Crouching Badger

“I don’t know, Donna, just wail something… ‘I...

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:25:16 +0100

“I don’t know, Donna, just wail something… ‘I feel love’? Anything, really, I’m just trying to get this bassline right. No, listen, it’s harder than it sounds.”

In memory of Donna Summer.

http://musicthing.blogspot.co.uk/2004/12/moroder-week-pt-1-i-didnt-know-he-did.html

Drones on the internet on a stick bathed in GPS watching you...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:22:00 +0100

Drones on the internet on a stick bathed in GPS watching you with video and machine vision and sniffing you with sensors. New aesthetic, yeah?

Made with Paper

What Trollstigen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollstigen)...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:49:22 +0100

What Trollstigen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollstigen) might look like if you were tied to a pole on top of a car driving at 320mph.

I reckon NRK should commission this. I’d watch it.

I fell off Dom from Muse's skateboard

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:15:00 +0000

rockandrolltedium:

One 1990s summer evening in our cul-de-sac in Teignmouth, I got off my Raleigh Grifter and had a go on Dom’s skateboard.

15 seconds later I was on my arse nursing a grazed elbow, my skateboarding career in tatters.

After that we went and played on my Amiga until he had to go home.

by @crouchingbadger

BBC? O RLY?

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:41:25 +0000

BBC? O RLY?

Photo

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 21:24:05 +0100

Questions about 3D Printing

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:27:00 +0100

How long before toy manufacturers go for the “3D printed look” to cash in on the trend?

Is 3D printed jewellery the epitome of Pokemonetisation? When will 3D printed jewellery trend and what pokemonesque combination will it take to go mass-market?

But can 3D printing be mass-market? Isn’t it the home-made within-your-grasp nature of 3D printing that’s popular? What about the professional end of 3D printing that’s always at the leading edge of the possible?

Watch Jointed Jewels by Roosmarijn Pallandt for byAMT Studio on Vimeo.

If home printing is killing retail, will the money move to creating and transporting the masses of resin-y stuff we’re making these trinkets out of? Can we make that out of renewables? Out of waste products?

Will we get visits from Selective Laser Sinterklaas delivering presents?

Photo

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:34:08 +0100

Corgi Swingball

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:01:53 +0100

A new sport introduced for the Diamond Jubilee/2012 Olympics - Corgi Swingball.

Fjord Transit “Yes, he’s in his office, but...

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 23:48:00 +0100

Fjord Transit

“Yes, he’s in his office, but he’s on an intergalactic cruise” —from Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Imagine a five day TV marathon covering a cruise around the Norwegian coast. This is Hurtigruten, a traditional midsummer cruise televised by NRK the Norwegian national broadcaster, producing a landscape porn masterpiece by transmitting every last minute of the journey from Bergen on the west coast to Kirkenes in the far northeast of the country, about 5 miles from the Russian border, and about 793 miles from the nearest Starbucks.

As the ship passed through the lower fjords people came to wave. Hei Mamma! At the harbours people wave flags and jump about like fools on Children In Need night. Boaters swarm around, waving and talking into mobiles so they know when to wave. It seems like a national event, but acknowledging the rest of the country, studiously ignoring the capital.

“It’s like visiting some natives, only the natives are wearing Berghaus and hats” —Scott

Of the many remarkable things about this fjordwatch is the breadth of media they’re using, from a detailed and interactive (ie. Rewindable) map of the cruise to the chat room and radar tabs. Even more ridiculously brilliant is the periodically uploaded torrent files of the camera views. NRK have set a competition for the best remix of the data, which will eventually include data from the ship’s systems, and offer a pretty good prize of about €1000 travel vouchers.

But beyond the cult following from us geeks, there’s something gently soothing about listening to the sea and watching a ship’s bow bob up and down in the midnight sun, punctuated by awful folk music and enthusiastic locals living in the far north being visited by national telly one sunny midnight. This is true reality TV. Hello, world!

