain.
The Limits of Utopia. A simultaneously depressing and galvanising read. "The Earth is not being blistered because the despoilers are stupid or irrational or making a mistake or have insufficient data."
#lowerthanvermin. An interesting look through the career of Nye Bevan. I particularly liked that "he was apparently disappointed by the fact that the miners’ leader Will Lawther considered the NUM’s role to be the defence of workers against management, not pursuit of the possibility of its being the management." That feels like the problem the unions have always suffered from in my lifetime.
In praise of friction. A pitch-perfect post about why you should install (this) ad-(and tracking)-blocker.
A Quick Note on Airbnb’s San Francisco Report. This is a fantastic take-down of the statistics quoted by Air B'n'B. You could apply almost all of those complaints to any of the reports that get generated to "prove" how much value tourism/arts/council-or-gov-topic-du-jour bring to the city.
The Slow Death of the University. "What if the value of the humanities [and the arts] lies not in the way they conform to such dominant notions [of society's prevailing ideologies], but in the fact that they don’t?"
Interesting Things on the Internet: April 20th 2015
Internet.org is a failed exercise in misdirection. Just because you call something "Internet.org" doesn't mean that it's access to the Internet. Doc Searls provides a perfect critique of Facebook's free-mobile-data-for-Facebook-access programme.
Don't know who to vote for? Then learn who to vote against. "The suffragettes understood that. They understood that democracy does not end at the ballot box. If we are lucky, it starts there. It starts with choosing your enemy. [...] Vote today and change the world tomorrow. We are not as powerless as they would have us believe. Choose your enemy and choose wisely. Good luck."
Interesting Things on the Internet: April 13th 2015
Mikey Dickerson to SXSW: Why We Need You in Government"Some of you, not all of you, are working right now on another app for people to share pictures of food or a social network for dogs. I am here to tell you that your country has a better use for your talents." and "this country belongs to you and me and it is exactly as good as we make it. Grownups are not going to fix it for us and billionaires are not going to fix it for us. We either do it ourselves, or nobody does."
A Year of Reflection. Fantastic set of thoughts on learning curves, relevance and running an agency. That description doesn't do the article justice.
NO DICKHEADS! A Guide To Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams. Lots of insight into how to build a team and set the culture of the company. Especially for "No dickheads allowed. Really! My definition of a dickhead is a person whose ambition for themselves or their own career is greater than their ambition for the project or team."
Welfare Makes America More Entrepreneurial. Giving would-be business founders a better security net is a better way to increasing how many companies we have than increasing the spoils for those which are lucky enough to be successful (by lowering taxes).
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 30th 2015
Everything is Made up and the Points Don’t Matter"But I've come to see that the most successful of our students have a worldview shift during our program, an entire change in their demeanor towards the built world around them. They come to see rules as malleable, power structures as changeable, and culture as embodied."
Hidden stress. A good article on harder-to-spot depressive tendencies from Roo Reynolds.
Liverpool's Open Data portal. Early days, but Ross Jones has fired up a CKAN instance for Liverpool. Basically, somewhere to store links to open data sets about the city. Add any you know of.
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 23rd 2015
Why the alternative is called alternative. "Having thoughts like this now, and sharing them is becoming more and more normal. You could say, that the alternative is becoming the normal."
Coase cost and web 2.0 (explained by Cory Doctorow). "if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without her boss’s permission, then, brother, look out, because the CoaseCost of demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a *lot* cheaper."
How Apple Makes the Watch. A great, detailed look at the manufacturing processes shown in Apple's videos for their new watch. Far better than the annoying breathless commentary on the videos themselves.
Sixteen Years. It won't get reported in any of the mainstream press, but this is the next stage in the well executed life of the right sort of Internet firm.
The beige world of clickbait journalism. Alison Gow on the endless froth of brands and media titles chasing clicks. I hope the clicks are worth it for the firms in question, compared to the damage to how I perceive them.
The Web’s Grain. Interesting thinking about how to approach web design.
Bruce Sterling on why you shouldn't care how SIRI feels. Bruce Sterling doing an excellent job in reminding us that artificial intelligence is our era's horseless carriage. We should be having discussions about the ethics or dangers of the systems we're building, but we shouldn't only apply that approach to something we can identify as AI because then we'll miss the important developments.
Hacking for the planet. In Chicago, civic hackers are working to improve local life with data and technology.. "Getting the right people together is more important than patching the right code together. That’s one of the most important things to understand about this movement. This is not a bunch of coders coming in on white horses going ‘I can fix this with code!’, but rather people with technology skills partnering with non-profits, government agencies, community activists, to build something together that solves problems in our cities.". I wonder who wants to run something like this here in Liverpool.
Interesting Things on the Internet: February 23rd 2015
The Sharing Economy-Poverty of Ambition. The problem with the "sharing economy" is that it's all about adding the economy to sharing, rather than adding sharing to the economy.
Product Land (Part 2). Interesting post about how to explore "a hypervolume of potential products". Much more actionable than that phrase makes it sound.
Becoming Homebaked. A suitably human write-up of the history of Homebaked Anfield, a lovely success story of people, art and placemaking.
An Update on Indie.vc. This funding model from Indie.vc is a promising development in new ways to fund good companies.
Press Play. Looks like it was a fantastic course in writing, and if nothing else read the "Personal Standards" section - applicable to so many groups/workshops.
Shabby housing and shiny skyscrapers"The dereliction of the Liverpool waterfront is a result not of the port’s disappearance, but of its new insubstantiality. The warehouses that used to line both sides of the river have been superseded by a fragmented, mobile space: goods vehicles moving or parked on the UK’s roads. The road system as a publicly-funded warehouse.” So true.
The Internet's Own Boy. An important documentary about the Internet. If you're in the UK, watch it over the next few weeks while it's available on iPlayer.
Notes (Rants) from Berlin: On Art and Engineering. Interesting thoughts on critical inspection of technology. I particularly liked "Dan Williams succinctly reminded me that we should always be replacing the word ‘algorithms’ with ‘a set of instructions written by someone.’"
The Art of Management. An in-depth look at the history of some of management theory, with lots of good detail on Cybersyn and Stafford Beer.
A Tale of Two Zippers. A delightful look at the factory automation that lets zips be made, and a valid rant about how tiny design decisions can result in huge amounts of mindless labour.
Interesting Things on the Internet: February 2nd 2015
Computer, remember this… An anecdote for whoever is claiming we're all going to start talking to our computers/phones/IoT devices to *hand wave* solve all our user interaction problems.
Maybe wallets can’t be apps. Doc Searls points out an important feature of physical wallets that doesn't seem to be replicated by supposed digital replacements.
Whitewood under Siege. Interesting look behind the scenes of some of the global supply chain.
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 19th 2015
The Toxoplasma Of Rage. Divisiveness and trolling on the Internet is nobody's fault, it's just an emergent effect of the systems we've built. An illuminating angle on why social (and traditional) media can become so polarized. I wonder how we break the cycle?
Towards the sociocratic museum. What should our modern museums and cultural institutions look like? How should they work? What should we be preserving? Some interesting food for thought.
The Cathedral of Computation. Here’s an exercise: The next time you see someone talking about algorithms, replace the term with “God” and ask yourself if the sense changes any.
The Data Sublime. Maybe the risk of our increasingly computer-directed future isn't that some big corporation will be in control, but rather that they will just look like they are.
Among the Disrupted"Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy."
A Basic Income Guarantee. I think this is a good idea. It would definitely let lots more people pursue their business ideas.
To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This"It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time."
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 12th 2015
Why This Shepherd Loves Twitter. Connecting interesting people and their experiences to the rest of us. What has always been a great thing that "social media" can do.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. "what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?"
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 5th 2015
Governing through unhappiness. Audit, targets and managerialism as tools to control and emasculate. We need to start setting different parameters for success, ones that can't easily be quantified.
On Nerd Entitlement. Such a shame that the alternate response to the geeks inheriting the earth hasn't won out, that we remember what it's like and help those less powerful.
Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty and then Eric's follow-up post Well, That Escalated Quickly. A sobering warning that algorithms can easily go wrong. More diversity in our teams will help mitigate, although not eliminate, this sort of thing. "Move fast and break things" is just a fun quote until you realise the things being broken are people. (Like Eric, I don't think this is just a problem with Facebook, it's just unfortunate for them that their famous quote explains the problem so aptly).
City link, co-determination, and destiny. Interesting thoughts from Matt Webb about the new forms of firm that it turns out aren't quite so new (I don't know how long City Link have been going, but they pre-date Uber by quite some time...). It often feels like unions and the traditional left/right politics are fighting an old, long-gone battle, and this sort of thing shows that to be true. It's not about workers vs. bosses any more, but still about asymmetry of power, and finding ways to challenge that.
HAPPIDROME - Part One. Adam Curtis on good form. Could the Internet remove our hierarchical control systems and lead to a better future, or are we just being controlled and kept happy and sedate by a technocratic elite?
Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things. A great snapshot of a potential vision of an IoT future, although not a good future. I (and we, collectively) need to work on better visions for IoT.
Interesting Things on the Internet: December 15th 2014
Start-ups and Emotional DebtThat is, treating “the money problem” as a strict subset of “the life problem” is a mistake. As tempting as it is for programmers, it’s impossible to divide-and-conquer the good life. Like it or not, “the money problem,” “the love problem,” “the friendship problem,” and “the true-passion-in-life problem” are all intertwined, and they develop together. That’s part of what makes life so interesting.
