Saw already twice (Joi’s and Matt Jones’s) this morning a link to Mission Bicycles, an interesting project just started where you can design your own bike, that starts as a “light steel frame fixed gear bike with high quality components, a custom paint job, no visible branding”.
That reminded me of Stefano and SlyWay, an Italian bike design studio I’ve been involved with in their early stages of, a few years ago. I went to check the website and I’m glad to see it now features several videos and models.
They still focus on the recumbent concept but apparently have several different “interpretations” of it. Quite cool!
I need to nag them though for the absence of microformats and whatsoever form of interaction on the website (well, there is a network, but pretty static). However on youtube you can find a few videos… enjoy! :)
Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it.
Although they had no experience in coding, the task of each participant was to make a mod (modified version) of a game built in Processing.
well, actually “just” 56. 56 archetypical geeks that Scott Johnson illustrated and aggregated in this poster as well as making them available as individual portraits (prints also available here).
Seeing this poster made me remember a conversation had a long time ago with Lilia and Phil Wolff on the many natures (or many types) of geeks (yes since you can be an art geek, or social science geek, a mind geek and so on…).
Boing Boing reports about RFID Guardian, a personal RFID firewall.
The Guardian is a personal device that operates by detecting the RFID tags on your person (keys, passport, bank cards) and jamming them so that they cannot communicate and answer queries anymore. If you prefer a network analogy, it’s a firewall for your RFID-accessible data.
It’s fascinating how media, being an extension to our bodies, require similar practices: people used to customize their computer and cellphones as they buy clothes for themselves, and now that RFID tags embody intimate/private details of our being, the need arises to create proper “underwear” for this data.
Good thing is, schematics for knitting this underwear is freely available and documented on a wiki ;)
Last night I attended the second San Lorenzo dinner in London.
This time the focus was on cheese, of which we tasted a very impressive selection, paired with different types of honey and the usual generous quaff of piedmont wine (oh, Barbera, my love! :) but also Nebbiolo, Gavi to end with a sweet Moscato).
So that is much all I’ll say about the food: it’s just awesome and you should try to get the chance to taste it, the sooner the better.
One interesting thing I noticed during the evening, is that the people around the table took on a curious yin-yang configuration: the “anglo-saxons” on one side, with our Italian host Sara in the middle, and the continental/latins on the other end, with a cheerful london foodblogger in the middle. Two separate conversations, two different rythms, the same unifying context and texture.
Good old Babele posted a video (in Italian) of the iAble, the office suite totally controlled through eye tracking developed at SRLabs (the last Italian company I worked with before moving to the UK).
…improving the experience of… city users! In particular, of pedestrian underpasses.
Why do I blog this?: two reasons. The disclaimer here is that Ana, one of the Secret Path group members, is our new designer @ Headshift! So this is a sort of welcome :)
The other reason is that I found this installation quite entertaining and clever, although I still have some concerns about walking slowly through an underpass in south London, that is.
But seriously, what I like here is the use of an interactive installation that is not meant to shock the audience or to augment the space around the user, but rather to create a small entertainment bubble where the person stops being a user to become a natural (as in unaware) player.
★★★☆☆ By W. Gibson and B. Sterling (1990) The adventures of a few improbable heroes set in a Victorian London, where lord Byron is leading the country with the aid of steam powered computers. Not the best book I read from either Gibson or Sterling, but surely an interesting exercise in storytelling and alternative world creation, and also a quite entertaining reading.
Usually these days I don’t blog about new websites that much, but I wanted to drop in a note about the new kid on the block: sketchcast.
Yet another surrogate of blogging, you say. Oh-no just a mash-up of blogs, podcast and screencast, you say.
Well, yes… and no.
There is an interesting difference: if you ever tried to record a podcast, you’ll know that it requires a lot of effort (well, at least at the beginning); it needs to have a good rhythm, you’ll probably need a background music, eliminate the “blanks”, adjust the volume swings and your own pitch. All of this because, despite the fact that the audio channel has a broader bandwidth than text, only a minimal part of it is used to actually transmit the content (the rest being filled of different types of signals). So what happens normally when we need to explain a concept to an audience? We switch to (or, better, support the audio with) visual: gestures, video, drawings.
That’s where sketchcast stands: broadening the communication channel between source and audience, without requiring the technology (and effort) needed for producing real video.
And yes, I know that a screencast with a paint program in the background would have been the same, I’m not praising the website, but the media (and it’s a media I haven’t seen exploited so far).
That said, it’s clear that the right formula for a “portable” solution is yet to be found, since sketchcast, as you can see below, is pretty unusable on a laptop :)
Some text will go here explaining who am I and so on.
For the time being, just Google me.
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