The Special Edition RAW Cannondale is produced in collaboration with denim brand G-Star. I love the combination of state of the art components and bad boy looks with traditional Brookes leather saddle and handlebar grips.
The Special Edition RAW Cannondale is produced in collaboration with denim brand G-Star. I love the combination of state of the art components and bad boy looks with traditional Brookes leather saddle and handlebar grips.
When we opened the registrations for Bathcamp, we needed a logo, and quick. Luckily there’s a standard Barcamp logo, which is available as a vector file, so I knocked up a version in a couple of fetching shades of blue:
All well and good, but fast forward a few weeks, and we started to feel that it wouldn’t exactly stand out in the BarCamp logo gallery. So, in a neat bit of team work, Stephen Pope, Mike Ellis and me, collaborated on this new logo, which oh-so-wittily incorporates an old-fashioned bath:
In the spirit of the event, you can also download this logo as an SVG vector file, for creative re-use! (Feel free to paint it on your laptop or tattoo it on your forehead for the event).
Having designed the logo, we also started thinking about taking the bath joke a bit further. With that in mind, we’re going to bring an actual bath to the event. We’re not sure exactly what we’re going to fill it with yet - although we’re asking attendees for their ideas - but we’re thinking that a bathload of beer would be fun.
July 15-16th Bridgewater hall
Bristol Wireless took its new revised LTSP suite for 2 days to the Substance Conference in Manchester. The Dell server laptop has been newly installed and the Evo T20 thin clients have been configured on the server, 7 flat screens and 3 laptops made up a suite of 10 machines: it all looks very professional.
After arriving at the venue, the suite went together in about 40 minutes and after a slight delay getting a network cable made and installed; we were running at 9am. The computers were for the delegates to use at break times and they were popular too, with a few people waiting for a machine to become vacant. Delegates used the Linux terminals to log on to Citrix and Novell systems or just checking websites and email through the browser.
The set up gathered a fair amount of interest and I ended up explaining the advantages of thin clients to a few organisations. In particular, the low power use and fan-less silent workstations making saving on air conditioning seemed to strike a chord, as did the fact that only the server needed occasional administration leaving time for ICT improvements instead of the usual constant maintenance cycle of multiple desktops.
Substance are Linux friendly. They make the most of the free tools available to make the most of web functionality. We discussed Drupal, Dapper, CiviCRM and plings, among other technologies.
Marc Newson recently collaborated with luxury watch manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre to produce the Atmos 561 mechanical clock. Atmos clocks will stay accurate for years powered by incremental temperature changes inside a bubble block of Baccarat crystal.
“Their power source is a hermetically sealed capsule containing a mixture of gas and liquid ethyl chloride, which expands into a chamber as the temperature rises, compressing a spiral spring; with a fall in temperature the gas condenses and the spring slackens. This motion constantly winds the mainspring. A variation in temperature of only one degree in the range between 15 and 30 degrees Celsius is sufficient for two days of operation.”
Via Core77.
Three over-excited six-year-olds are trying my patience this morning.
Every five minutes I hear a screech, followed by: “I’m telling!”
Then a pause, then, in an irritating whine: “Giles, so-and-so squirted me with water on my bum.”
I have no sympathy whatsoever, I tell them. You’re playing with water pistols. Getting wet is the object of the game. Whining is forbidden. Go play nicely.
Five more minutes passes, then: “Owwww! I’m telling! Giiiiiiiles!”
1. What do you do in your day job?At the moment I am working for a start-up in Bristol called Beanbag. As to what I do its a bit hard to describe as there is no job title or job description - basically if its not coding or design I’m involved to some extent. So far that has mainly meant doing some blogging, writing/rewriting some copy, trying to get a bit of publicity from other more impressive blogs and doing a bit of customer service. Its all good fun and interesting to be in on something at the start.
Depends on the sporting season to be honest! During the winter between helping out with a local football club, watching a few Bristol Rovers games, getting stressed out every time England take the field during the Six Nations and Sunday afternoons watching Bristol play the dullest rugby known to man there isn’t much time left. The summer is mainly just recovery time!
In my 10% and other free time I’ve got quite an interest in the idea of using the social web to enhance events and have written a bit about that and put it into practice once or twice. I also try to occasionally update my personal blog.
Because it only 20 minutes away on the train - is that a suitable answer? I like the freedom that unconferences allow you and the opportunity to learn something completely unexpected and interesting. I also enjoy the occasional opportunity to have a beer and a chat with people who actually understand what I’m talking about when I speak about my job!
Increasingly my passion seems to have settled on education in particular the idea of literacy. Whether that is traditional literacy, information literacy or media literacy changes like the Bristol weather but its that concept of comprehension - people (mainly young people) being able to do more than just go through the motions with something but to really understand what they are reading (whether its a book, newspaper or webpage) or watching and make their own judgments on its worth. I think thats really important as we are bombarded with more and more information sources.
Butcombe Gold… any explanation would seem unnecessary!
Sink Bowl is an ingenious crockery item devised by industrial designer Sherwood Forlee for eating instant ramen.
When you get to the point where you are frantically chasing just a few noodles swimming around in an ocean of broth, simply pop the plug in the top bowl and the soup drains into the bottom bowl, leaving you with just the remaining noodles. The hole is just big enough to let your soup drain but small enough to prevent your noodles from escaping.
The bowl also deals with the thorny issue of soggy cereal - no one likes mushy cornflakes for breakfast. With this bowl, simply allow your milk to soak your cereal for the requisite time and then pull the plug and drain. There you go . . . perfectly moistened yet crispy cereal.
Genius…!
