Speaking in Tongues

Free English Esperanto web translation

M'estimable chum Anno pointed me at this. M'other estimable chum Roo pointed out that Lojban was surely meant to be the internet equivalent.

But no, of course: the internet equivalent is LOLCat, having taken over from Klingon sometime last year.

Which makes me wonder...

Has anyone written a Klingon to LOLCat translator yet?

My First Conference

Open Tech 2008 - 5th July in London.

I'm giving a talk at this year's OpenTech 2008, on July 5th, in London's sunny London. It's the first time I've ever stuck my head over the parapet of the conference circuit, and I'm both excited and utterly terrifying.

I'll be talking about art history - the starting point for the talk is a painting by Rembrandt, and going on to talk about technology and embodiment: how our physical bodies relate to our machines, tools and the internet. I'm going to look particularly silly, as I'm on at 10.30am, a time of the morning when my brain doesn't work, and also sharing a bill with UBER BRAIN and offical world's cleverest person, Matt Webb.

The synopsis of my talk is roughly this:

* Who was Dr Von Tulp, and what can Rembrandt’s painting of him tell us about human-computer interaction?
* How is a week without the internet like loosing a leg?
* Why are the heady rushes of computer games and pornography the most compelling things on the internet?

We’re beginning to use machines as bodily prostheses almost without noticing. Touch interfaces, motion control, virtual worlds, mobile connectivity – all give us a delicious illusion of power over the physical.

We all know the man-machine stereotypes from countless Hollywood movies, but what should we geeks, tinkerers and creative technologists remember about the way our real-world bodies intersect with the imaginary spaces of computing and the internet as we shape the future of embodied interaction?

All these questions – and more! - glossed over as I attempt to draw lessons from art history, robotics and interface design in to one quick presentation – and all without sounding like a mad early 90s technohippy.

Register to hear me make a tit of myself at http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/

If you're interested in the subject matter, my research links are appearing at http://del.icio.us/mildlydiverting/embodiment

Behance Explained

enough_words.gif (GIF Image, 967x1535 pixels)

I thought this worth linking to.

The Behance network explains their service first in words, and then as a diagram. It's a really elegant way of explaining a site's value proposition to a potential user - especially when that potential user is a designer or artist.

Mind you, not very googlable, but there you go.

50 years of the Radiophonic Workshop.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC old masters of new sounds

A brilliant little piece revisiting the Maida Vale studios, with Mark Ayres - a man who rescued a huge quantity of Radiophonic tapes from being skipped by the BBC when the unit was disbanded.

Mark has probably done more for preserving the history of electronic music in the UK than anyone else, and he deserves all credit for that.

Also, he let me have a go in his Dalek when I was five.

Evil Thoughts about Anti SEO

I'm very bored of SEO spam friendings on Twitter, such as this Ass Hat.

Which got me thinking - I'd like to set up a spam blog somwhere that took the links from these SEO feeds, and republished them using keywords like 'shit' 'illegal' 'very poor service' 'rubbish' and for that matter, 'ass hat'.

I'd find that really really satisfying.

RSS aggregation as a friend filter

Just a quick thought before I forget it.

So - a lot of services allow you to grab all of your RSS feeds from all over the shop, and republish them in a central aggregated feed.

The resultant feed - of bookmarks, tweets, flickr pics, LastFM music, blogposts, yada yada - is noisy. REALLY noisy. In fact, unless you know someone really well, it's just too much information and you drown in it.

But there are some people for whom that much information is good, and comforting. I'd keep an eye on everything my other half was up to, for instance - not for stalking reasons, or because I want to surveil him, but because it's nice to know whats going through his head - it's his presence when he's not around - as Leisa would say, it's Ambient Intimacy.

But other people - no, I really don't want to know their every move - I'd like perhaps a once a month update of key items.

