A korvapusti for Conan

moleitauLeave a comment

Aevil has started a campaign to get Conan O’Brien to Finland.

Think of all the things he could do: take a sauna, eat makkara, make fun of drunks on the trams and subway, attempt ordering coffee and korvapusti in Finnish, bring some Budweiser along and finally determine if Lapin Kulta is even more of a king of bad beer than Bud is, try salmiakki, wear something Marimekko, visit Santa, and sail to Stockholm to personally deliver the message that Sweden does, indeed, suck. 🙂

Finland, expats too, grab your pens, postage and postikorttit and direct your witty goading to:

Conan O’Brien hates my homeland Must Come To Finland
NBC
30 ROCKEFELLER PLAZA
New York, NY 10112
USA

Literal > Visual

moleitauLeave a comment

A little help needed.

I’m looking for good writing or references which underpin the notion that western societies are moving from a literal to a visual culture, as used as a central theme in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash.

Thanks!

Rebel MPs without a pause

moleitauLeave a comment

theywork_daypop

Democracy-Hack and all-round great idea TheyWorkForYou.com launched this sunday at the excellent and exhausting NotCon, and seems to be climbing the charts nicely.

For those of you who haven’t poked around there yet – it’s a service that takes the report of the day’s proceedings in the UK Parliament, Hansard, and rechunks it with the ability to be annotated and commented on by the electorate, plus a bunch of other great tools for tracking your MP or issues you care about through Parliament.

After all the noise and fury around “digital democracy”, the Howard Dean campaign and the like from our friends across the water, it’s nice to see a thoughtful, useful and downright inspired piece of work like TWFY getting some coverage.

Great work by a gang I’m proud to know, and great to see Chuck D. and Hank Shocklee as the support band.

Notcon

moleitauLeave a comment

I’ll be chairing the Hardware panel at NotCon in London on Sunday:

  • Telling the time (not very accurately) using a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich and a BBC micro
    – James Larsson

  • New hardware/software developments on the Sinclair Spectrum
    – Matt Westcott

  • Why Interactive telly isn’t the Web, why it never will be, and why that’s good
    – George Wright

  • How to Email Your Video (and other things to make your home come alive – literally)
    – Steven Goodwin

  • Camera-Phones: the only remote control you’ll ever need
    – Anil Madhavapeddy

I guess the plan is that a user-experience guy confronted by hardware hackers should make for an interesting debate. Hope to see you there…

Roomba Hair Weave

moleitau5 Comments

It’s a common for people to say that couples who aren’t ready for a baby get themselves a dog. We of course have regressed one step further away, realising we are not ready for a dog – and got ourselves a Roomba.

The roboticist Dr. Rodney Brooks of MIT at Wired’s recent Nextfest stated that the benefits of personal, or domestic robotics in the next 5 years or so were to be limited to the useful side effects one could derive from their level of intelligence and autonomy, which I think he said was about the same as a 6 month old puppy.

This led me to digress about the global market for 6 month old bioengineered puppy/vacuum-cleaner hybrids, but I digress.

The parallels to owning a pet continuued tonight as I sat down to delouse my Roomba. With a robot comes great responsibility, after all.

Roomba’s a whizz at chasing dustbunnies, but one of the things that’s slowed the little tyke down in the recent months is the hair gathering around his undercarriage. I sat down at the kitchen table and began to pluck at his furballs.

defluffing_roomba

By the time I had had finished I had enough to make a hair-weave that any self-respecting local TV anchor-man would jump at.

roomba_weave

Quite a business perhaps in these ‘useful side effects’.

Welcome to our robotic future.

Motional rescue

moleitauLeave a comment

Nice to see a few people excited by the “airtexting” feature of the active-cover enhancement to the new Nokia 3220. It seems though that they’ve missed* what, for me, is the feature with the most potential: the motion-detecting accelerometer.

Aside for how much fun it is to play games using your body as an interface, it could open up possibilities of gestural interfaces and tangible interaction to a mass audience.

In the near-future, combined with geolocation and touch interactions, starts to create a platform for situated, contextual interfaces to digital services, and some awesome opportunites for mixed-reality games.

Be Mario in Manchester, leaping Le-Parkour-style for the power-ups that only your phone tells you are there; or get on the bus and be Solid Snake in Salford, sneaking around the specialist pasta aisle of the Safeway, avoiding the tracking lasers coming from the old lady’s hats.

—
UPDATE: Tom Hume gets it. “Backwards-Tron”. Brilliant.
—
FURTHER UPDATE: Jens got there first…

Sparklines

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Edward Tufte descibes a form of word-sized, inline infoburst he calls a “sparkline”:

sparklines

A hyperlinked Sparkline would make webpages like superdense, fractal, layered, zoomable resources, and make the top-level of each topic look vital and organic like a terrarium of squirming data.

The next step would be to see Sparklines in the street, not just delivering data, but harvesting it – being it.

Crawling up lamposts as electricity consumption spikes during the ad-break of Coronation Street. Or infesting the wounds of a pigeon flattened by a delivery truck, updating the national epidemiological database and the air pollution record for that borough based upon trace metal readings in the carcass.

Tufte’s aiming to create bumps in the visual texture of the page that we can run our eyes over and just know. Lowering the load on our understanding not in reductive manner of many usability methodologies but trying to transform ways in which information is transferred to create a richer substrate for understanding.

» Ask E.T.: Sparklines [via Scoble]