The Machine That Changed the World

Waxy.org have posted online all the episodes of this documentary, which I’d not seen before, but which is fascinating in a thoroughly geeky and pre-intertube way:

The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains - Waxy.org

So far I’m just into episode II, dealing with ENIAC and the breakthrough of computing machines into business. Thankfully I’m not quite old enough to remember punch-cards.

Mammary Fluids

Well I’ve belatedly discovered that Weebl was responsible for the animated Hexstatic video which gave this blog its name. The song was Chase Me (from Master View) and the animation is available for your viewing pleasure on Weebl’s site. I’m glad I squared that circle.

Oh and Hexstatic also appear to have posted a lovely new mix up on their site.

GT Labs

Off the back of the presentation at OFFF Lisbon earlier this month, where Stuart, Ben and Stephen presented Rhythm of Lines, GT have launched their GT Labs website, where cool stuff will be dropping every month or so, to demonstrate things that we do and to open up some of our work to wider communities for use and re-use.

The R.o.L code released there last week is GPL’ed and doesn’t represent the entire code base for the project but does give enough away to demonstrate working end to end from Maya into Flash and Papervision.

Though the project work represented there took place before I joined GT, it represents something I’m happy to shout about; a successful technical project which is aesthetically beautiful. It encourages play and user-engagement, and has rightly won awards and accolades.

I look forward to adding to the GT Labs contributions some time in the near future.

Howard Rheingold at NESTA

I’ve just heard Howard Rheingold speak at the NESTA Connect event “Mass Collaboration, Tools, Techniques and Foundations”. Quite a milestone for me really, given that the guy is something of a luminary. For him to be speaking in my place of work was quite entertaining and he gave an idea packed presentation, as I expected.

Anyway I’ll save full reactions until I am no longer at the office and can absorb stuff fully. This is just to say that the recording of the talk is now online and can be got from the NESTA Podcast feed.

Alternatively you can grab it directly from the server :

Howard Rheingold - Mass collaboration, Tools, Techniques and Foundations.

Mark Earl also gave an entertaining and informative speech relating to themes he develops in his book, “Herd”. I’ll be uploading that forthwith too.

PC Woe

CPU Cooling WHOA!Rather a pause in posting lately, I’ve been distracted by my PC finally giving up the ghost, and by preparation for The Big Chill, amongst other things. My replacement PC parts don’t yet seem to be playing ball, but at least the weather looks good for the weekend. That should help me forget that I’ve just spent hundreds of pounds on cutting edge technology which does nothing but beep at me when I turn it on.

Thank goodness for warranties. And festivals.