Word-lens - real-time text-recognition. It’s a bit wobbly...

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 23:21:17 +0000

Word-lens - real-time text-recognition. It’s a bit wobbly and underpowered at the moment, but this is state-of-the-art.

It gave me a daft idea: ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) using a smartphone on the dashboard of your car on a daily road commute. Eventually it’ll recognise your fellow commuters and where they share your journey. Could this help with lift-sharing?

"One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to..."

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:06:00 +0000

“One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can’t. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn’t work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn’t really any point in being there.”

- Douglas Adams, Chapter 1, Mostly Harmless

Once again, Douglas Adams understanding human nature. The current evidence for him being right is Twitter - the instant-gratification toss-off bad news amplifier. Pacific tsunami panic messages spread by people sitting miles from a different coast. People are predictable.

Although it’s been said, many times, many ways,...

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 23:37:21 +0000

Although it’s been said, many times, many ways, you’ve probably not heard it sung by a 250lb black schizophrenic with an entertainer’s keyboard.

Familiarity I think is one of the basic aesthetic elements that...

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 23:30:41 +0000

Familiarity I think is one of the basic aesthetic elements that can produce a pleasurable response. A lot of people grew up playing NES games, and the sound of a NES has a deep bank of memories to draw upon and colour the experience. Drawing out these memories and comparing them against something different, something separate, like Pink Floyd, maybe causes your brain to scramble to make new connections between them. Like a joke, it makes the right connection, and you laugh, you feel pleasure. At least, that’s a little bit of how I think aesthetics works. —rainwarrior http://rainwarrior.thenoos.net/music/moon8.html

Personal Information Stack

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:31:00 +0000

On Saturday morning I awoke in a hotel in Ascot to the worst hangover and heaviest snow of recent memory.

By 1pm leaving the hotel became an inevitability so we checked the train times from Ascot. With conflicting information, stale websites saying one thing and local people saying another we were torn between driving and taking the train. I had a hired car and a determination to get back to Oxford, but also a determination not to get stuck on a dual carriageway somewhere with frostbitten toes.

A34 Snow Chaos by Ash Matadeen

The traffic layer of Google Maps decided it for me. The dark red sections told me something was seriously up with the roads around Oxford so I didn’t want to risk driving onto dual carriageways and getting stuck (which is exactly what happened to many on the A34 for about 8 hours).

People on my Twitter stream said it was chucking down with snow in Oxford, how many centimetres/inches, how close to snowpocalypse we were, marks out of ten. The travel news, having been reconstituted into 140-character updates and localised by county/motorway was appearing in my Twitter stream and told me that things were descending into chaos on the A34, M40 and local roads around Oxford. As if to verify this, Dale Lane’s bLADE traffic app on my Android phone calculated my route and showed it beset on all sides by cold water in varying forms.

National Rail Enquiries’ phone service just about managed to get us enough information to discover we could catch a train from Reading, assuming the roads were clear enough to get there from Ascot, and off we went.

We parked at Reading and got to Oxford on what appears to have been the last train into town before they all started to get cancelled. I felt really well informed the whole time, but my interface to this information was rarely via the official outlets. The times I did put the radio on all I got was reports about football and moaning about gritters and quickly turned it off. So it was a surprise to me to discover I’d been using my own personal information stack.

Personal Snow/Road Information Stack - Conceptual Model

[Before I explain this it’s worth pointing out that it really represents the mobile-accessible information. There are many flash-based bloaty frontends I could use to show this information, but I’m on the move, I don’t want to need a laptop on my knees to show some godawful flash mapping zoom thing when it could have been funnelled through one mobile-friendly user-interface had someone produced the information in a re-usable format. Rant over.]

At the top is the Google Android operating system. This could be your iPhone or any other smartphone. The only requirement is the device’s ability to work out where it is. Some of the software is specific to Android, but likely to be available for your iPhone or whatever.