Why I Joined The New Artists’ Union. In the recent art project I've worked on about 30 years since the Miners' Strike there's been some thought-provoking discussion about the place of unions; whether I'd strike if the same situation arose; and which union I'd be part of. So it's interesting to see that there is a fledgling union for artists. Not that I'm sure that I'd qualify.
Is saving Newcastle a mission impossible?. Distressing reading, as it brought home that this isn't just happening in Liverpool but across the country. It'd divide and conquer politics, and the challenge is finding a way beyond that, to counter it.
It’s hard to build a good web. It's good to see some of the people building decent web "properties" exploring ways to thrive. Go support them.
Metafoundry 15: Scribbled Leatherjackets. A good critique of Making. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, although I agree with some of it. It is always about the people, not the things. Maybe if more people answered "a difference", or "a community", or "I make do (and mend)" to the question "What do you make?" then we'd be moving in the right direction. But she's right, the celebration of Making is really just railing against the busywork and churn of making things of no (real) value in order to further line the pockets of the rich. Making isn't really the right term to latch onto, as many people make the world a worse place. It's tricky to find a better alternative though.
The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare. I hope justice is done, but either way, surely we should be implementing laws, processes, etc. so that we don't end up with a financial system "too big to fail" again (or at least for another 50 years until it inevitably fades from the folk memory...)?!?
Leah Meisterlin — Antipublic Urbanism: Las Vegas and the Downtown Project. An excellent exploration of the Creative-Class-Regeneration-project in Las Vegas. There are echoes of what I espouse for DoES Liverpool's role in Liverpool in there, but I hope (truly hope) that we have a more human, considerate, inclusive intent (and I'd hope people would hold us to account and point out our failings if we don't live up to that intent).
Interesting Things on the Internet: November 10th 2014
Getting the digital autonomy we pay for. "I just want people to understand what’s possible in a world of connected, standards-based software components, to recognize when those possibilities aren’t being realized, to expect and demand that they will be, and to pay something for that outcome."
Peak Google. An interesting take on succession in the position of King/Queen of Tech
Paul Downey is in the middle of an excellent series of blog posts exploring (and showing his workings, so you can play along) an open dataset on house prices and sales in the UK. This one looking at postcode data produces a lovely, detailed map of England and Wales from just properties which have been sold over the years.
Against Productivity. Meaty thinking from Quinn Norton. And alongside "productivity" I'd add "efficiency" in the grab-bag of sounds-worthy-and-innocuous-but-isn't memes of the modern age. Of course, the irony of the fact that I'm reading that and writing this while sat on a train that a few years ago would have given me just time to think and idly stare out of the window isn't lost on me.
Interesting Things on the Internet: November 3rd 2014
Ten hours of walking in NYC as a woman. The Internet, real life, both just the same. Linking to this doesn't feel like helping much, but I guess pointing out that it's wrong to more people is a start.
Security Problems. Similarly highlighting the problem more than a solution, but we [geeks] need to get better at fixing security and privacy on the Internet for everyone, rather than just knowing the little back roads and tricks that we only use ourselves.
Shut Up and Eat. If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives, perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale. Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, “I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal."
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 27th 2014
The quarryman's symphony. It doesn't sound like much, but this video of a quarryman orchestrating the moving of hugs blocks of marble like a conductor does an orchestra is captivating.
Yes We Can. But Should We? We need more critical thinking around the maker movement, IoT, and probably life in general :-)
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 20th 2014
How to build a fairer city. Takes a while to get going, but the suggestions for how cities should look to develop, rather than compete, could move the debate on usefully. It would be good to see the council considering what this would look like for Liverpool
Organize! What the Artists’ Union of the 1930s Can Teach Us Today. Interesting to see that artists formed a union back in the 30s, given that it seems difficult to see who the "boss" would be that they'd organise against today. Maybe they could just lend weight to, or seek to influence, political parties instead?
Radio: Experimental Form. Always nice to see people experimenting with device interfaces, particularly when they're in such a beautiful wood case.
Listening Post Ten Years On. Nice look at some of the techniques used in creating an interesting piece of media art. Wonder if FACT could be persuaded to bring it to Liverpool sometime?
Art at the Edge of Tomorrow. A great piece on Lillian Schwartz's work at Bell Labs. "Because there are so many Lillian Schwartzes who are looking for their Murray Hill, and so many Bell Labs who need to find their Lillian Schwartz."
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 13th 2014
Why nerd culture must die. I'd always thought (/hoped) that the geeks gaining more power would be good, as we knew what it was like to be outsiders, and would be more empathetic to other outsiders. Sadly that's not always the case.
Hypertext as an Agent of Change. Really interesting talk from Mandy Brown about the network, inequality and other great stuff.
Still Life with Emotional Contagion. Aaron Straup Cope talking about archives, the network, and a rejection of the perpetual state of living in the now online. Seems dConstruct this year has a really good crop of talks.
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 15th 2014
Labour Pains, Labour of Love. For selfish reasons, mostly because the North (of England) can't easily join Scotland, I'd rather the Scots vote no to Independence. However, this article shows how, were I living in the home of my surname (I think it's great- or great-great-grandfather you need to return to for this branch of McEwen to be in Scotland) I'd be seriously considering voting yes. Whichever way, let's hope it shakes some of the torpor from the political debate here in England.
With genetic testing, I gave my parents the gift of divorce. Humans are messy, lives are complicated, people keep secrets. While there's quite possibly a similar story with a marvellously happy ending, we should design our systems to acknowledge the possible downsides.
Here today, gone tomorrow. Being productive is difficult. If there was one insight I gleaned from spending a year or two failing to build a successful to-do list startup, it's that it isn't about making lists, it's about crossing things off.
My Cousin Is Not a Hero"Sometimes, a bunch of terrible things happen right in a row, and it’s just terrible. It doesn’t make for a good story. It doesn’t make you a better person. It just sucks."
Not Safe for Not Working On. A good look at the wider issue (for developers, and which should be demanded by users) around the exposing of celebrity nude photo trading networks.
What is “fairness”? Great piece about the fairness of algorithms by Danah Boyd
A right to build: An open approach to housing provision: self-provision. An interesting take on the UK's housing situation. It'd be great to, for example, see Liverpool's Mayor Joe Anderson experimenting with this approach in some of the areas with great community, like Granby, rather than the business-as-usual approach.
Interesting Things on the Internet: August 25th 2014
The broken Promise of the Mobile Web. It is depressing at times how long some of this stuff takes to make it into the mainstream. We were working on tight integration between the phone and the browser for Microsoft Mobile Explorer back in 2000, but the handset manufacturers were (understandably but disappointingly) afraid of ceding their UI to the browser. The WAP specs made a nod towards it in the WTAI stuff, but it was pretty clear when we tried to implement the spec that no-one else would succeed with it in its WAP1.0 form. Then in 2007 I co-founded a startup that was going to provide an alternative to iPhone UI, all browser-based, but rumours of Android nixed us finding any funding. Hopefully the FireFox phone or Indie Phone will finally realise the promise...
What does “Agile” mean? Nick Pelling gives a good buzzword-free explanation of Agile - "Really, to make a good practical contribution to the majority of the projects I see happening these days, you need to have the skills both of traditional software engineering and of contemporary Agile practices. (It’s not an either-or choice, you almost always need the two simultaneously.)"
What’s Neutral about the Net. The sage Doc Searl's takes a good stab at explaining why "net neutrality" is an important concept, and one we should fight for.
Interesting Things on the Internet: August 18th 2014
Would a citizen’s income be better than our benefits system?"There would be other advantages from such a system. First, it would be universal and hence avoid the stigma attached to benefits. Secondly, people taking a job or starting a business would have the security of knowing that they would still have their citizen’s income if the venture did not work out."
How to Be Polite. Bits of that reminds me of my approach to my first year (and maybe a bit longer) at uni. I don't practice quite as much now, but maybe I should.
PSI Force. And once you've read that first link, then read this and think about how you can help. I know it's hard if you've only ever known the commercial Internet, but those of us who experienced it before commerce came to dominate know that it could be all the wonderful things it is now and so much more!
Snow on the Water. Hmm, seems to be a web-we-lost theme emerging to this week's links, although maybe a better term is the web-we-haven't-built-yet...
Seeing Like a Network. Turns out you already learned how to safely use the Internet, by passing notes in high school.
A good state would give each of us the chance to thrive. "the state should engage independent civil society not for profit but in the experimental and competitive provision of public serves without ever endangering the universal minimum."
Interesting Things on the Internet: July 28th 2014 Edition
What is public? Anil Dash doing a great job of setting out how public/private isn't a black and white issue. "Ultimately, we rely on a set of unspoken social agreements to make it possible to live in public and semi-public spaces."
‘Hello there’: eight lessons from Microsoft’s awful job loss memo"An experience is something that leaves an impression on you; everyday activities ought to do no such thing, or we would all be exhausted within minutes of waking up. Using your phone, except perhaps when it’s brand new, should not be an experience."
And a video of Bruce Sterling's talk at FAB10:
"I'm a smart city but my brain is run in California"
Surveillance and Austerity. Politics these days is all about keeping people in their place, so the powerful can keep consolidating theirs. We deserve a better alternative.
Don’t blame the mandarins"every department should have its Chief Historian, in order to remind the short term and media-harried boss of the day exactly how many times his recent idea has failed."
Interesting Things on the Internet: July 13th 2014 Edition
This week's "Interesting Things" brought to you a day earlier than normal, as there's still a small window of opportunity for UK citizens to contact their MP about tomorrow's vote on the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill. It's easy to send them an email, just head to www.writetothem.com. My letter looked like this.
