Scraplab

I always enjoy reading other people's weeknotes. It seems like a good excuse for maintaining writing momentum, without needing to think too hard. So here's mine.

I almost started writing them at the end of last week, but it was a terrible week for a variety of minor reasons. So, rather than start on a grumpy note, here's a good week: week 47 of self-employment.

Monday was busy, trying to wrangle software for BERG's El Morro project. I'm helping out for a few days doing dark things with some software that never quite expected this to be done to it. I'm just a small cog in this project, but I'm looking forward to seeing the product in action.

Also, it smelt like spring.

Tuesday was an bitty day, catching up with Newspaper Club, fixing some bugs, getting a haircut, writing a presentation, and generally hanging around The BRIG until catching a train in evening to Ipswich with Tinker.it to help run a workshop.

On Wednesday I woke at 5:30am in a Holiday Inn, and somehow managed to be coherent enough to give a talk to some senior business folk about cloud computing and hardware hacking at 8am. The rest of the day was a satisfying whirlwind of teaching and making. All to be shared in due course.

Thursday: early breakfast with the team, coffee, coffee, lunch, office, won our Designs of the Year category, did the dishes, bed.

Friday: There was a lot of sun and laughter in the office. Champagne lunch, thanks to Matt. It was a great day.

I'm enjoying the mix of work at the moment. I regularly write code in four or five different languages. I do things ranging from what I think people call design, to writing code, to handling support requests and doing businessy stuff. I'm not overwhelmed, but I'm comfortably busy. I've got space to think and breathe, but I'm never without things to get on with. This feels healthy.

Week 48 awaits.

In the future, maybe by the year 2010, our watches will be able to tell us when the next bus is coming.

This is my Sony Ericsson MBW-150 bluetooth watch, showing the next few SF Muni bus arrival times for a nearby stop. The code to fetch the arrival times is running on my Droid phone, and communicating with the watch using Marcel Dopita’s OpenWatch software for the Android platform.

Smart stuff by Joe Hughes.

It still amazes me that with the Practical Application of Codes and Pictures, 1145 lines of gobbledegook and 554KB of compressed images can be turned into this:

I mean, that's fucking magic.

I might be wrong, but right now, and in lieu of a better alternative: Atomkraft? Ja Bitte.

Also: SVG, EPS, AI

No idea where the original "Nein, Danke" logo came from, so it seems cheeky to license this as anything other than public domain.

A circular from the Civil Aviation Authority (PDF), picked up byChris Fleming on the OSM Talk-GB mailing list:

NOTIFICATION OF GPS JAMMING TRIALS - NORTH SCOTLAND 16-27 NOVEMBER 2009.The purpose of this Circular is to give notification of the trial to be performed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) Air Warfare Centre, in which Global Positioning System (GPS) signals will be intentionally jammed.

Date: 16-27 November 2009.Time: A maximum of 6, fifteen minute periods between 1100 and 1500.Location: The trial uses a 500 Watt airborne jammer at 10000 ft amsl, transmitting to the west along a 50 nm flight path on a 270° T radial from Kirkwall, Orkney Islands. The aircraft will fly between two points, situated at a distance of 10 nm and 60 nm from Kirkwall.

Infrastructure is only noticed when it's not there. Failure, simulated or not, is sometimes the only way to remind us what we smother ourselves in.

Tomorrow: leaving my phone at home.

Yesterday, slightly quicker than expected, the Noticings iPhone app went on sale. It does one thing well, and that's getting your photos onto Flickr with all the metadata required for Noticings.

There's been lots of chat about the App Store recently, specifically about the approval process. I was prepared for the worst, especially since the application reads the photos directly out of the /private/mobile directory to get access to the original EXIF metadata which the UIImagePickerController doesn't provide. It's not a private API, but I could see how it might be contentious.

Thankfully, my experience was smooth and painless. I submitted the app on 6th November, but resubmitted on the 11th with a bug fix. And it went on sale on the 18th. My contract and approval for paid applications was very quick and didn't involve having to sign or fax any paperwork. Quite impressed really.

No-one is going to get rich off it, but hopefully it'll provide a small revenue stream for Noticings, enough to keep the server bills paid and the game ticking over.

This noise, this screeching, whining noise, has forever embedded itself in my auditory system as the sound of amazing things happening.

First, the long screech of the handshake; two machines sizing each other up. Questions asked and answered. Decisions made.

With both satisfied, the stuttering chatter. Quick as you can, what we have to say is too important to waste with frivolities.

In the silence — both machines process their exchange across the ether.

Somewhere, a bit flips. We repeat.

Update: Thanks to Chris for letting me know that, of course, Toshiba shamelessly ripped this advert off Simon Faithfull's Escape Vehicle — which even has the original screeching noise.

I forgot to mention that Clarke now works on Snow Leopard, using that Core Location cleverness. Which might make it the first app in the wild to do so, although I'm sure someone will tell me it's not.

People have asked me to add support for Google Latitude, mapme.at, or Brightkite and all those things. I don't use them, but the source code is on Github, and I'm happy to merge changes back in. If you want to update your Twitter location automatically, EagleTweet will do the trick.

The only thing I still want to add is the ability to ping a URL of your choice when your location changes. For those home/office automation tricks.

And yes, I know the menu icon is still in colour. It's on Ben's voluminous todo list.

It's Autumn. The leaves are dropping, just like the temperature. Which means it's time for Bike Hero. Somewhat inspired by this video, Bike Hero is a game to be played in your head whilst cycling along leafy paths and lanes.

The objective of the game is to run over as many leaves as possible. The faster the better. Every leaf that makes an audible crunch, soft or loud, is a point. You lose points for crashing into cars, pedestrians or park benches. As many as you feel is necessary.

A typical level might look something like this:

And a good route through it would probably be something like this:

Now, obviously it's not as simple as that. There are traps to be avoided. You might think this is a good section to aim for. Lots of leaves, prime for crunching. But you'd be wrong. There's a drain cover just under those leaves, perfect for wiping out on.

But if you do there's always an opportunity to make up some points with a bonus section like this:

Or an extra dangerous drunken night mission (double points):

There's a limited window in which to play Bike Hero every year, so make the most of it while you still can. Happy crunching.

For a while Tom Armitage and I have been kicking around the idea of a game called Noticings. Recently we managed to find the time to build a simple version of it, and a few of our friends have been playing it for a few weeks. It seems to be going OK, so yesterday I took the password off and opened it to the world.

From our about page:

Cities are wonderful places, and everybody finds different things in them. Some of us like to take pictures of interesting, unusual, or beautiful things we see, but many of use are moving so fast through the urban landscape we don't take in the things around us.

Noticings is a game you play by going a bit slower, and having a look around you. It doesn't require you change your behaviour significantly, or interrupt your routine: you just take photographs of things that you think are interesting, or things you see. You'll get points for just noticing things, and you might get bonuses for interesting coincidences.

If you spot something interesting, take a photo of it and upload it to Flickr, tagged with 'noticings' and some geodata. Each day is a turn, and photos from the day get pulled in at 3pm GMT the following day, giving you time to upload them and tag them properly.

We're starting very simple. There are two rules:

Slowly, as the game evolves we'll add new, more exciting rules and tweak the old ones. Perhaps extra points for venturing out at lunchtime every day for a week, or for spotting things along lines of latitude or longitude. Who knows? It's part art, part psychogeography, part city discovery engine. You can keep up with the changes on the blog.

We'd love it if you gave it a go, and even more if you let us know your thoughts (email is probably best).

Update: Tom has jotted down some his thoughts, expressing the goal much better than I.