Scraplab

A few months back I donated £25 to Resonance 104.4 FM (wikipedia), because they're awesome and poor. Mostly I listen to The Bike Show, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It recently had a great double bill on the history and future of the Moulton, which I thoroughly recommend if you enjoy tales of 60s British engineering and "the bicycle as architecture on wheels".

Anyway, I got an email back a few days ago, completely out of the blue.

Dear Tom,

Thanks very much for your generous donation. We are currently putting up some not very glamorous but necessary and useful shelving in the studio, so this donation came in very handy.
Best wishes
Ed

Lovely. No boiler plate, just short and sweet. Put a smile on my face, and reminds me that they still need to spend money on stuff like finding somewhere to put their files, and it's not all about studios and expensive mixing desks.

Funding for core activities is always tricky for charities. Funders and grant givers always want outcomes and deliverables and smiling children, and there's never any money left over for post-it notes or little things like salaries.

Perhaps more charities should project a less glamorous image, and remind us that they still have to do all the boring stuff that everyone does at work. And perhaps then we wouldn't have such unreasonable expectations.

Sponsor a filing cabinet, sir?

Saturday saw the inaugural papercamp prototype, which was excellent. Jeremy and Matt have already written up overviews, and there's lots of photos and that.

For me, one of the best things about it was just how fresh it all felt. Compared to a standard web (un)conference where everyone knows their space, expertise and opinions, here lots (most?) of us were exploring stuff outside of our day job and business-as-usual. It was passionate and interesting and I felt completely out of my depth, which was was great.

So in 2009, less of the comfort zone stuff please, and more like this.

I wrote some stuff about the microprinter project that I quickly demoed at Papercamp. There's video, pictures and code, and if you're savvy enough it should be all you need to build one yourself. Which is what some people have already started doing.

Another example of Radio 4 at its best. Neo urbanism and the shifting spatial fix, Jane Jacobs, patina and "muddle", the decline and rebirth of Detroit, urban naturalism, the Toyota Production System, mass decentralisation, creativity and the problem with the "squelchers".

It's available for another five days.

When I was younger, every now and again, my grandmother would cut out an interesting article from a newspaper or magazine, and post it to me. Usually they were about a great feat of British engineering, what with me being a boy and engineering being a good, wholesome, boy activity.

Anyway, it was great, and at the time I didn't really repay the favour enough. Nowadays, I stumble across things that I'd like to send her, except today it doesn't involve quickly tearing, folding and stuffing. Instead, it involves docking with USB cables, leaky printer ink and empty paper trays, because most of the stuff I'd like to send her I read online. The energy required to push data into matter always seems a bit much for what is a fleeting thought, and I never manage to do so.

Most of the interesting stuff I've read ends up in my delicious feed, which got me thinking. Perhaps someone could build a service that does the following:

And, I've probably got most of this working, albeit manually, including the beginnings of a Ruby API for Viapost, and an algorithm for selecting the main content on a page. Unfortunately, the PDF generation stuff uses a piece of software that costs $3800 for the server license, which is a bit of a limiting factor, but I'm sure that someone serious about this will find a better way.

Anyway, this won't get anyone rich, but it's easy(ish) to build, and perhaps it could be part of a growing breed of products that bridge the world of analogue and digital natives by playing to each others' strengths.