Archive for 2007

Hardcore Hardware Hacking Weekend

July 9th, 2007  |  Published in Uncategorized

If you’ve seen me talk at a conference recently (perhaps XTech or ApacheCon Europe) you’ll know that I’m very interested in what happens when the coders who made the web get to script the real world. Cheap and powerful hardware prototyping is now within the reach of anyone who can code a webapp or configure a Unix box.

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20:20 talk on hardware hacking for software people

May 19th, 2007  |  Published in Uncategorized

I just got back from XTech 2007 in Paris. It was an excellent conference this year and I’m really proud of having contributed in a small way by being on the programme committee. Every year the speaker lineup gets better and better.

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ApacheCon Europe 2007 keynote

May 7th, 2007  |  Published in hardware

Last Friday I had the great privilege of giving a keynote talk at the ApacheCon Europe conference in Amsterdam. My topic was the new possibilities for software hackers coming from cheap, scriptable hardware prototyping. I illustrated the path from the desktop via my work in Second Life, and showed how it translates into physical computing.

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Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr

April 27th, 2007  |  Published in misc

For the last couple of months I’ve been working on a new project in my spare time. Dopplr is a social network for frequent travellers, designed to increase the amount of serendipity in the world. It lets you share your travel plans with your trusted fellow travellers, and uses them to find the coincidences, near-misses and surprises. Maps, mobile, timelines, feeds, calendars: you can have the information pretty much any way you want it.

Dopplr’s still invite only, but there’s a good chance you know someone with an account by now. We’ll be issuing new invite tokens from time to time, so keep an eye out. There are some screenshots on Flickr, and alpha travellers Stowe Boyd and Roo Reynolds have written some illuminating reviews. I’ll be at XTech in Paris in May (don’t forget, online registration closes soon) so track me down and I’ll give you a demo.

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Conferences 2007, Part One

February 27th, 2007  |  Published in events

I’m on the road again. On Thursday March 1st I’m flying to San Francisco and I’ll be in the USA for the whole month.

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Back from Kiwifoo

February 12th, 2007  |  Published in events

I’ve just got back from another big trip. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks in New Zealand, thanks to Nat Torkington and the kind sponsorship of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. Not only did I get to attend NZ Foo Camp, but NZTE’s John Houlker arranged for me to meet with representives of Auckland and Wellington’s media, software and archiving interests.

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Connecting First and Second Life

January 11th, 2007  |  Published in hardware

I’ve been interested for some time in the possibilities offered by bringing external data into virtual environments like Second Life. This data might come from the web, but it could also come from the real world – from physical sensors and interfaces.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve enjoyed playing with the Arduino hardware prototyping board. This week’s open-sourcing of the Second Life client came at exactly the right time for a new experiment.

Here’s a video demonstration (people reading the feed, start your web browsers). On the left you’ll see an Arduino reading analogue values from a potentiometer and feeding the results in via the USB-serial interface to my Mac. On the right, you’ll see a modified version of Second Life that is feeding those values in via my avatar’s chat channel. An object in the Second Life world is reacting, with perhaps a half-second lag.

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