Dan W

Hovershow 2012

2012-05-02T22:41:00+01:00

Last weekend was Hovershow 2012 at the Hovercraft Museum. The only hovercraft museum in the world. So we went on a London Hackspace trip.

Hovercraft are a peculiar thing. One of those technologies that were going to be The Future but now largely unseen. Like the Concorde, monorails or Space Shuttles. I have vague memories of them being excitedly shown off on Tomorrow’s World or Blue Peter as a kid. Or possibly it was on Thunderbirds.

The museum is only open a few days a year or by appointment. There are hovercraft scattered everywhere in various states of rusting and disrepair. Quite a lot of hovercraft.

The staff sell entrance tickets from the back of a shipping container dressed in Hoverspeed steward & stewardess uniforms. The site is dominated by the two Hoverspeed branded giant SR.N4s, the Princess Margaret and Princess Anne. They’re so big that exhibits and trade stalls are set up inside their car holds. There’s a harrier jump jet inside the hovercraft.

There’s a hover mini.

Heathrow fire service hovercraft.

Pedal powered hovercraft.

Hover ice cream van.

Hoverrides.

And a nice beach to skim stones on.

The rest of my photos are on flickr. There’s another open day coming up later this summer and there are various photos and videos on the hackspace wiki page for the trip.

Instapaper Placebo

2012-03-07T20:20:00+00:00

Last week Instapaper released a new bookmarklet. It’s nice. It saves articles that have been split across multiple pages.

However it doesn’t work in the way I want the Instapaper bookmarklet to. So I’ve made my own. It’s above. You put it in your bookmarks. When you find an article or web page you want to read later, you click it. And it saves it for later.

There’s one difference. Mine doesn’t save the page, it just pretends to. And that’s good enough.

I use instapaper a lot. I think it’s a fantastic service. No longer do I have a hundred tabs open to web pages I intend to read at some point before closing the browser. I can push them to instapaper and read them on my commute instead in a calm stripped down format. It works great.

But I find far more things that look interesting than I have time to read. Currently I have 4051 unread links. I had to write some code to find that out because instapaper doesn’t have an unread count anywhere. That lack of unread count is the best feature.

I’ve built instapaper placebo because instapaper itself is too complex for what I need. I don’t need a nice mobile app for reading. I don’t need a way to remove all the clutter from the page. I don’t need an online cross-platform bookmark syncing service. I just need a way of offloading all my good intentions. A way to stop hoarding links. And with less stuff to read I can make more stuff instead. Productive stuff. Like instapaper placebo.

Oh. Never mind.

Yearnote 2011

2012-02-26T23:09:00+00:00

2011, in brief.

Work

Sculpting With Scent, We Are Forests, Indoor Positioning, Bristol Stories Map, The Unicorn, Theatre Jukebox & Sky Orchestra.

Side projects:

A bot, a map, another map, a graph, a glanceable, a book, an observer & a projection.

Visiting:

Redsands Maunsell Forts, Colney Heath, dConstruct, Bletchley Park & SXSW.

Speaking:

Future Everything & OpenMIC.

Not a story, just one damn thing after another.

Do The Other Things

2011-12-29T23:52:00+00:00

I was watching “NASA’s Greatest Missions” on TV over Christmas. There’s this clip of a Kennedy speech they repeat:

We choose to go to the moon… we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

What are the “Other things”, apart from going to the moon? A quick search didn’t bring up good answers. Yahoo Answers claimed the other things were Marilyn Monroe. Some forum posts argued it was a reference to an earlier part of the speech:

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

I’m not convinced. I then found an earlier speech that this could be a reference to:

I therefore ask the Congress, above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activities, to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals:

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth

He goes on to give three more goals:

Secondly, an additional 23 million dollars, together with 7 million dollars already available, will accelerate development of the Rover nuclear rocket. This gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself.

I haven’t heard of Project Rover before. As wikipedia describes:

A nuclear engine was considered for some time as a replacement for the J-2 used on the S-II and S-IVB stages on the Saturn V and Saturn I rockets. Originally “drop-in” replacements were considered for higher performance, but a larger replacement for the S-IVB stage was later studied for missions to Mars and other high-load profiles, known as the S-N. Nuclear thermal space “tugs” were planned as part of the Space Transportation System to take payloads from a propellant depot in Low Earth Orbit to higher orbits, the Moon, and other planets.”

Neat. But it didn’t get anywhere.

Third, an additional 50 million dollars will make the most of our present leadership, by accelerating the use of space satellites for world-wide communications.

Fourth, an additional 75 million dollars–of which 53 million dollars is for the Weather Bureau–will help give us at the earliest possible time a satellite system for world-wide weather observation.

I wonder if satellite development would have progressed the same without this funding. It seems to have had more practical impact than flying to the moon. What if the satellites could have been funded without the moon trip? Or is the big audacious moon goal needed to sell the boring bits to the public?

Reminded me of this article on airport security:

Security theater, from this perspective, is an attempt to convey a message: “We are doing everything possible to protect you.” When 9/11 shattered the public’s confidence in flying, Slovic says, the handful of anti-terror measures that actually work—hardening the cockpit door, positive baggage matching, more-effective intelligence—would not have addressed the public’s dread, because the measures can’t really be seen. Relying on them would have been the equivalent of saying, “Have confidence in Uncle Sam,” when the problem was the very loss of confidence. So a certain amount of theater made sense.

Does that make the TSA our generations equivalent of going to the moon? The annual 8.1 billion USD budget seems comparable to the total 25.4 billion USD cost of Apollo.

As an aside in my searching I found out that Apollo reaching the moon was mentioned in a Star Trek episode broadcast in 1968, before it happened. I bet there’s a whole branch of moon conspiracy theory material dedicated to that.

Arrivals for Foursquare

2011-11-23T20:03:00+00:00

Arrivals is a simple list of where your foursquare friends currently are. It is intended to be displayed on a spare second screen such as a tablet or phone without intrusively drawing attention.

Where’s Dad?

Arrivals is based on a concept by Toby Barnes. Where’s Dad is a small glanceable display built for Toby’s son for use on a spare old iPhone. Whilst Toby is travelling his son asks him during phone calls where he currently is. This display constantly shows his current location, city and country based on his foursquare checkins. A simple piece of situated software with an user base of one person. See Toby’s blog for more details of his thinking behind it.

Arrivals is a generalised version of this, using the same style but showing your friends locations instead.

Broadcast

There are many different ways to use foursquare. I check-in mainly to keep a personal log of where I’ve been. I rarely use it to view where my friends are. I find the iPhone push notifications too intrusive whilst I only launch the app to check in.

This leaves my usage unbalanced, friends are broadcasting but I’m not listening. I’m more likely to notice a friend is nearby from twitter or instagram than from foursquare.

Arrivals fixes this by making a screen unobtrusive enough to be left open. The screen only updates when a location changes. The animated flicker in the corner of the eye draws the attention but does not interrupt. As a result it gives a constant awareness of location and daily rhythms, with a cascade of checkins at lunchtime and after work.

Public/Private

One difficulty in creating Arrivals is the balance between a public display on a second screen visible to all showing information that is private and only intended for foursquare friends.

I’ve tried to solve this by showing the minimum amount of information on the screen. No timestamp, no city or country of venue and no name of the person checking in. To view any of this information one must use the foursquare website or mobile app. As a compromise the profile picture of the person checking in is shown on the display, as otherwise one needs to open foursquare far too frequently just to see who is where. The lack of a timestamp allows deniability in the case of recognition.

Animation

Animation is provided using CSS3 transforms and only happens when a location changes. An unintended effect of this is that some new users sit and intently watch the Arrivals display waiting for a checkin as they wish to see the flip animation.