So a social aggregator with degree-of-intimacy - where you can pick and choose elements of a person's behaviour to subscribe to. This should couple with a few smart bits at the back which would desubscribe or deemphasise sections of a person's feed according to your consumption behaviour. Not reading all of Friend X's long screeds, but most of their tweets? Eventually the long screeds will drop off your updates.

Facebook maybe goes part way towards this, but it really doesn't understand the shades of grey and changeability of social ties.

Fluidity, and smartness, and the understanding that friendship ebbs and flows.

@frequency

An idle thought

I've noticed in the last few days that the frequency of @replies on twitter amongst my small circle of friends has increased dramatically.

@replies were always interesting as they grew out of the natural behaviour of the community, and were only later included as a full feature of the system.

I'm wondering if the high crossover between friends and use of twitter as SXSW as an organising tool might be due to this. It would be an interesting stat to track - changes in the 'flocculence' of the site as replies cluster around events with large groups of active users. It might be an interesting visualisation exercise, particularly if it were possible to map cel location to incidences of flocculence.

Were I able to write scripts to extract the data, and map it against dopplr co-incidences, I would.

But I can't, so someone else is welcome to the idea.

Nitrate Pirate

Nitrate Pirate
Originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting

I've just found the negatives to my favourite pictures of my grandmother.

They're Nitrate, and badly damaged.

Does anyone know a Nitrate film preservation expert?

Keep Calm and Carry On

Keep Calm and Carry On
Originally uploaded by I like

I have a copy of the iconic 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster framed on my wall at home. I found it via a post on flickr, and bought it over the internet from Barter Books Gift Shop a couple of years ago.

I find it slightly sad that other places are now taking much of the credit (and presumably the income) for its rediscovery. You can't stop things going viral, I suppose. At least Barter books link to some proper contextual academic information.

Can I suggest buying from Barter Books, and thus support 'the British Library of second hand bookshops'? I'd also point out that a poster from Barter Books is a LOT cheaper than some of the other options...

World of WarCraftCraft

Checking my personal email this morning, I found a thread from my Warcraft chums in our guild, about the appeal of the game. I will paraphrase here, this being a good starting point for the complete waste of time that follows.

Hactar: So, an idle question: When you hit lvl 70, do you keep earning XP?

Tikker: and, do you keep doing quests? what do you do after 70?

Jonalock: You don't earn any more XP, no, but the XP you would earn from completing quests gets turned into extra gold instead. You'll have a bunch of solo quests to keep doing when you hit 70, for which you get more money and sometimes better equipment as quest rewards. Further progression comes from doing instances to get better equipment which then lets you do harder instances to get better equipment which lets you do raids (instances for more than 5 people, typically 10 or 25) to get better equipment which lets you do harder raids to get better equipment which lets you ... And there goes your life.

Tikker: when you put it like that it sounds so.....futile....

Jonalock: On the plus side there'll be an expansion out soonish raising the level cap to 80 and with a huge number of new solo quests and the like .. (and which will also overnight make all your hard-won uber-gear entirely useless - green is the new purple!)

Kieth: you see this is the point I lose the will to live...why are we playing this again?

Tikker: cos it releases crack from a keyboard while you play as a reward.

Kieth: finger ingested rock...that's it, I forgot

Crystaltips: I feel like framing this thread.

Now, I have this ongoing problem with Alice (Crystaltips) telling me to do things: I just unthinkingly obey. Dunno why, I just do. She used to use it to get me to bring her Lattes in meetings, the cow.

So, the framing the thread comment kicked me in to action. How do you frame a thread and make it nice to look at? And specifically, how do you do it for someone like Alice, whose favourite thing is slightly rubbish game-based crafts?

You turn it in to cross-stitch, obviously.

So - first, let's find some imagery. I wanted something Horde-y, obviously, so I checked out the official Blizzard fan site kit.

World of Warcraft Europe -> Fan Site Kit

Lovely avatars, but not quite what I was after. So, copyright infringement time! What happens if you type 'Horde' in to Google Image Search?



