When I run, I have a piezo in my shoe. In conjunction with a wireless receiver, my height, weight and some very clever maths, my ipod can work out how fast I’m going by the force and frequency of signals from the piezo. I get a graph of my run at the end, which is [...]

As well as working for Pixel-Lab, I occasionally do bits for Mudlark, who held a launch event in Birmingham last Friday.
It sparked off a lot of thoughts about communications, which I’ve written up for them here.
There were a few definitions given of the term post-digital, including Matt defining it as “a state in which we [...]

I made these, and finished them for the Epilog competition Instructables are running. They’re controlled by an arduino mini reading a rotary potentiometer to determine how many of them to switch on:

I’m still very much a newbie with both a soldering iron and a compiler, but I’m finding both more comprehensible than I expected. How [...]

(This is written for Russell Davies’ Lyddle End 2050 project. The photos are all of models I made for it, and you can also see them as a set on Flickr).

We’ve lived through a lot of futures and most of them, we didn’t see coming. We’ve imagined many more, and I have a lot of [...]

While 3D printing will remain the territory of geeks and tinkerers for quite a while to come, an impressive step was achieved with the RepRap last week: It can now print its own components. Not quite full self replication, in the sense of a second, fully assembled printer appearing end on out of a first, [...]

Trying to watch TED talks is like standing in front of a firehose. I like it when people point me to a particularly interesting one, and this 10 minute one by Joshua Klein on crows is fascinating:

Among the more startling things in the talk:
Crows can figure out a problem and create a tool to surmount [...]

There are a few things I once hated and reactively avoided, but now grudgingly accept as mud from which I can grab occasional nuggets of precious metal.
Celebrity gossip:
I still steer well clear of most of this. It is utterly irrelevant to me that footballer X, pop star Y or model Z have cancer, are giving [...]

Just tried to sign up for the last round of tickets for BarCamp London 4, and they ran out in less than a minute, before I’d even got down the reg form. Friends who were trying to register didn’t even get to see the form.
I went to BarCamp London 2 in Feb 07, and it [...]

Speaking of Instructables, I only just found out the Looty I made a while back hit MAKE last month, with Jim Woodring also making a post about it.

This time at Cebit 08. Details are scant on who’s behind this one and what tech it uses (FTIR would be possible I guess but easily confused if it’s as transparent as it appears to be. Maybe a capacitance sensing mesh sandwiched with the glass?), but it’s nice to see something this big looking so [...]

This raised one of my eyebrows today:
“The couture houses of Paris have grown accustomed to requests from film stars to borrow their latest designer dresses, but now they are being inundated with requests from a new quarter – France’s female politicians.
Eager to look their best in the court of Nicholas Sarkozy, where appearance is often [...]

Currently, I’m writing a response to the Byron Review for my employer, and a part of that involves looking at the risks of virtual worlds.
One which very few people seem to be thinking about is that many of them conflate self worth with shopping:
If you’re a parent, I would be much less concerned about things [...]

This work by Johnny Chung Lee interests me in the same way FTIR touch screens do:

Creating events that work with intuitive gestures may prove to be a challenge, as wiggling a finger doesn’t seem like the tidiest input or the most natural. I suppose that’s workable with interpretation of twitches though, and even if not, [...]

I’m getting a new kind of spam from Facebook, and unlike the endless notifications, as yet, it can’t be turned off.
For the past 6 months of so, I’ve found Facebook to be a very good, spam free way of keeping in touch with people. On signing up, I liked that pretty much everything there was [...]

James Howard Kunstler is very passionate, and perhaps a little too dogmatic, about urban design. He is also hilariously savage about bad examples. This talk is about pathogenic environments, and is worth watching even for the criticism alone: