To celebrate the success of the PlayTime event and continue Tim Wright’s mission to play golf on the moon (with David Bowie), XPT is offering a iPod Shuffle to the person who comes up with the best photographic simulation of a particular aspect of the the 30-year plan.

By concretising events and situations in a series of manipulated images, we are making the whole project more real, more achievable. Simulation=Solution. Remember - don’t leave space to the professionals.

A few weeks on, I’m finally getting around to uploading my slides from my PlayTime presentation, Playing with Pictures (it’s a 20MB+ PDF file, exported from Keynote). I was intending to annotate these so that they’d make more sense to someone who weren’t at my session, but I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll do this.

This gist of it however was this: Photo manipulation has always had a bit of a bad name, and even today we’re still worried that adding, removing or modifying parts of a photographic image detract from photography’s perceived ability to show us the truth. But you could argue that these techniques - and especially montage/manipulation (cf. the history of collage, Eisenstein etc, blah blah) - allow us to see other, new truths (all that nonsense about MegaWords was a joke about quantifying this). And the things you need, stock imagery, skills, tools etc. are becoming more available and affordable all the time: see all the examples of the web services* I mentioned. So we’re going to see a lot more of it, especially with the YouTube generation, and it’s also something that we (XPT and everyone else) are going to continue to have a lot of fun with…

*Most of the links to these are embedded in the PDF, but for convenience here are the best of them: Worth1000, Photoshop Tennis, iStockPhoto, Snipshot, Tourist Remover, Riya Visual Search, Lazy Mask, Zonetag, scanR, retrievr, Mappr, Ning Photos and Google Moon.

News about the Moon-Golf-Bowie photo competition we’re running and the ‘Golf on the Moon’ Google Maps site to follow in a subsequent post.

There I was thinking I’d completely got out of the habit of blogging.

Bruce Sterling is doing the rounds in London at the moment: I caught him on Monday at a New Statesman event upstairs at the Grouse and Claret. Bruce gave a highly entertaining ‘cyberpunk exegesis’ of a bewildering array of contemporary issues and ideas: the UK’s surveillance culture, Web 2.0, Climate Change and of course the Internet of Things to name just a few. Good ‘names’ for things seem more important than ever now: Bruce mentioned that Tim O’Reilly - who coined the term Web 2.0 - has an English degree, so “he’s good at naming things”, and in his design/tech book ‘Shaping Things’, Bruce stresses that the ability to take on a name, an identity is one of the key features of a ’spime’ (a Sterling neologism: an object that exists in space and time):

…the means of production [of third-stage objects] are re-engineered around a capacity for identity. The object becomes an instantiation of identity. It’s named, and it broadcasts its name, then it can be tracked. That’s a spime.

It used to be that we more often looked to sci-fi novelists like Bruce or William Gibson (who ‘invented’ cyberspace) for neologisms to help us track the tech world, but now it seems the industry does a pretty good job of this itself (think Web 2.0, or its sometime namesake Ajax which can be broadcast and tracked so much more easily now it’s no longer XMLHttpRequest). I guess this is also why Bruce describes himself now as an “industry booster” as well as a novelist and why he’s admits he’s had to keep rewriting his novel about spimes over the last few years, as reality keeps changing faster than it can be imagined.

Something that could really benefit from a new name though is ‘climate change’, a name that would go on to help create (Viridian’s) ‘irresistible demand for a global atmosphere upgrade’, in the same way that merely the idea of Web 2.0 (or any other technology that “sounded good on a golf course”) is fuelling so many irresistible demands.

Some links: Podcast of the New Statesman event (and Dave Phelan’s notes). Bruce Sterlings’s ETech keynote on the Internet of Things. Julian Bleecker’s Manifesto for Networked Things (pdf). Ulla-Maaria Mutanen (of Craft Manifesto fame)’s ThingLinks.

Nokia Research recently announced the Apache webserver had been ported to run on S60 phones (see my earlier post). The plan had been to “bring a full-fledged webserver to S60 and to make a webserver running on a mobile phone accessible from the Internet using any web browser”. Now the client binary is available for download and you can sign up for an account on Nokia’s gateway and try this for yourself.

Here’s Apache running on my N70.

(I recently upgraded to the N70 from the 6630: I wasn’t sure whether to wait for a S60 3rd Edition phone but in the end the 2 megapixel slide-and-shoot camera, the flash and larger memory won me over even if the tiny keyboard and all-blue backlighting is a considerable step in the wrong direction, usability-wise).

From the Read Me:

Raccoon consists of two parts: a Symbian port of the Apache httpd webserver and a “connector” that together with a gateway provides a mobile phone with a global name in the operator networks of today. In short, you can now host a website on your mobile phone that is accessible from any web browser on the Internet.