Aha, that will do nicely. Many thanks to the Horde Army guild site, from whom I've ripped this off (sorry guys!). Incidentally, that's one of the best put-together guild sites I've seen - they even have their own resources database. Go Horde Army!

Next step: some kind of slogan. I love antique samplers, with their folk-artsy cross-stitch writing, and I don't see why a Horde embroidery should be any different. I think a simple guild name - in angle brackets, of course - with a quote from the discussion should do. And what's that on my hard drive? A copy of Fritz Quadrata, the Warcraft tooltip font? How did that get there? Surely that's in violation of lots of copyright rules?*

To Photoshop, comrades!


Nice design, eh?

The next thing is to convert it in to a sewing pattern. I've found a few sites that offer image to embroidery pattern conversion in my web-peregrinations, and the two best are coincidentally, free to use online.

MicroRevolt are an excellent organisation that protest at the use of sweatshop labour by making protest quilts to send to the CEO of Nike. They deserve your support.

They also have an excellent little tool for converting pictures to patterns on their site, called KnitPro. It produces simple-looking patterns, but doesn't reduce the number of colours in the image.

Running our design (and a brightened up version) through Knit Pro gives us our first four patterns

• Cross-Stitch Pattern 1 - no guild name on this one, dark colours, 120w x160h, 19,200 stitches


• Cross-Stitch Pattern 2 - guild name, dark colours, 96w x 120h, 11,520 stitches


• Cross-Stitch Pattern 3 - guild name, brighter colours, 96w x 120h, 11,520 stitches


• Cross-Stitch Pattern 4 - guild name, brighter colours, 120w x160h, 19,200 stitches

A good alternative to KnitPro is Pic2Point.com: it spits out more complex-looking patterns, but reduces the colours in the image for you to simplify it, gives you a chart of yarns on the front, and makes the pattern easier to follow. I don't think it sends blankets to corporations with questionable ethical records, though.

• Cross-Stitch Pattern 5 - guild name, dark colours, stitch count 18, 8 inches wide, 12 colours, 27,000 stitches apx.


• Cross-Stitch Pattern 6 - guild name, bright colours, stitch count 18, 8 inches wide, 13 colours, 27,000 stitches apx.

So, there you go. Horde Guild Quote embroidery patterns.

Things I discovered during this process:

• Running dull colours through either of the pattern makers above will make them muddier. Work with your image first to brighten it up a lot.


• With KnitPro, as it doesn't do colour reduction, you might want to save your design as a gif or a png with a reduced colour palette. If you're really clever, you can use the 'Save for Web/Devices' option in photoshop to select a good palette of colours for your thread.


• Using a tool like 'posterise' in photoshop to simplify the image doesn't seem to help with the output much.
  
• KnitPro barfs on some png files, and renders white as black. I think this is something to do with differences between the way png8 and png24 handle transparency, but I may be wrong.


• None of the pattern makers I tried handled the text well: even with antialiasing and at a larger pixel size (stitch-pitch?) it looks a bit rubbish. You can live with that, and keep the font recognizable as the WoW font, or you could use a tool like Crossstich.com's Caption Maker or the Subversive Cross-stitch Magic Robot.
  

If you want to know how to actually do the embroidery - and I'm not going to, because 27,000 stitches would play merry hell with my RSI, there's an excellent primer on game related embroidery at Kotaku by Maggie Greene, that takes you through the process step by step.

To finish, a couple of interesting bits:

Radical Cross Stitch
Subversive Cross Stitch Kits

And some context: information from the Brooklyn Museum Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art that goes part way to explaining why alt-crafting is a political act.


* NB: I actually care a lot about copyright violation, and feel tremendously guilty about the unlicensed fonts I own. In particular, I *really* *really* want to buy a copy of House Industry's Neutraface, because it is beautiful, but really, $249? For something I will use maybe twice in personal projects, and maybe on a weblog? If you price your content out of your market, you're just encouraging piracy. See also: legal copies of Photoshop.