Colonising the Clouds. Could Google, Facebook, etc. start thinking of themselves as the new states?
Interesting Things on the Internet: July 7th 2014 Edition
Retail futures, mediated through our phones. Premature monetisation risks ruining the future city. The slick user story of personalised service, smoothly delivered to the wealthy relaxed consumer as they browse the aisles is seductive. We told ourselves we were “improving” the experience. The reality is going to be every single store, shouting with a desperate digital screech, delivering invasive messages and insta-deals.
You and your research. Text of a great speech about the discipline and techniques required to do great work.
Six steps to better business digital of things. I do wonder if the field that "Pretend Office is one of the best companies in the field that it’s in" is writing strategy documents for the council. Or maybe some other local companies...
Maximum Happy Imagination. Matt Jones pointing out how all these visionaries who look to disrupt everything always seem to stop shy of disrupting the consumer-capitalism environment itself...
And via that last link, also Creative People Say No. I always find that tricky to balance, particularly while trying to grow a culture, which puts me more in the manager role where you have to be available to help people...
Industry clusters: The modern-day snake oil. It's all about the people. As ever. Which makes it trickier to engage with. (But I don't think it's impossible. Anyone want to pay me to work up my ideas into an alternate strategy?)
Consumers, users, people, mammals. Russell doing his usual sterling job of clarifying things that you hadn't spotted needing clarification until he showed you.
Interesting Things on the Internet: June 9th Edition
Nobody Goes to Art School to Make Money, so Fuck Off. "In other words, we went to this art school because we too are interested in programming and making, but disagree with the rest of what we see in the tech industry now."
Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7. "The need not to know yourself. Symptoms are forms of self-knowledge. When you think, I’m agoraphobic, I’m a shy person, whatever it may be, these are forms of self-knowledge. What psychoanalysis, at its best, does is cure you of your self-knowledge." (there are more bits I could quote, but that was the one that drew me in initially)
Diary of a Corporate Sellout. Although we didn't have the wider community, given that STNC wrote web browsers for OEMs to ship on their mobile phones, lots of this rings true for my experience when we became part of Microsoft. And that's a big part of why MCQN Ltd hasn't ever looked for funding.
Everything is Broken by Quinn Norton. "There is certainly a limit to what an organized movement of people who share a mutual dream can do, but we haven’t found it yet."
BPF - the forgotten bytecode. A look inside how tcpdump works. Particularly interesting for protocol engineers like myself :-)
The "Drinking Coffee and Stealing WiFi" 2012 World Tour. I love hearing about the deep thinking that really good web people (such as Aaron) do about how to work with "digital" as a material. We need more of this - both the sharing, and the sort of people doing this work.
Nest’s Tony Fadell on Smart Objects, and the Singularity of Innovation. I like his thoughts on how it takes heavily-integrated companies to provide the innovative solutions, although I suspect I've a more open approach to how they should also enable others to integrate with them.
The Enervation Precinct. This article is about rebuilding Christchurch in New Zealand, but equally applies to almost any innovation-through-regeneration projects anywhere.
Digital civic space – the diagram. Catherine seems to be finding some interesting subject areas and making some interesting findings. I particularly like her four qualities of digitally active citizens.
Land of Impunity. Culture isn't what you say, it's what you do. This is the real problem in politics, fix the lack of accountability and lots of UKIP and the like's "support" will disappear.
URLy warning and Chrome obfuscates the URLs, Google benefits. Two good blog posts about Google's Chrome browser experimenting with hiding the web address and why that is a bad move. It's moves like this that are part of the reason that Firefox remains my default browser, and why I try to limit the amount the holds Google has over my life. They are becoming too powerful, regardless of whether or not they're using that power responsibly.
The myth of the science park economy. Not sure I agree with all of the analysis in here, but there's lots of good stuff about innovation, science parks, university technology transfer, etc.
Company Rule. Good reminder of how/why such an entity as a company came to be. Do today's circumstances call for an alternative approach to be available too?
Properly Funding Democracy Club. With a general election beginning to loom over the horizon, it's good to see the more civic-minded hackers working at tools to help improve democracy. However, I think Francis' idea to take things to the next level is a good one.
More thoughts about handcraft versus machine craft. Further thoughts from Rena Tom about the differences between craft and manufacturing. "I took time out of my day to love these drawer hardware. That’s good design."
A follow-up to my post about the risk of the Banksy Rat being destroyed, while it's long been gone from the building, they've actually removed it and auctioned it off. Although not mentioned in that article, I think the proceeds are being donated to charity. Which is some small comfort I guess. The comments from the people selling it off are rather telling though. For all the claims about "landmark" developments, it seems that once your property is at risk of being recognised as an actual landmark, that's a "liability" for the developers.
Product-driven versus customer-driven. I think this explains a lot of why I struggle with lean startups and lots of the find-people-with-pain approaches. Not that it guarantees I'm not on a hiding to nothing still.
Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 22nd 2014 Edition
Years of Living Dangerously. I must admit, I'd watched the Years of Living Dangerously documentary the other day, but was rather underwhelmed by it. Maybe that's because I've joined Francis and gone all Dark Mountain on it. I'm not sure. However, Robert Llewellyn does a good job of reminding me that there's another option.
Shell Shorts. A lovely look at the manufacturing process behind the Eames Shell chair
Michael Bloomberg: You can’t teach a coal miner to code. This is a point that's often lost in the arguments about progress. The important thing isn't to prop up old, failing industries, but we do need to acknowledge that the transition has a human impact. We should look for ways to alleviate any downsides to that.
Reflections on Glass An excellent piece about Google Glass from Jan Chipchase. "The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership falls on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven out."
Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 14th 2014 Edition
Can press freedom exist at all in a corporate world? Rather dense and heavy-going, but a good reminder of the water that we swim in, and that even things like companies are a construct that society has invented, and so could be replaced with something better.
The Next 5 Years for Drones. A good exploration of the sorts of things drones are likely to be up to (or capable of) in the near future. Helped me realise that while there's lots of good stuff that could come out of the technology, there's also a danger of it just helping to concentrate power in those who already hold it.
Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 10th 2014 Edition
The Search for the Next Platform Fred Wilson on the move into hardware, etc. from the big tech companies. "Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to make sure they don’t miss it.. "
An Investor's Guide to Hardware Startups. A good summary of the different phases, growth and challenges for hardware startups. Not just useful for investors, lots of good stuff in here.
Worse"In the last few years, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have all made huge attempts to move into major parts of each others’ businesses, usually at the detriment of their customers or users."
Solve Hard Things Early, another good piece on management structure, etc. In particular this - "Build great habits around communication and decision-making when everyone still knows each other well." - something we've consistently struggled with at DoES Liverpool
The Overprotected Kid - part of me wonders if we're worrying too much about how kids grow up, or alternatively going through the "in my day..." phase, but an interesting article nonetheless.
Why Startups Should Train Their People. Expectation-setting, I think that's something I'm not very good at. Possibly because of a mixture of perfectionism and not wanting to tell people things they don't want to hear. Not that the realisation of that makes fixing it any easier...
What Your Activity Tracker Sees and Doesn't See - a wonderfully illuminating way to look at how accelerometers, the actual sensor in things like Fitbit or Nike Fuelband, interpret the world.
The Future of Jobs: The onrushing wave. Long, interesting article from the Economist, looking at whether computers/robots/etc. will replace all our jobs, and whether or not we'll find different jobs to do instead.
How to Think - grit, curiosity, self-control, optimism and being challenged to step up to the plate; sounds like a good recipe to me.
Stupid Smart Stuff"Whenever you see something labeled "smart" or "intelligent," be assured that it is actually rather stupid."
The Good Master. Interesting thoughts on a new old model for apprentices and careers from John Willshire
I learn from this Tim O'Reilly post that we've been inadvertently practising "Lean Urbanism" for the past couple of years at DoES Liverpool. It just seemed common sense and part of an age-old tradition of reusing old, interesting, perfectly serviceable buildings for new uses that focused on people and activity over polish and superficial appearance. Still, given the continually repeated attempts at regeneration-through-glossy, maybe it does need a new term. If you look beyond the neologism, there are some good points and links in the article. I just need to find the landlords in Liverpool with imagination and willingness to try something different.
HS2: more people back northern rail improvements than north-south project. Nice to have some (slightly more scientific) research to back up what I was chatting about with a furniture designer in Sheffield the other night - shaving more time off our trips to London will reduce how much work I can get done on the train, better transport links across the UK Maker Belt would be more useful than HS2.
SeeChange - asking all the right questions (which aren't just "get rid of all the cameras!?!") about the proliferation of the amount of streaming video recording that's going on.
Full NHS hospital records uploaded to Google servers. In case anyone was in any doubt as to why the Government needs to do much better on looking after our NHS data. (The "infinitely worse" story currently might be about mock data, rather than real data. But I might be revising that before I publish this...)
A Day at the ODNI. Quinn Norton writes up the day workshop on identity that she attended at the US intelligence agencies. However, it's a much more interesting read than that makes it sound.
Escape from the 'sink' estate"Either you believe that people who are born into Britain's disaffected underclass are born with criminal proclivities - a belief which I hope you find bigoted and ridiculous - or you accept that the criminal behaviour of the underclass is the direct consequence of environmental factors."
Google lobbying for unsafe driving - A good point about how, in lobbying for their tech to be allowed when driving, Google should then be held partly responsible for any subsequent accidents caused by that change.
Another less-than-glowing article about Google, Georgina Voss talking about arts patronage, following the launch of the Google DevArt programme. I know Georgina, some of the artists initially announced with the DevArt programme, and also one of the Google developer advocates who helped pull it together. I think, as ever, there's an element of clumsy manoeuvring from the big corporation rather than any real malice, but the article raises good points.