On the next level, I use Twitter to see people I follow, who are often in the Oxford area, so it becomes implicitly filtered by home location. Also, doing a full search for #uksnow tweets give me an idea of where snow is occuring in postcode clusters. I was able to filter that by my current location to get an idea of my progress from Ascot to Reading.

The excellent bLADE UK Traffic app from Dale Lane allows me to create a route from any location (including ‘here’) and then checks traffic along that route by extracting it from the BBC Travel News feed.

As you can see, the Highways Agency only really succeed as backend information providers, providing a really poor link to their data on the front end. What they are critical to, however, is the data collection & verification. They have an operations centre which gathers information from many sources, including sensor data, camera information, and of course everybody’s favourite fake police cars: the Highways Agency Traffic Officers (HATOs). They provide feeds of varying levels of complexity, and it’s possible the local radio phone-in reports get fed into their system. As the tax-funded central operation they should be the authoritative source. But that’s a bit 1990s.

Google Maps telling me I should avoid the A417 near Hot Air Balloon Roundabout tonight

The final section, almost autonomous from the rest (except bLADE’s use of Gmaps routing API), is Google Maps (Mobile) Traffic Layer. Google collect traffic flow data, but are notoriously cagey about giving away operational details. There are three likely sources. First there’s Google Latitude, in which you personally volunteer your location data to Google so you can share it. Then there’s the Android Location API used in apps for things like “find me the weather”, “tweet with location”, which uses GPS, mobile cell ID or wifi to calculate its position. Finally, there’s the mobile phone providers (O2, Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile) who aggregate the cell-switching information of phones travelling between cells along a road and sell that information to people - such as Google. All of these methods can be used to infer movement, and locked to a common path (a primary road) they can be assumed to be traffic flow. Unless they run parallel with Eurostar, that is.

Coast-Bound Eurostar in the Snow by jf01350 (CC-by-nc-nd licence)

At first I felt publishing my methods was just showing off, but it’s helped me articulate the levels at which I use this information and how it could be made easier. What this boils down to is a stack of information flowing from people/sensors up to my device, being aggregated in some cases, and filtered by location where possible. Surprisingly it’s nearly all crowdsourced, except for the core Highways Agency information.

My conclusion is that crowdsourced manually recorded data (eg. Twitter, Radio phone-in) is a wonderful hyper-local data source, giving you glimpses into the real situation on the ground, but not easily verifiable and very rarely updated when the incident clears. Meanwhile, the Highways Agency collect volumes of information but must try a bit harder to reach the top of this stack. They have to make themselves more readily re-usable by people who are crying out for an authoritative data-source for their applications & websites beyond a few snippets of incident reports.

I’m sure the future of us paying Trafficmaster to build flow sensors, or relying on Google Phone concentrations to give us symptoms of congestion is not one that the Highways Agency had in mind when they dug up half the network to install sensors and matrix signs. They need to produce feeds of their sensors for free or low-cost public consumption. What do they have to lose?

I feel a Freedom of Information Request coming on…

!speedcam by Ade Bradshaw (CC by-nc-sa licence)

RIPE Atlas using XPort Pro

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:11:16 +0000

RIPE Atlas using XPort Pro:

The RIPE Atlas project appear to be using (at least for the prototype) an XPORT Pro as a very lightweight, widely distributed performance monitoring network.

The XPORT Pro is essentially a programmable, USB-powered ethernet interface with brains, and formed the basis of the Botanicalls Twitter circuit for talking plants. This is a really very interesting mass monitoring system, giving extremely low-overhead performance measurements, which means the uptake will be much higher than a rack-mounted power-hungry black box.

Find out more at: http://labs.ripe.net/atlas

The Age of the Train. My favourite is still the Police Train.

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:05:55 +0000

The Age of the Train. My favourite is still the Police Train.

