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 [...]

My attitudes toward music have changed drastically in the past few years, in several ways. It’s become so easy to obtain digital music, and squeezing it onto mobile devices so convenient over physical media, that I’ve bought more music, been exposed to more music, and seen more live shows in the past few years than [...]

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 [...]

It’s seldom I see something and think “I must blog this immediately”, but this post at Fabbaloo is provoking me to smile, and giving me that intense, floaty sense of futurism becoming the present.
I’m also going to break my normal blogging code and quote nearly the whole thing:
Yes, 3D printing has produced pre-fab replacement homes [...]

I’ve been noticing more and more the keen divide between my life led online and my life led in meatspace, and am getting interested in ways to close the gap, especially in public.
I had some laptop stickers printed saying “Hello there. Yes you. Just because I’m using a laptop at this table, that doesn’t mean [...]

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, [...]

I’ve been asked to deliver a keynote at Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer. Provided everything goes to plan, this post will be automatically published while I’m giving the talk.
Slides and a written version of the talk can be found at the Pixel-Lab site or a few entires on in this blog. For now, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This is interesting. Our brains conserve energy on a very basic level, much like emotionally driven motivations that (ideally) impel us to seek the highest value for the lowest investment of energy and time, and reflexes automating things that first require much practice.
Monotonous duties switch our brain to “rest mode”, whether we like it or [...]