Privacy Icons. It's good to see projects like this which try to help non-techies understand what's happening behind the scenes with the digital services that they use, and give all of us ways to make better decisions about which ones we trust.
Urban data: From fetish object to social object looks like an interesting one-day conference, organised by the excellent Adam Greenfield. Annoyingly I'm already busy on the 14th, otherwise I'd be heading along.
Interesting Things on the Internet: Feb 24th 2014 Edition
Can we avoid a surveillance state dystopia? A good counterpoint to the gloom about Snowden, etc. Not that things don't need to change - it outlines plenty of reasons that they should, and also suggests ways that they could - but outlines plenty of reasons for optimism.
Open data, a vision from Leeds. Nice to see Leeds looking to experiment with how open data might improve their city. More importantly, there's an open data community, which is what led to this initiative. Will be watching it with interest.
The Government has just postponed the care.data scheme, which was looking to make all our medical records available to buy for medical research. Ben Goldacre has written a measured look at the issue, laying out the many problems and concerns, along with how it could benefit humanity (although Ross Anderson's comment is also worth reading). It's a good example of how the default motive of profit, and the Government's lack of credibility ruin something that could be of great benefit. There's an opportunity, if the NHS could manage to approach the issue from the perspective of its patients, to define new and better ways for us to share data about ourselves without sharing what we don't want. To build something that would act as a best practice for corporations to adopt to protect more of our privacy rather than erode it. It would be harder to achieve (although probably at a similar cost), but would properly move the UK up a notch in open data rankings.
care.data and the community. Before I've even hit publish on this set of links, there's been further developments in the Government's care.data scheme. Outside of that scheme, strictly speaking, but they've sold all our hospital records to insurance companies. And they wonder why people are worried. Paul Bernal does a good job of laying out the concerns. I am heartened though by the effect he outlines in the section "Underestimating the community" - he's right that the response is a great example of the now-networked citizenship being able to out-perform those in charge in assessing the risks and amassing a collection of experts in the many different disciplines that it cuts across. And also in how it shows that people aren't just motivated by the market and profit. I'm looking forward to more of this as (the members of) society works out how to organise things in this way.
A good, if a little gloomy in outlook, interview with Adam Curtis. Hopefully his perceived lack of anything new to challenge the status quo is because he's looking for the wrong signals. Fighting the last war, as it were. I hope so, if only because the alternative is a bit depressing.
A piece from the Guardian yesterday about David Cameron's response to the floods. Living in the NW, where we've luckily avoided the worst of the terrible weather battering the rest of the country, and not tracking the mainstream media much, I only have a peripheral awareness of how bad things are. My knowledge is coming from tweets about rail cancellations, pictures shared on Twitter of the mainline railway hanging in mid-air, and mostly from Lucy Bricheno's talk about flooding at Ignite Liverpool on Thursday. It's rather nice to have that route of information, where an event I help run has speakers who monitor sea levels, flood risk, etc. for a living. Anyway, this link included more to capture this quote from David Cameron - "Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed for it will be spent.". I don't disagree with us spending money on the relief effort, but it's interesting to see that while the Government has spent its entire term claiming that there is no money, they've now discovered a bottomless supply of it...
Work Makes Works, an interesting collection of artists mapping things they've done (sometimes for free) and how that's led to other opportunities or artworks.
I like how it makes the everyday urban infrastructure that most people don't notice the subject of the film. It reminds me of somewhat of the Walkshops that Adam Greenfield runs.
One of my projects-I'd-like-to-organise-this-year is some sort of Walkshop around the centre of Liverpool. Maybe this would help introduce what we'd be seeking out...
Label Whisperer A lovely use of good API and URL design combined with small pieces, loosely joined to produce a prototype service to help museum visitors find out more about exhibits.
And while I'm here, I might as well let you know about Internet Icons, an event linking up the British Library with a number of other libraries around the country, including Central Library here in Liverpool. Before the London talks are streamed, there's a local speaker at each location and they've asked me to talk at the Liverpool one.
Another round of dumping collected tabs here... random things but all interesting and worth a read...
The Rise of the Female Hardware Entrepreneur. This is one of the nice things about the Internet of Things / hardware / wearables / etc. subset of the tech world - lots of women in high profile roles. There's always room for more, naturally, but it's a move in the right direction.
Value is Created by Doing. Good to remember that doing work is important, not doing things that look a bit like work...
Websockets (accidentally) blocked by mobile networks, a reminder that vanilla HTTP is often still the best solution to getting your client code to talk to your web service. I might have some experiences with that and server-sent events soon.
Dude, where's my North Sea oil money. A rather depressing look at how the UK might have fared had the Thatcher government not passed all our oil money onto rich people.
This year the run up to Christmas seemed especially manic, so I seem to have accumulated an impressive list of open-tabs-to-blog-about-later, even by my standards. As usual, the original this-should-be-a-carefully-thought-out-blog-post moment has gone, but if they made it as far as a left-open tab they're definitely worth sharing...
How I Built Emojitracker A great, in-depth explanation of building a web service at a massive scale (even though he didn't intend to do that when setting out to make it...)
Following on from that, Stream Updates with Server-Sent Events was a good overview of how web servers can send multiple events to a client. A good way to avoid polling if you don't need bi-directional communication
Disability Mapping with OpenStreetMap - one of the benefits of open-data such as OpenStreetMap is that new communities can repurpose it to better suit themselves, and everyone benefits from their work
The Inferno of Independence. Lots of this rang true, from the stress of being independent (see also Dan Catt); to the frustration at watching (and participating in) talented friends struggling to be paid for their good work while barely talented chancers cash in; to the importance of language and the words we use.
In what's turned out to be a follow-up to my last post, which also linked to him, Jeremy Keith's transcript of his talk at Beyond Tellerand is a superb talk about the future of the Internet, caring about data, and longer-term thinking
Jon Udell once said that a blog post can just be an email that you share with many people. This wouldn't quite be an email, it would've been a draft email (that's my default way of taking notes, as my email client is usually open, and it's shared to everywhere I might need it) to me so I could copy them from one operating system to another. So, a collection of random things that piqued my interest while I've been editing Designing the Internet of Things (and so hanging out in Windows rather than Ubuntu...)
An assortment of links that I've read recently, which seemed good enough that there's a lingering tab open containing them, but not good enough that I've gotten round to turning that into a full blog post. So in lieu of that, I thought I'd just share them in a good old linkdump...
Paul Graham on Good and Bad Procrastination. Especially for this ice-breaker (or is it a friend-losing?) question: "What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?"
An Aura of Familiarity - a collection of short stories about a possible networked future. Mostly rather dystopian, so maybe a warning of things we should steer away from towards nicer (but less exciting to write about ;-) futures
An Assortment of (relatively) Old But Interesting Links
These tabs have been cluttering up my browser for months now... nagging reminders that I'm not blogging as much as I'd like (one of many things I'm not finding as much time to do as I like, but what's new...)
Anyway, rather than just close them, I'll share them here. Feel free to read them and then imagine what the blog post they would've inspired would look like, or write one of your own instead :-)
Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong (this was a great piece about how little sharing actually happens on "social media", compared to shared among people in general, something to bear in mind when the social media experts and companies are trying to persuade you otherwise...)
No to NoUI (The NoUI phenomenon as a specific term had passed me by, but Timo does a fantastic job of explaining how we should disregard anyone trying to sell us a "seamless, invisible interface")
Links: Design, the Internet of Things, legalities and work
Things are rather busy at the minute, and I'd amassed a few open tabs in Firefox of assorted things I thought "ooh, I should share that" when I encountered them in my RSS reading. Normally they'd just go out as a tweet, with a brief bit of background but as (a) I'm not on twitter as much at the minute (see earlier point about being busy...) and (b) when I am, I'm already sharing plenty of links (partly because we're in promo mode for the Good Night Lamp kickstarter campaign and partly because I've been blogging quite a lot - for me of late - recently) I figured I'd continue the blogging-kick and post an old school link post.
Hack Design An online course trying to teach developers how to be better designers. I've signed up, and so far it's been quite interesting. We'll see how long I last...
A few thoughts on design and the internet of things. A fairly long piece from Tim Burrell-Saward, which suggests some design principles for connected devices. It's nice to see other people starting to talk about these sorts of things. I liked "make it Poppins"
Tom Coates - An Animating Spark: Mundane Computing and the Web of Data. More principles for the Internet of Things, this time from Tom Coates. Principle #3 is excellent, although I'm not sure I agree with principle #7, I can see why he's included it but I'm much more a fan of keeping intelligence at the edge of the network where possible.
A Moment of Silence for Aaron Swartz. Bunnie Huang sharing his experiences of challenging tech behemoths and how the legal system can be used against someone doing things on the edges of the ordinary. A great post, such a shame it was written in the tragic circumstances of Aaron Schwartz's suicide.
Hiut Denim - Do the work. Now you're (hopefully) fired up about doing important work and changing the world, a great reminder from Hiut Denim that all we need to do now is the hard work it takes.
Which is a good note for me to end on - part of the reason I've been blogging (a bit) more of late is that it works as a good way to get my writing muscle-memory going, so I can get on with finishing the next chapter of my book (another thing I'm long overdue explaining here, but that will have to wait for another day...)
Blog All Documentary Quotes: I Love This Dirty Town
"We could actually live in cities, if we still believed in cities".