Boys' Life Magazine, June 1984

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:04:16 +0000

Boys' Life Magazine, June 1984:

Distantly-recalled but I never expected to see them in their entirety on Google - what appears to be the complete set of Boys’ Life Magazines, a magazine for Scouts in America. I was a scout there for a few months in 1984, initially dressed in green English uniform when everyone else was wearing dark blue.

Shortest Path First

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:45:00 +0000

When a major transport link changes in a city, the topology of the city’s links changes like a dynamic routing protocol in a network. Areas which were previously hard to reach suddenly become accessible at very low cost (ie. time) to the user.

The London travel times map (http://stamen.com/clients/mysociety) was originally made in 2006 by the late Chris Lightfoot, and the work lives on as a “London 2012 Olympic Stadium in Stratford, East London” travel times map.

Far from being a calculated crow-flies radius from your start point, the time to reach each area of the map is tailored to your individual location, calculated and displayed as contours. As the slider moves it masks the areas of the map which are no longer accessible in the time given. The end result is that you can accurately estimate travel time between two points, and perhaps use it to decide where to live.

Although this is a very clever new approach to least-time routing, I don’t think most people see the city as contours when they calculate their commute. This may be because nobody’s really mapped the city in travel-time contours before, or it may be that we see the world as links to traverse.

When a new line opens people very quickly change their cognitive map of the city. In the same way that a planned engineering closure will cause a temporary recalculation of a night out, people in a city calculate whether this new link benefits their daily commute, and then flow across it.

At some point it will become part of the fabric and the city’s inhabitants consider living somewhere previously inaccessible. The “here be dragons” parts of the map will open up to them. This has the side-effect of changing the value of housing and economic makeup of an area, a process called gentrification. Since the opening of the East London Line extension Canary Wharf and Docklands is a few minutes away from Southeast London. There’s likely to be a rise in the property prices and a change of dynamics in New Cross and Dalston and, sure enough, speculators have already bought property there.

Maybe I spent too long north of the river, but I’d claim that London Underground is the preferred method of transport for the uninitiated, if only because the map is so beautifully presented that it’s how many Londoners see the city’s shape. I’d even go so far as to suggest that colouring in the overground rail network would lure people into it and open up a previously inaccessible South London. A guerilla campaign with a few felt tips could change years of unsuccessful transport plans. With this in mind it seems a shame that the Crossrail project gets such ugly maps on its website.

When Crossrail opens, hopefully in 2017, the topology of London will once again change. The graphic at the top of this article is an “artist’s impression” of the Crossrail map, but instead rendered as a Beckian tube line. Using contemporary mapping language suggests the line has already been completed and updates the topology inside your head. It allows you to dream of they day when you can step into a new station at Tottenham Court Road and be accelerated to Slough before you’d even have got a seat on a First Great Western fart cart at Paddington.

The tunnel is not merely another section of underground, though. As a high-speed simplified underground system it has the effect of a vortex or wormhole, warping space (time) as the slow procession of escalators and ticket barriers flit somewhere above your head and you’re extruded from Central London under the once-impossibly-modern Westway and Trellick Tower. Sadly, they didn’t burrow under Slough.

Thoughts on Bletchley Park

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:15:00 +0100

I visited Bletchley Park again this week and again was left with the impression that it misses an opportunity to explain itself.

There have been press campaigns, fundraising, petitions, even “donate a day’s salary” for Bletchley Park, and they’ve certainly come a long way and done a lot to preserve it, but when you get there it all seems a bit shambolic. I appreciate that gives some of the charm, but given a bigger budget I suspect they could really bring it alive.