There is a lot of (demo) functionality to explore: “there are custom modules for accessing the core functionality of the phone - camera, contacts, favourites, log and messages - and modules for sending instant and inbox messages to the phone, and a module for finding mobile websites in the proximity”.

Now that I’ve got this up and running I guess I need to get to work on my mobsite.

(via Tommi’s S60 applications blog)

45 Years ago today, on April 12th 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space. On the same day, 25 years ago, John Young and Robert Crippen flew the first Space Shuttle flight to orbit. Today we celebrate!

( Technorati tags: yuri-gagarin | space | imax)

I was invited today by one of my clients - The Climate Group - to watch Al Gore give his presentation on Climate Change at the bfi London IMAX Cinema. Gore’s presentation is pretty well covered elsewhere, so I’m not even going to try and summarise it here (it was too dark to take notes and besides I’m a lousy note-taker anyway). Suffice to say for someone who has a reputation for being boring, he’s both funny and extremely passionate about our need to find a common moral purpose to deal with this “planetary emergency”.

Here’s Al Gore and The Climate Group’s Steve Howard standing beneath “one of the world’s most widely recognised and requested photographs of all time” the last image of the Earth shot by a human being (from Apollo 17 in 1972).

Al Gore and The Climate Group’s Steve Howard at the bfi London IMAX
Originally uploaded by Rob Bevan.

The vertiginous, somewhat uncomfortable feeling you get sitting up close to an IMAX screen (the UK’s largest) really enhanced the images of huge ice shelves collapsing into the sea and all the ensuing discussion of ‘tipping points’…

(See also The Climate Group’s coverage of today’s event).

( Technorati tags: al-gore | climate-change | imax)

From del.ico.us/blog:

This is a big step for del.icio.us, but one that I hope will make it more useful. Because del.icio.us is all about sharing and we don’t want to discourage that, we will be watching how this feature impacts the community and will also be experimenting a bit with the UI over the next few weeks.

( Technorati tags: delicious)

About the only good thing to result from the theft of my bag just before Christmas was replacing my ageing original 1G iPod with a sleek new black 5G video iPod (whoever thought that glossy white ‘iBook’ look was a good idea?). Actually that’s not strictly true: I’ve effectively ‘upgraded’ many of my closest and most familiar possessions at the cost of many hours cancelling credit cards, talking to insurers and replacing missing Christmas gifts.

What has really surprised me however, is how much I’m enjoying video on the move. Just today I was watching the 1969 ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ film (recently made available on Google Video, along with a number of other NASA History of Space Flight Motion Pictures), watching Neil or maybe Buzz shaving on the 3-day flight to the moon. The commentary describes this as ‘housekeeping’ whilst I was thinking ‘why bother?’ before I realised I’d just missed my stop on the tube.

Shaving on the way to the moon
Originally uploaded by Rob Bevan.

My wait for the return train was just enough time for the best sequence - the Eagle’s descent to the surface of the moon - which actually just reminded me of all the times I’ve peered out of the the window of a plane (I always watch) as it lands: there’s that long wait as the plane seems to hover interminably just above the ground before touching down. This is usually the only moment I get a little tense whilst flying, unlike my mate Tim who pretty much feels that way the entire flight. (He was so visibly distressed when we flew to Glasgow once that one of the cabin crew came over to find out if he was going to be OK, and tried to comfort him with “don’t worry - we’re the lucky crew!”, which understandably made things worse.) I’m constantly on the lookout at the moment for moon-related material to pass on to Tim for his ‘golf on the moon’ project: clearly he’s going to have to deal with his fear of flying first.

And just because this is doing the rounds today, is very funny and brilliantly executed: what if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging?

(Finally, one housekeeping note: here’s a smart way to get video from your iPod on TV using a cable you probably already have, instead of the $19/£15 proprietary Apple iPod AV Cable.)

( Technorati tags: ipod | google-video | moon)

Like most of the UK’s web development community I was at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps summit a couple of weeks ago. A couple of highlights for me were Tom Coates’ wonderfully lucid and entertaining synthesis of all things Web 2.0 (see also Jeremy Zawodny’s annotations of Tom’s slides) and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails ’sermon’. Although I’ve been working with Rails intermittently for at least eighteen months I’ve never seen David speak and it had never really occurred to me before just how Scandinavian Rails is: minimal, beautifully designed and good for the soul.

DHH’s Devil
Originally uploaded by Damien Tanner.

Anyway, by now, the talks (sorry, ‘podcasts’) are all available for download, there are numerous write-ups (best of which are Simon Willison’s notes), hundreds of Flickr images and Lars Plougmann’s mindmaps.

( Technorati tags: futureofwebapps | rails)

These images from today’s 4×10km Men’s relay.

(FilmLoop is a free photo broadcasting (”photocasting”) network that presents pictures in a “Loop” player on your desktop.)