Another of the BBC Four Collections videos, I Love This Dirty Town is part of the "London" collection. However, it's not really about London specifically, and shows a bit of Cambridge and Coventry among other places as it provides what is effectively a good primer on Jane Jacobs' now classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. There'll be a "blog all dog-eared pages" post for that here too when I finish reading it - lots of good stuff in it.
"If you don't look closely you think it works"
As ever, nothing is new - along with the mis-guided large-scale regeneration that I've oftencovered it's nice to see a guy from a design studio back then reusing the slightly-tired-but-full-of-character properties in the same way that we do today...
"They're packed with handy characters that you can find. Somebody to cut things for you, or make jigs or bolts or blow a little bit of plastic. There's always something, some little firm, some little chap around the corner who has exactly the particular craft you happen to want. You can grow almost any kind of photographic, light-engineering, design industry in these old buildings. And I would've thought that's a social gain."
On businesses in the city...
"There's nothing wrong with the big getting bigger, as long as the small get more numerous"
I do wonder if this is the nub of the problem - an eternal struggle between people who want to bring order to our cities, when the inhabitants are busy optimising for many more smaller and conflicting plans of their own...
"Planners are so paternalistic, don't they know that a lot of people have plans of their own? [...] Streets go up and they go down in the world, it has something to do with people who actually live there"
The BBC Four Collections are a fantastic way to start opening up the archives, and it's lovely to be able to watch old documentaries again. I have a feeling I'll be leafing through some more of them in future, this Panorama documentary from 1966, for instance, looks interesting - predicting what the tech industry in California will look like in the year 2000... There's also The Great Railway Cavalcade: Rocket 150 at Rainhill, looking at the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Rainhill Trials, which I remember attending as a boy.
Anyway. I've just watched the Tuesday Documentary: Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding. First broadcast in November 1969, it's a look at the railway network and men who worked on it, particularly the area around Sheffield and Manchester but also touching on London.
It's from a time when steam was on the wane and the electric and diesel engines were taking over. Commenting after a section showing old railwaymen sharing stories and banter in the railwayman's club, the narrator says:
"when they argue the superiority of steam, they don't mean at all that it was more efficient - because they know it wasn't - but steam to them is better because it was a more demanding thing. It was a difficult thing to do well, and they take pleasure in remembering how they did it."
Lovely.
It also shows some of the forward-looking thinking of the day - shots coming up the escalator from the tube into a gleaming new Euston station; mentions of containerisation and how it simplifies the freight interchanges; and shots of a new "electronic marshalling yard", where trackside sensors allow the movement of the wagons to be controlled by "computer tape". Apart from the punched tapes, it doesn't sound all that far from some of the Internet of Things projects being proposed now.
I'll finish with a quote from one of the drivers, who describes a cafe that I'll bet hasn't featured in eggbaconchipsandbeans, probably because it will have died with the passing of the steam engines...
"you can't get a better feed than bacon and eggs fried in a shovel"
"HOW could it possibly cost more for a government agency to hire a private consulting company with its own headquarters, executives, support staff, shareholders and so forth to prepare a bid for a project, compete for the contract, execute the project, compile reams of data proving what a great job it did on the project, and then spend the next six months lobbying the government to do a follow-on project and hire it again, than it would for the government agency to just do the dang job itself?"
Review of an interesting book arguing that urban farming is a profitable business to run. Surely there are plenty of candidate sites in Liverpool? It'd be lovely if the Urban Gardening Group at DoES tied up with Transition Town Liverpool and spawned some businesses to do that...
Excellent interview talking about the politics and a different approach to regeneration projects. Source of Dan Hill's "dark matter" phrase from Laptops and Looms.
Interesting site with some pretty detailed circuit diagram details on all sorts of mobile phones. Hopefully one of these days someone will use this sort of info to work out how to build new software images for old Nokia Series 40 phones and we can start doing interesting things with the old handsets rather than just breaking them up for precious metals
Interesting-looking open-source Pachube competitor, although it seems a little abandoned (and I've not looked into how robust the database, etc. is - which is the big problem when you start throwing lots of data around)
Interesting project to give people a secure, private "Internet appliance" that sits in their home/office/etc. and takes care of a lot of the stuff we're currently busy offloading onto "the cloud"
I found jqplot to be quite a nice cross-browser graphing library for jquery, so saving this in case I ever need to offer an "export to png" option for the graphs
Interesting (if not particularly pretty) bike lighting kit. Toying with getting one to replace the rear light on my bike now it's been stolen (the LED throwie currently in its place isn't a particularly long-term solution :-)
With so many options to choose from, and given that I don't do Rails work day-in-day-out, these sorts of posts which collect together the popular or recommended gems are really useful.
Another UK PCB manufacturer, with an interesting service - PCBs without soldermask, etc. so they can offer them for free. Very useful for getting prototypes made up to check your PCB design before paying for a run
I keep thinking up project ideas that need unique music or visuals generated from some form of unique code, so saving this for when I actually start building one of these projects
Interesting-looking project trying to tackle one of the more important, but oft-overlooked problems with all these web services that we're using. How to keep hold of all of our data.
Will come in handy if/when I get round to expanding on the AudienceBot to allow it to better gauge what people thought of a particular song/performance
Audio recording/playback chip. The sort of thing like you get in cards to play back a sample when opened (although this is probably bigger and more expensive, but still only a few quid each)
I love the idea of these stickers. It's a shame that there's no way to link back to local projects from them though, otherwise I'd get some and stick them up around Liverpool
PuTTY is my default choice for ssh or telnet on windows, but sometimes it's useful to tweak the defaults it uses, so saving this for the next time I need to use it.
Recommended by someone on a mailing list somewhere, but it's been sat as an open tab for too long for me to remember. One to try next time I'm getting PCBs made
Whenever I start a new Ruby on Rails project I make another attempt to try test-driven-development. Each time, so far, I've given up before I've seen any benefits. I'm collecting links to help me get started next time.
Whenever I start a new Ruby on Rails project I make another attempt to try test-driven-development. Each time, so far, I've given up before I've seen any benefits. I'm collecting links to help me get started next time.
Whenever I start a new Ruby on Rails project I make another attempt to try test-driven-development. Each time, so far, I've given up before I've seen any benefits. I'm collecting links to help me get started next time.
Whenever I start a new Ruby on Rails project I make another attempt to try test-driven-development. Each time, so far, I've given up before I've seen any benefits. I'm collecting links to help me get started next time.
This article confirms a problem I've hit with making the jump from trivial example to actual project, but hasn't made it completely obvious how I'd get past that. Maybe some of the links from the bottom will help.
A long but very interesting article looking at the financial crisis (and probably other themes too - read this a while back and it's been sat as an open tab waiting for me to do something with it since then...)
I'd always avoided KiCAD for PCB design as I'd wrongly assumed it was a KDE package (which would require lots of extra gubbins on my Ubuntu machine), but it's not. Suspect this tutorial will come in handy when I design my next PCB
Good to read an explanation of how someone uses git and branches to manage releases. This is the sort of workflow I'd run with, particularly if I was working in a bigger team. It's basically what we ran at STNC/Microsoft, but it's good to see how it relates to git (I'm still getting my head around the distributed version control thing)
An awesome idea. Getting a collection of people together to all chip in some cash in order to hand out grants to let people get projects off the ground
Good, in-depth description of building an ultrasonic distance sensor from components (rather than off-the-shelf). At some point I'll use this to build a no-moving-parts anemometer...
Interesting to read about what DIY Drones is doing with their warranties. Concerns on that is what's holding back development/release of the Mazzini boards - selling something that people then wire into the mains has proved a bit too scary
A lovely idea - an informal liability waiver form for people to use if they're doing something (e.g. clearing snow/ice, clearing waste ground) where the person who owns the ground is concerned that the volunteer might sue them if things go wrong. Basically saying that the volunteer is happy to engage in the work, and takes responsibility for their own actions.
Excellent project to boost engagement in local issues. Wonder if we could run something like this in Liverpool and even provide some low-tech feedback (in addition to the high-tech website side of things) with regularly printed and updated posters - pick places to advertise the questions, but then have a network of volunteers to print out updates and paste them over the adverts on a daily or every-few-days basis
A good overview of the Open Space method of conference/meeting organisation. I like the "chairs are all set out in a circle" format - dressing the venue will be an important part of working out how the long-conference proceeds.
How to build an ultrasonic distance sensor from the raw tranducers. Hopefully this will come in handy when I get chance to build an ultrasonic anemometer.
Interesting-looking group giving talks on science once-a-month in Liverpool. Will have to get along to one some time (which also reminds me I still haven't made it to the Cafe Scientifique either...)
Interesting set of programmes about how interwoven with technology our life is, and they were made in 1978 - so things have become even more entwined since then!
Not tried this yet, but given that the last time I tried my WiFly shield things didn't work particularly well, I'm hoping this will be much better. Suspect it will be, given who's written it.
Boulderdash, built with just an AVR microcontroller chip, crystal and a few capacitors and resistors. It's not one of the AVRs that the Arduino uses, but that might make it a good "playing with other AVRs" project for a hackspace evening...
"We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders."
Unlike the other vim tutorial I've saved today, this starts at the basics and shows lots of the ways to use the default options. The other tutorial is more about customising vim to let you work better, this is about getting a better handle on how vim works without so much customisation.
I use vim for most of my text editing, but know that I barely scratch the surface with how powerful it is. I keep reading tutorials or blog posts explaining bits of it but this is the first that's made me think "I should set aside some time to try this stuff out".
Huge selection of wine, and the prices seem pretty reasonable too. They've even got La Luna e I Falo, a Barbera d'Asti that I used to regularly get in Seven Up, the little restaurant round the corner from our apartment in Turin where R worked.