Restraint

The hardest part of designing a glanceable is restraint. It’s technically very easy to add extra information and features to the display. Adding the airport code of the nearest city to a checkin, colour coding the text with the Dopplr city colour, clicking a checking to flip it over and show details. Each feature addition would detract from the purpose, to do less than the existing sites & apps.

Perhaps next time I should make a physical display device instead. It’s easier to resist scope creep in atoms than in bits.

Anyway, feel free to try Arrivals, read Toby’s write up or let me know what you think.

URL: http://arrivals.iamdanw.com/
Created: 2011-09-17; Cardiff, UK; Foursquare Global Hackathon
Collaborators: Toby Barnes (Concept & design direction); Richard Birkin (Sound Design)
Role: Software Development
Technologies: Sinatra; Heroku; Foursquare API
Screenshots & Videos: Flickr; Vimeo
Coverage: Foursquare Blog; The Next Web; PSFK (twice); Mashable

What is the best Disney animated film that most people haven’t seen?

2011-11-15T12:00:00+00:00

On Quara someone asked ”What is the best Disney animated film that most people haven’t seen?”. I answered Victory Through Air Power (1943):

It’s the most bizarre Disney film I’ve watched. Made during WWII, it is an adaptation of a book by Alexander P. de Seversky advocating the use of long range aircraft in warfare. The film begins with a humorous animated history of flight before alternating between lecture sequences from Seversky and animated depictions of his warfare plans.

It was understandably not a huge success when released to theatres. Churchill is claimed to have made Roosevelt watch the film, changing Americas approach to the war. After the war the film was rarely shown until released on DVD in 2004. There are occasional screenings at places like the Walt Disney Family Museum.

Probably not the most family friendly or entertaining of Disney animated films, but certainly one most people haven’t seen

Awkward Shopping

2011-11-07T01:35:00+00:00

Sam Machin showed me the Pizza Express app. It’s like most retail apps. Vouchers and a store locator, clumsily implemented. But it also allows paying the restaurant bill with PayPal.

Type in a code printed at the bottom of the receipt, apply any vouchers and then log in to paypal. The trouble is the next step is uncertain. The bill is paid, but the waiting staff don’t know this. Do you just walk out? Or do you first explain what you’ve done? You’ve not placed a card or money on the table either, so the staff don’t walk up to your table to help.

Likewise, Apple are rumoured to be launching the ability to pay for in store purchases through an iPhone app:

The other major feature coming in Apple’s new app? Customer self check-out at retail stores. This is a huge deal and Apple is the first to be able to put it together. Here is how this will work: after you find the item you want to buy, like an accessory, you launch the Apple Store app on your iOS device and there will be an option to buy a product in the store. You scan the product with the camera on your device in the app, click purchase, and it will charge whatever credit card is associated to your Apple ID. You then just walk out of the store. Yes, we have been told that Apple will not be checking purchases which seems hard to believe, but this self check-out option will launch Thursday worldwide at all Apple retail stores

RFID credit cards are similar. You produce your credit card to pay and then have to explain you don’t want to use the usual chip and pin machine but to do the wavey thing that has no colloquial name yet. Using chip & pin would be quicker than having the conversation.

We lack the necessary vocabulary and rituals for these new forms of payment.

Retreat Into The Future

2011-11-06T12:00:00+00:00

A few weeks ago Justin Pickard linked me to Jonathan Meades’ Remember The Future. I’ve just gotten around to watching it.

It’s a sort of spoken essay about the techno-utopian vision of the future from the 60s & 70s. An appropriate companion to Playful 2011 which was full of men raised in the 60s & 70s disappointed that their promised future didn’t happen.

Which reminds me of John Gruber’s complaints about technology concept videos:

I’m not arguing that making concept videos directly leads to a lack of traction in the current market. I’m arguing that making concept videos is a sign of a company that has a lack of institutional focus on the present and near-present. Can you imagine a sports team in the midst of a present-day losing season that makes a video imagining a future championship 10 years out?

More Retreat Into The Future than Occupy The Future