Just finished a really pleasant seminar yesterday at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the Univeristy of Nottingham. “TEL” in the title refers to Technology enhanced learning. I’ve been trying to unpick the connections between making and hacking and TEL for a while now and appreciate any comments of suggestions in this area. There’s streaming …
Category Archive: Uncategorized
Apr 16
Kuler is cooler
Mar 24
(Power)Pointed Humour
Presentation graphics packages like PowerPoint have always been slightly irritating to me. Although they can make it easy to present ideas, this doesn’t mean that the presentation will be meaningful to an audience. Information design heavyweight Edward Tufte has offered scathing critiques of presentation software and argues that they lead to a different kind of …
Feb 24
iPhone stereo line-in to mic Adapter
Recently, as part of an iPhone development project I’ve been working on with the Institute of Zoology and Birkbeck, I had a need for an audio line in adapter so that we’d be able to record stereo audio from an audio sensor. The application tags audio data with GPS information as part of a citizen-scientist …
Jan 02
Happy New Year!
Well, it’s 2010 and what a harsh decade it has been! To ring in the New Year on a positive note, I harvested an old edge-lit display mechanism from my stores and lit it up with a few LEDs and an Arduino. I used a simple pulse-width modulation (PWM) routine to do the fading. It’s …
Nov 25
Spacehoppers are go!
I’ve been working with my colleagues on a project for SonyEricsson around the release of their latest mobile phones series (Satio and Aino). The project involves using twitter to inflate a warehouse full of spacehoppers on a live webcam. The hoppers will be “released in the wild” as part of the product launch, and tweeters …
Nov 25
The Backchannel Beast
Just read Danah Boyd’s excellent blog post on the twitter “backchannel” phenomenon and the difficulty it presents for speakers who are placed in a very awkward position. Her extremely negative experience at Web2.0 Expo illustrates how difficult it is for public speakers to cope with live (and often unmoderated) twitterstreams onstage behind them. The shift …
Aug 04
Move over, RepRap
Wow. It had to happen, of course. Shapeways have developed 3D printing in a material other than resin or polymer, the traditional materials for rapid prototyping physical objects. They can do it in stainless steel! The magic isn’t toooo surprising though, as they use the same techniques. Stainless steel dust is fused into a solid …