An in-depth interview with Jane Jacobs which covers quite a lot (it seems) of her ideas and opinions on bottom-up city regeneration. I really need to find the time to read some of her books.
A good explanation of how to organise groups and the differing roles that people need to take within them in order to get things done.
"They’re not in any particular order here. No one person did all of these throughout, they can be passed from person to person and sometimes more than one person needed to take the role on at a time. Also the names don’t matter, I’m not aiming to create anything special or precious here, just trying to explore the ideas."
I'm often building power circuits of one form or another, and it would be nice to make them switched-mode as that's more efficient. However, it's also more complicated. Hopefully this will help demystify things.
Maps, and a searchable directory of people from the Scottie Road area of Liverpool (including my grandparents) from just before the slum clearances of the 1960s.
“You’re charged VAT to repair old buildings, and you’re charged zero VAT to build new ones, or to build new estates on greenfield sites. That’s absolutely bonkers, and everybody knows it in the building industry, we’re just all keeping quiet about it."
Is anyone campaigning to get this fixed? Seems like a stupid state of affairs to me...
I'm still unconvinced that git is a better solution for source control than subversion for my needs, but saving this for the next time I need to get my head round how it works.
After resisting learning python (although not until I'd tried to get to grips with it once or twice) it looks like I might be needing this sometime soon...
Another great post from Dan Hill. The BERG video is lovely, and the Augmented City / Domestic Robocop videos are superbly produced but give a worrying view of the world once augmented reality takes hold. Luckily I don't believe that things will play out that way, or is it that I'll be trying to edge the technology in a different direction...
An easy to follow (so far - haven't finished migrating my Twitterbots over to OAuth yet) explanation of how to move over to the new OAuth API for Twitter.
A free one-day conference being (co)organised by the Transition Towns Liverpool group. Not sure I'm in Liverpool when it's on, but if I am then I think I'll be heading along.
Nice tool to generate character arrays for use in Arduino LCD or LED matrix code. Similar to, but prettier and more polished, something I knocked up during Howduino NCL to help the guys working on their LED matrices.
Good post on the importance of the company's culture. I don't think it just applies to startups really. And rightly shows that process is important, but similarly that there should be as little as necessary and there should be some flexibility in applying it.
Great to see a conference on the Big Society happening in Liverpool. Less great that it's an exclusive £300-odd per ticket event. I also can't find where it's being held... maybe that's because my immediate reaction to finding out about it was to suggest we could hold a better, free, more inclusive rival conference next-door to it :-)
For ages I've been wondering if it's possible to grind up old milk bottles (and any other domestic plastic waste) and use it as the source material for 3D printing on things like the RepRap or Cupcake. It's great to find that lots of other people have had the same idea, and actually gotten on with experimenting with it.
I think this article makes a good case that Detroit should be the city that Liverpool is looking to as a kindred spirit, rather than chasing Shanghai tower blocks.
"Detroit will re-invent itself and prosper through the help of makers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs who thrive while operating on a lean budget, without the bloat that has caused the demise of many of our once-venerated large corporations. True, lasting change cannot happen overnight, but with a little patience, room to operate, and a lot of sweat, we can entice both our young people to stay in the area and help in this reinvention while enticing other artists and makers — who may be claustrophobic operating in other cities — to stretch out and make Detroit their home."
"The first step in those efforts is to stop seeing the systems we depend on as out of our control. They aren't, and that we're so convinced they are is a testament to the dedication of the powers that be to shoo us away from interfering in their profits.
Cynicism, boredom and fear are their tools. They reinforce, at every opportunity, the idea that government is broken, that civic engagement is for dupes, that real rebellion involves shutting up, making money and spending it."
Ostensibly a look at the Transition Town movement and postulating that it's targetting the wrong problems, but in addition to the green agenda this could almost be a manifesto for civic renewal.
Another cheatsheet for git. One of these days I'll use it enough to get my head round it and not need to look through these things whenever I'm doing anything with it.
An interesting (as they so often are) essay from Adam Greenfield wondering what the future of the city might look from a technological and ubicomp perspective. I wonder what Liverpool would be like if there was such a bug-tracking-system for the city... Some good comments too, which pull at the fact not visible in the main text - that Adam is thinking about this not just from a techno-utopian viewpoint, but from a realist someone-will-build-this-sooner-or-later perspective where it's better to be engaged and involved in it and helping shape it in better (egalitarian, secure, civic-rather-than-purely-commercial) ways.
"A paving slab that says “20 Tonne Crane” is not the same as a 20 tonne crane."
A lovely piece looking at the difference in approach to regeneration of two dock areas of Leeds.
"When a building is first made it belongs to the builder, the architect and their paymasters. They alone can tell stories about why and how it came into being in its pristine form. But over time, the balance tips in favour of the place’s users, its neighbours and even to passers-by. Their stories become the building’s stories and the building’s stories become inspirations, symbolic of the city’s authentic character."
Fantastic piece from the former CEO of Intel on the problems with focusing on profit-margins over jobs. The possible decline of Silicon Valley looks rather similar to the collapse of manufacturing that the UK went through in the late-70s and 80s. The challenge for us is to work out how to recover from that problem.
Some very nice dataviz modules for Drupal. I need to have a play with some of the more advanced features of Drupal sometime... not quite sure when that's going to happen...
American presidents have been promising to wean America off oil for thirty-six years. Jon Stewart's explanation is hilarious and sobering in equal measure.
"Right, the creative class. Maybe Richard Florida has promoted the wrong creative class. In his model, artists beget coffee bars that make formerly dreary neighborhoods attractive to real estate developers, who lure lawyers and accountants into luxury loft buildings with names like “the Shoe Factory.” Maybe there’s another model, one that sucks a little of the class bias out of the formula and privileges artisans over artists, blue-collar jobs over white-collar ones. Give enough people who are passionate about making things the stability to invest in equipment and hire workers, and you might slow, or even reverse, the death spiral."
A really interesting interview with Adam Greenfield. I particularly like his take on the sorts of offices we should be working in, and how the Google-style "free food, sports facilities, etc. all on campus" offices are more of a ploy to keep you at work for as long as possible. I much prefer my current work experience which is nearer to this:
"My idea of a good workspace is a little different: a small office, with windows that open and lots of natural light, in a dense and well-served neighborhood in the central city."
Keep talking about going camping again (and keep wondering about throwing the tent on the back of the bike again, although I'd need more clothes in UK than I did in Italy...) so this might come in handy for finding sites.
Excellent blog post and slide deck about innovation, and how it's really the commercialization of invention rather than invention itself. Worth reading just for the onion/Gilette slides, but lots more good stuff in the rest of it.
A good summary of the Digital Economy Bill debacle as it was just rushed through Parliament. The (soon to be illegal?) mashup video is particularly nice.
Electronics and white-goods recycling place out in Tuebrook. Handy to know from both a getting rid of old computers and electronics, and an acquiring old stuff to rip apart point of view.
Interesting piece on career development and the problems with universities (and not just because I've accidentally been following that advice for years now ;-)
Found via Mel Starrs' delicious links, this isn't really a "mistakes I've made and how to avoid them" but more of a confession of continued failings. I'm bookmarking it not because I've learnt any new tips to help my work, but because I share a lot of these problems and it's good to know that others suffer from the same problems.
According to this analysis, US manufacturing is far from in decline, it's just manufacturing job numbers that are falling due to increased productivity. Would be interesting to see a similar version for the UK. The big question, that this doesn't seem to address at all, is what's going to provide the alternate employment for the workforce?
The speech that Ove Arup (the founder of engineering firm Arup) gave which outlines the companies aims and core values. A great blueprint for any company, I think.
Interesting specification for a way of providing signed comments and syndication of said comments to piggyback on an Atom feed. Lots of good links to other standards for doing signing, etc. too
A good way of thinking about the increasing enroachment onto our privacy of firms like Facebook and Google...
"What's happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It's what we use to pay for online services. Google charges nothing for Gmail; instead, it reads your e-mail and sends you advertisements based on keywords in your private messages.
[...]
The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they've created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service."
Interesting thoughts on how people might engage better with the planning of their cities, and wondering if there are better ways than just NIMBY-style actions to prevent change. How could people propose more developments that they would like, rather than just oppose plans that they don't like?
"Britain has plenty of things to worry about; it would be absurd to suggest the contrary. But the big ones are not sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. There is a statistically small class of people, including a number of underskilled young whites and Caribbeans, who are being left behind in a general march toward the light. Many of those who were already at the bottom of the pile are finding it impossible to get out from under and join in. And this is serious."
The Economist takes a detailed and thorough look at whether we do live in a "broken society" and finds that on the whole, we don't.
"New Southampton looks much the same as New Everywhere Else"
I was just going to add this link to my delicious stream, but I wanted to pull just that bit too much in the way of quotes out of it, and so figured a blog post was more suitable.
In From the Mill to the Mall, Owen Hatherley provides a lovely essay on lots of the problems with the retail park and shopping mall architecture and planning of the modern city. It's nominally about Southampton, but I was pointed to it by someone spotting the similarities with Birmingham, and obviously I can draw the comparisons with Liverpool (even down to the hugely busy but invisible container port and the civic architectural legacy from the White Star and Cunard lines)
"Jobs For Local People are no doubt the eventual result, and the alibi for the extremely profitable land deals. The result is a city devoid of any real civic pride, with a series of chain pubs where shops used to be, competing for cheap pints."