When you Visit Today

You’re greeted at the gate by a man in a booth who opens the barrier and gives you a ticket to redeem, or possibly pay for, later. I couldn’t work it out.
Find your way to the peach melba coloured building where they sign you up for a year’s season ticket, ask you about gift-aid, make you sign things, tell you in person where everything is and send you on your way. Very helpful and friendly. Perhaps not very efficient.
They suggest you watch the orientation film. Perhaps this is the key to the experience. I haven’t seen it, so all my observations here may be irrelevant.
I haven’t yet been offered an audio handset, and I’ve no idea if it would enhance the experience or not. They’re simply not promoted.
You check out the museum exhibits - a collection of posters, artefacts and wordy information posters which don’t quite make sense yet. Slightly lacking narrative and a bit keen to explain in epic detail for this stage in the visit.
Rush over to a guided tour in the main house, grab a cup of tea in Hut 4 first. They need some metal cups with enamel rims.
Listen to an old boy digress for 20 minutes about Queen Elizabeth or sit open-mouthed as he dives headlong into rotor and plugboard settings on an Enigma which leaves most people bemused within the first 5 minutes.
Visit the Bombe, understand where it fits in and that Colossus had nothing to do with Enigma. Get an inkling of what’s going on.
Visit the Colossus and be impressed, but still not entirely sure what it did.
Notice that there’s a computer museum around the corner, spend a happy hour pointing at the old computers.

If it’s simply a heritage architecture and artefact tour then perhaps it’s okay as it is, but if the aim is to explain what they did here and some of the basics of code-breaking to a wide audience they’re going to have to meet us in the middle somewhere.

The anecdotes which are spilled out during the tour are very good and probably the easiest parts to grasp. Even if you were flummoxed by the lightning explanation of the Engima machine, it’s easy to remember things like the London Symphony Orchestra playing German favourites just before they transmit their radio messages to program the enemy operators’ brains into giving predictable sequences. Or not taking action despite knowing it would involve loss of life because doing something would make it obvious that we had broken Enigma. The British love mistakes.

On the other end of the spectrum the museum explains in great detail some of the restoration work involved in an almost self-referential effort to show you how far they’ve come. Undoubtedly having a Bombe (both real and model) and a Colossus give something tangible, well done chaps, but it’s in context that they come alive. “The Making of…” is usually a DVD extra for a reason.

There is no narrative unless you go on the guided tour. Even then the narrative is filled with waffle. The old boys give it some authenticity, character and humour definitely, but there is no script, no curriculum, just a number of waypoints. Watching the bemused wives, yawning fidgeting children and strained looks as people tried to piece it all together I felt the opportunity to engage and involve them slipping away.

Assuming some people go there aware of Enigma, knowing it has something to do with boffins-in-the-war and code-breaking-top-secret-and-all-that-old-bean-pip-pip, a bit of an explanation of the order of events would be helpful.

That has the potential to be very dry, but could be implemented in an accessible way. Instead of leaving you at the beginning, with an orientation film in a room like a lecture theatre, turn it into a briefing room. God knows they have enough characters working on site, surely they’d be able to find one who can camp it up a bit.

You arrive at the gate and you’re each given a laminated card with some gibberish on it as if you were a despatch rider with a radio intercept.
After parking you make your way to the reception/ticket office where you do the admin. For added authenticity they could give you a “chit”.
Then you get a briefing (ie. orientation film, context, etc.) and you’re assigned orders to take the card to the correct hut.
Follow the process of the code-breaking loosely through transcription, cribs, the Bombe, rotor settings, and ultimately decoding the message onto a teletype (or some kind of virtual teletype).
Scan a barcode on your card and see your unique message from the radio intercept you brought in. Read and interpret the message. It could be an order to invade France or it could be a laundry list.
See how your piece of information fitted into the war machine. Save some lives. End some others. Steal some Nazi underpants.

All through this process refer to the people involved, the stories, the secrecy, the separation of responsibilities and the possibility that you might fail to decode things or be shut down due to lack of understanding.

This is all, of course, with the caveat that the Heritage Lottery Fund money has now been awarded and there are plans to improve the experience. As this develops I hope they remember to bring us into their world rather than just point at things.