"(Southampton is lucky enough to have only one 'Quarter', though a Cultural Quarter has been promised for some time)" Indeed. Liverpool isn't so lucky, we have the Knowledge Quarter, which seems to overlap quite a lot with the Georgian Quarter, and in the centre of town is the Met Quarter (although maybe the council isn't responsible for that, as it's basically a shopping mall... At least the redevelopment around the Baltic Fleet pub is the Baltic Triangle.
At least our big city-centre shopping temple, Liverpool One, does a reasonable job of interfacing to the surrounding city - its walkways are covered rather than enclosed, so there's plenty of natural light and some exposure to the elements; there's some variety in the architectural styles; and the preservation (or recreation) of the original street pattern gives it some ebb and flow with the existing city. It's still a big shopping mall, full of chains that could be anywhere else and has privatised a huge chunk of the city centre, but it's in the centre and about as well done as you could hope for.
Gordon McLean has written an excellent post on his blog, entitled Why blogging is good, pointing to some of the conversation around the recent blog post from Clay Shirky claiming arrogance and lying can be useful traits. There are links to the discussion over on Gordon's post, so you should go and read them first because (1) they're good, and (2) I'm going to assume that you have for the rest of this post :-)
I was just going to comment on Gordon's post, but decided I should celebrate the fact that I've got a blog (even if I don't post to it as often as I'd like) and write my comment here.
Gordon says: "As for the issue being discussed in these posts I have to agree with Tom, particularly when he talks about how arrogance and confidence have a place in your “personality toolbox?, but the person who only has those tools is all the poorer for it. Unfortunately society, and certainly the workplace, still seem to favour people with confidence when what we should be doing is cutting through the noise to see what substance lies underneath."
I agree, but I also think that we should all strive to reach into our "personality toolboxes" for our arrogance and confidence in order to call "Bullshit" to dampen the "noise" when we can.
Nice project using a Bluetooth watch to display the times of the next buses. Hadn't realised you could get Bluetooth watches, could be a good option for future research into glanceable ubicomp.
Superb lecture about the management techniques and process at Pixar. Packed full of useful ideas and things to remember. Let's hope some of them have lodged in my brain somewhere
Good set of slides explaining some of the concepts behind 6LoWPAN, a version of IPv6 for very low power devices - sensors, etc., the usual ubicomp/Internet of Things sort of stuff.
Really interesting and thought-provoking discussion about the possible ethical and moral problems that services like Mechanical Turk might create. Not all doom-and-gloom, and with good examples of problems beyond the obvious "it's really poorly paid, so is like a sweatshop" concern.
We (the tech community in particular, along with wider society) need to have more of these sorts of discussions, and at least with this it's happening fairly early on in the adoption of the new technologies.
As well as being a detailed look at how a Porsche car was built back in the 60s, I love the insight you get into the production techniques - the specialised tools and jigs produced to make things easier (I have some similar but lower-tech versions for Bubblini) and the attention to measuring and documenting the car as it's built - the exact CC of each cylinder being marked on it for example.
A good summary of the different types of RFID technology about and what they can and can't do. Very good at helping you to understand the difference between the vague ideas about what could be possible, and what the limitations of the different solutions are.
Fantastic set of projects to encourage good behaviour by making doing the right thing more fun. Sounds all very worthy and dry but just go and watch the video of the World's Deepest Bin.
Step-by-step instructions for dismantling CD drives and which parts can be reused. Handy accompaniment to the vibrobots project as you can find most of the bits to build a vibrobot in a CD drive
Good to see the official Arduino board manufacturers are thinking about the environmental impact of the boards. Also good to see that they're not claiming that offsetting is a full solution, but it's heading in the right direction.
I didn't make it over for TEDx Leeds as sadly it was on the same day as the Art of Digital Learning Lab in Ulverston. This is a good write-up of the event, complete with links to each of the talks on YouTube. Think I'll be watching them when I get a spare twenty minutes.
Interesting story of one of the ways that ARUP tries (and seemingly succeeds) to maintain a good culture within the company. One bad apple really can spoil the whole bunch and it takes courage to oust them early, particularly if they seem to be talented.
Lots of interesting possibilities for further reuse of bits from printers. Obviously someone needs to work out what to do with the non-stepper-motor bits of a printer :-)
Internet-Connected Sonic Anemometer. You can measure wind speed and direction with some ultrasonic sensors. No moving parts. I've been wondering whether to see if the guys at the bombed out church would like one of these to let them show on their website whether St. Lukes will be open or not
A good summary of how putting on a uniform (or some sort) can help you overcome both your own shyness and others reticence to engage with you. I think "magic vest" is a great term for it.
An interesting approach to recovering from illness - Jane McGonigal devised a game to help her recover from concussion. There's an interesting comment from someone wondering what would happen if the technique was applied to the long-term unemployed. There must be some funding for someone to try that out.
A good explanation of how Pete Ashton used Twitter at the recent Supersonic Festival in Birmingham. Includes details of how he explained what was happening to festivalgoers (a screen showing recent tweets alongside printed instruction posters).
Write-up in the Liverpool Daily Post of the TEDxLiverpool event that was last Friday, including a quote from me and mention of both Bubblino and Howduino.
Very nice twitter visualisation, perfect for conferences and Barcamp-style events. Should've bookmarked this ages ago after we used it for #be2campnorth and #howduino
Freely downloadable book about wearable technologies - Lilypad, etc. Wasn't going to bookmark it until I'd read it, but as it's been a while now and I still haven't found time it's better to share now and worry if it's any good later :-)
Useful library of interface devices, materials, audio equipment, etc. - sure it will come in handy to mine when I've got some strange hardware project on the go
The programme of open days for various places around Liverpool has been published for this year. Now I just need to work out which ones I can make it along to
Surprisingly good (as it features me talking quite a bit :-) video taken at the recent Art of Digital Learning Lab 3 in Lancaster. I talk a bit about Arduino and then show off Bubblino
Cross-platform software to rip DVDs to AVI (or similar). Recommended on GeekUp, so keeping a note of it in case I want to use something like this in future (maybe if I get round to moving all my DVDs onto the media server)
Interesting-looking website gathering information about local councils (in this case Liverpool). The committee meetings calendar seems particularly useful stuff to surface. Of course, it could be that all this is already on the Liverpool City Council's own website somewhere...
Interesting project to build something to measure physical movement - it's intended that you'd just wear it as you go about your life, and then can do interesting stuff with the data captured. (via russelldavies)
Great idea to work out ways to overcome the myriad little problems that face organisations when trying to take advantage of new Web2.0 tools and social media
An essential tweak if you're using the Arduino IDE on Windows on a machine with Bluetooth. I used to have to wait around half-a-minute whenever I clicked on the "Tools" menu as it tried to connect to all the Bluetooth devices setup. With this fix the menu appears instantaneously!
"In 1986 Barnsley Council adopted an energy efficiency policy with a target of reducing energy consumption by 15% in 5 years. They actually achieved a reduction of 20% in 4 years." Well done Barnsley Council for showing the way forward.
Another Arduino and other bits supplier, based in Kent and selling solar panels to use to power your Arduino projects (although maybe only low current draw projects and maybe only 3.3V Arduinos like the Pro?)
Nice project by Landon Rohatensky, who's modified my Alertuino perl script to trigger his Arduino controlled teasmaid. It picks up the type of tea from a tweet, and that sets the time that the tea steeps before it is dispensed into the cup, ready to drink.
It turns out that a bike left unlocked in the centre of Liverpool lasted longer (nearly four hours) before being stolen than any of the other locations they tried, including London and Norwich
A great idea endeavouring to make different ways of getting together to achieve things easily legal. Hopefully will offer a simple menu of choices to make it easy to form co-ops, collectives and collaborative businesses.
The SCAXb, an Arduino-compatible board with XBee wireless on the board rather than on a separate shield. A cheaper way to get Zigbee comms with your Arduino projects
Eco-friendly printers based here in Liverpool. I used them for the Howduino posters - their prices seem comparable with anyone else, and their service was great.
Starting to collect Liverpool-related calendars to feed into an events feed for the city. Feel free to add any you find to delicious with tags Liverpool and Calendar
A good collection of ways to get started producing better designs in CSS if you're just a programmer rather than a designer. I've used some of the stuff in here, but it still contains lots of good ideas.
Interesting firmware for the popular Linksys WRT54G WiFi router. Would be useful if I get round to getting one to use to make Bubblino easier to hook up to a WiFi network (i.e. I could use this rather than a laptop as the Ethernet <-> WiFi bridge)
I didn't think ASBOs were particularly useful, but this report shows they can be effective.
I loved this quote:
"They all act like they are some sort of gangster and think they have power and drive flash cars but the reality is they all live at home with their mums."
Great use of the Open Street Map data to overlay all sorts of useful info about Sutton (part of London). Click on the "+" on the right and you can bring up things like recent planning applications, "fix my street" issues, local gyms...
The BBC's article about Maker Faire UK this past weekend in Newcastle. And yes, that is the same Adrian McEwen quoted about halfway through the article.
Lots of footage from the recent Maker Faire UK in Newcastle, all made by a local enthusiast and he's done a good job - although I am one of the few stands that he missed
A research paper analysing the usage patterns in an office to see how much energy could be saved when people aren't at their computers or in the office.
Interesting approach to bootstrapping product sales - Moq act as an escrow service to safeguard buyers money whilst letting manufacturers get solid sales figures to work out demand. Then once the Minimum Order Quantity is reached, the product can go into production.
Interesting web service which can analyze mp3s that you upload. If I ever get round to building my mood-jukebox project, I think I might be using this.
Interesting scheme for authenticating which websites are yours (or that you built), although it doesn't stop people attributing more things to you that you haven't actually done.
Phil Gyford has been experimenting with using his blog front page as a place to collect all of the "stuff" he does on the web. When I finally get round to redesigning McFilter, I want to do something similar.
Saving this for when my Tikitag starter kit arrives. I doubt I'll want everything to run through their servers, so working out how to bypass them will be handy
A bit of a rant, but a great summary of the potential problems of "cloud computing".
"this idea that ... a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you’re about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand."
I need to start playing around with some of this stuff, as that'll soon be the next step to take with Mazzini. Lots of useful discussion in the comments too
Delightful - an instructable detailing all the steps taken in boxing up an Arduino robot kit, from laser cutting components to weighing the bags of bolts to ensure there are enough in there. It also shows the fun you can have building custom machines with a laser cutter - all those clear plastic constructions remind me of Fraggle Rock!
A great collection of photos taken in Liverpool in the 80s. A real trip down memory lane for me - there's even one of the Albert Dock before it was done up, complete with the missing corner from where a bomb hit it in WW2
Very interesting approach to the business model for some hardware. Make everything open and transparent, including the markup. Then let people decide to DIY if they don't want to pay your margins.
One of the dilemmas of modern technology: the cost of storage makes it easier for more and more data to be collected and kept, and remembering things for us is a useful feature of computers - but should they remember everything for ever?
I think more people should be worrying about the answer to that. This paper proposes a good solution, where all data is given an expiry date and is deleted at that point.
I think there's scope for a more nuanced solution though, where data gets fuzzier over time. For a while it could be useful to know that I made a phonecall at 10:34am this morning, but in 10 years if I need to know at all then surely something like "early Jan 2009" would be close enough?
Tricky to implement, because remembering is such a hard task that deliberately forgetting feels very wrong, but I think we should be exploring what we do and don't want to keep for ever.
Great five-part series suggesting how we should develop politics and society. Lots of this resonating with the sorts of things I'd like to develop further.
Clamp to measure current flowing through a cable without cutting the cable. Sometime I'll get round to buying some and seeing if I can hook them up to an Arduino to build a variation on the CurrentCost, etc.
About half of these are within a couple of minutes walk of our flat. Excellent. Will have to try more of them out. The Quarter is good, and the Leaf Tea Shop was good for the Barcamp afterparty (although very limited in its range of beer), will have to try it for food sometime.
Cool new service showing you what's happening near where you live. Pulls in info from PlanningAlerts.com, FixMyStreet.com as well as things like Upcoming, BBC News, and even things that users have added.
"a subscription to a magazine about taekwondo will only be as useful as your decision to drag your fat ass into a dojo and start actually kicking people. Over and over. Otherwise, you’re just buying shiny paper every month."
Great to see Merlin back on form. I'm glad I didn't unsubscribe during his dip. Go read it.
32 minute trip down memory lane, or the ultimate game of "Name that tune"? I'll let you decide, but this mp3 of the first 10 seconds of every number one from the 80s is cool
In my limited experience, getting HTML emails working across the different email services is a nightmare. This is a good (and exhaustive-looking) comparison of which CSS elements work on which email clients
"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.". It often surprises me that I ended up blogging, given that I spent my A-levels and degree trying to get away from writing essays.
Last month the BBC website had a series of articles about the problems with the sorts of numbers and statistics oft bandied about by people and the media. They're well worth a read, even if it just means you'll never trust a number in a news report again...
I last went for a drink in the Geldart when it was a slightly seedy local, good if you wanted a game of pool, or to watch the not-quite-legal-Norweigan-satellite-feed Premiership football, but other than that nothing special. It's main claim to fame in those days was the pretty-much-daily lock-ins which meant it was about the only place to get a drink after hours in pre-liberal-licensing Cambridge.
The lock-ins were clamped down upon and stopped well before the late licences were brought in, and the Geldart went back to oft-overlooked and neglected residential pub.
Tomorrow, however, all that is set to change. My mate Elvis (no, really, that is his name) has left his role as manager of the excellent Kingston Arms in order to branch out on his own and will be relaunching The Geldart under a new guise.
The pub has been completely refitted and refurbished and will be serving good beer and good food in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. There'll be the usual Guiness and a couple of lagers on tap, but the main focus will be a good range of ales.
I had a sneak peek round the place a couple of weeks ago, and it's looking very good. Sadly the beers hadn't arrived (mainly because they'd have gone off otherwise), so I didn't get to sample the drinks. Nor did I get to try the food, which I'm intrigued to try because in addition to the usual pub fare there'll be "hot rocks" where you get to cook the food yourself at the table on, guess what, a heated rock.
The grand opening is tomorrow, Saturday 9th August from 6pm 'til late.
An interesting website and competition from the UK government to encourage new ideas for opening up public data. Includes some interesting pointers to other data sources too
Online course notes for a from-complete-novice electronics and electricity course. A first glance seems a little too basic for what I'd like, but you never know.
"It shows that people do care. They do care about the world they live in. They just don't care about party politics." Interesting essay on the state of British politics from the leader of the Lib Dems.
On the strength of watching this I'll be buying "In Defence of Food". To be healthy, shop round the edges of the supermarket (or better still, not in a supermarket at all)
Useful collection of charts and different ways to visualize datasets, and it lets you choose what it is you're trying to display and gives suggestions for the types of chart to use.
A paper from the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems looking at how 35 American households have embraced green technology and environmentalism
An "open festival". What an interesting idea - choose a week or so for the events to happen, and let the community organise their own events for it, promoting each other under the banner of the festival.
Interesting web service to help fund small projects. Propose a project that you need funding, then people can pledge money to fund it; if you get enough pledges then you get the cash, otherwise everyone who pledged gets a refund.
Interesting article about the economic return on installing solar electricity panels. Upshot is that the return on solar PV can be better than a bank account.
Interesting site letting you swap books with others (and it even works if there isn't a direct swap - i.e. where you have a book the other wants and vice versa). Think I'll stick to just posting my old books to a friend, but might investigate further in
Russell has announced the date that tickets go on sale for Interesting2008. I'm not going as I'll still be here in Italy, but would be otherwise. When's Interesting2009...?
Will be off to these guys sometime soon to buy a soldering iron and some other bits and bobs. Much consulting with the English-Italian dictionary beforehand I expect...
A free book putting figures to the question of whether the UK can provide all its energy sustainably, written by a professor from Cambridge Uni physics department.
Found this archive of the BBC's Reith Lectures whilst looking for the one Richard Rogers gave in 1995. Unfortunately that one isn't online, but I'll be having a listen to some of the others over the next few days.
Been looking for more info on Richard Rogers since watching the Imagine programme about him - this is the report generated by the Urban Task Force that includes him as a member. It discusses ways for cities to evolve and be revitalised.
Great thread on Ask MeFi about songs for guitar. Superb links to some "books of chords", which will save me trawling through ultimate-guitar.com looking for stuff I want to play
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by Prince Charles giving a speech about climate change, but I am impressed at how well he puts the problems across. I hope it has some effect.
Useful collection of articles about how to create digital art - sound, graphics, hacking together bits of hardware to control things... Lots of links to other bits of software and hardware
Long, detailed exploration of what the street of the near-future could look like, from Dan Hill. Written as a narrative through the lives of the users of an imagined "smart" street.
"Have your say about the future of Channel 4". Good to see this if C4 are serious about engaging with people about what they should be doing. Get rid of Big Brother would be my first suggestion... ;-)
A collection of videos imagining what a sustainable life could be like. It's an interesting and novel approach, which is trying to show people that green could be normal.
How to get cool mouse-gesture goodness on Linux. Shame I'm using Windows for my laptop, the number of times I've tried to use the Firefox gestures outside the browser...
Danah puts a great argument for treading carefully when building Facebook-like services. Unfortunately, history shows that the geeks will likely ignore her, because they can.
The latest service from the superb mysociety.org - you give them your email address and postcode, and they email you whenever there's a planning application in your area.
Every now and then I end up playing with different video formats and never know what software to use or how to convert from one to another. Lots of info here on how to do so.
Haven't played with this yet, but it looks like a much cooler and more finished version of what I was trying to do with the New Music Radio project to listen to mp3 blogs
Cool video of people doing parkour round some of Cambridge. Very impressive, as this flinging yourself off buildings in a controlled manner always seems to be.
Interesting property website. Very Web2.0 with google maps overlays giving you rough property prices for areas, and also has lots of data available about how much properties have been sold for and when - even goes as far back as my house in Cambridge (in
Forums for the community of people who enjoy exploring strange and deserted urban areas. Lots of photos of interesting old industrial sites, like the United Glass silos in St. Helens, or the docks in Liverpool.
Well, at least I'll have some time to get through some of my reading list before I'm next in Liverpool... then this place looks like it'll be worth a browse round.
The fun way to understand the problem of climate change. It's like someone took the Stern Review and condensed it into a 10-minute video with funny hats and explosions!
My reading list is already far too long, but I think there are some good recommendations here. Maybe when I get through my current glut of marketing tomes...
Lots of good looking form goodness. Always useful to find out better ways of formatting and displaying forms - they seem one of the trickier bits of HTML to get to look good.
And now something to lighten the mood. An excellent idea for a game where you scrawl on the "page" with a "crayon" and your drawings become physical objects that move a ball around... oh, just watch the video.
If the terrorists want to use fear to disrupt and affect our lives then, with the continued ridiculous measures from the government, haven't they succeeded?
The video of a presentation given by Dan Germain of Innocent smoothies fame. An honest and passionate talk about the business and getting started as an entrepreneur.