I’m a freelance writer, mostly about computers and internets. I fell into it. I started life as a trainee reporter on the Cambridge Evening News in the early 1990s. Normal trainee reporter stuff - cats stuck up trees, car crash on the A14, body found in the Cam in the early hours of the morning, phoning Jeffrey Archer for comment on scandals, to which his answer was always “No comment,” and you can see why really - but the big thing that happened was that CB1 opened just down the road from my house.
CB1 was the first cybercafe in the UK outside of London, and after writing an article about it I started going there quite frequently. I taught myself how to use internets while they were still very young. The machines were a mixture of Macs and NeXT boxes. God knows what the software was, I can’t remember.
A couple of years later and a journo friend called from her job in London. “You know about the internet, don’t you?” she asked. Well, sort of, yeah. “Well we need an internet correspondent. Fancy a job?” And that was that. After a few years of London I got sick of it and went freelance. Shortly after that we moved to Bradford on Avon.
I have a five-year-old. That should be answer enough.
But if I’m honest, I do get time to myself. On Thursday nights I go singing, and after singing we singers go to the pub where the landlord glares at us if we show any signs of singing some more. If I have a free day with no five-year-old and no work (all you fellow freelancers will know about those days), I like to take my camera out for a walk.
Same reason as everyone else. I didn’t get invited to FooCamp. Also, because I think it’s good for my sanity, my career and my sense of well-being if I go to local geek events. I get on with geeks, even though I lack the expertise that a Computer Science degree or a career in programming would have given me.
Passions change over the years, don’t they? Stuff I used to get all hot and bothered about doesn’t trouble me as much as it did. These days I’m growing interested in two strands of environmentalism that I label “waste” and “simplicity”. They’re linked, of course. I’m interested in minimising waste, and in all aspects of everything that make life simpler. Other things that start me swearing include: the poor quality of daily newspaper journalism these days; the poor quality of most TV; the poor quality of food offered by most supermarkets. I’m nearly middle-aged, can you tell?
A cloned copy of myself, who could do the childcare when I need to get on with some deadline-specific work.
Giles’ online presence can be felt at http://gilest.org/.
Actually, please don’t do that, I’ll have to get off my bum and look for another job.
It is, however, part of the conversation I’ll be having in my parallel session titled “What’s the Point of having Developers in a Web 2.0 World?” at IWMW 2008 in Aberdeen next week.
Self-promotion over, back to your jobs people (while you still have them!).
Since the introduction of the Local Government Act in 2000 districts across England and Wales have had the option of directly electing their Mayor. Whilst traditional Mayorships have been largely ceremonial positions, Elected Mayors assume a far more active political role, with powers similar to those of the Councils executive committee.
A few of the early Elected Mayors created something of a media sensation; Hartlepool memorably voted in H’Angus the Monkey and Middlesbrough elected Ray “Robocop” Mallon, a famously hardline ex-police chief.
Currently there are thirteen directly elected Mayors in England, including the Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Thirty five Local Authorities in total have held a referendum to establish the publics appetite for a directly elected mayor. So far one third of these have been successful. A campaign has just been started to gather the support for holding just such a referendum in Bristol. There are strong views and compelling arguments for and against, so which way should Bristol go?
A History of the Mayors of Bristol
View this video file
Saturday, September 13, 2008 at 08:00 AM - Sunday, September 14,
2008 at 08:00 AM (GMT)
http://bathcamp08.eventbrite.com/
BathCamp is a BarCamp style event that Tim Beadle and others are organising, to take place in Bath (UK) later in the summer. A BarCamp is a type of participatory conference (or unconference, if you prefer), where everyone is encouraged to give short presentations, demos, workshops and so on, in a kind of ad-hoc, not very pre-planned kind of fashion. There’s also an overnight element, where attendees can literally camp out and hang out, either discussing stuff or making stuff (or both).
As part of your £5 booking fee, you are not only guaranteed a place at the event but we’ll also chuck in a t-shirt, food and a couple of beers as well. We’re also massaging the feet of as many sponsor types as possible and hope to bring you some quality schwag, too.
Today I did lots of healthy, useful things*, while the news around us is that we are in a recession, a very quick and serious one, and not just as a country but as a globalised western world. What this has led to is exemplified really nicely by the great Big Issue headline that came out a while back "The answer to the food crisis - Grow your own!" - and in general people are rushing to get more and more into planting and cycling and generally into more sustainable lives as they see this is probably the best time to do it - even if this is just a mini bust due to speculation. And when I read an article in the weekend paper about a poor freelance journalist wishing he had studied engineering as a backup trade - and now impoverished by the credit crunch, I was inspired to expand freecycle and other stuff like that into an online community task/project/exchange coordination system, that could fall back into wireless if there was no main internet.
That's what I've been thinking about since: how to create an open source management system for localised urban economies to exchange, buy, give resources and skills, and organise those exchanges into tasks. But of course it's only about 30% a web application - the rest of it is hard work and face to face trading, discussion and agreements between the people involved, and ways to ensure people without computers don't get excluded and in fact are encouraged to use it.
But this didn't just come out of nowhere: I've recently become one of the webmasters for Transition Bristol. I was chatting about this last week with a friend who is stuck in his house with ME and lots of family heirlooms and clutter, which really get him down. One bit of this clutter is a very nice collection of ecologically oriented books. So we thought - let's start a distributed library for Transition Easton - so just in that part of town, for local people to be able to share say, a lawnmower or a book. So I suggested it to Zoe who is one of the people running Transition Easton - and in doing that I researched all the other exchange systems that have come and gone in Bristol already:
Existing local and UK DIY stuff:
Larger versions: many existing open source systems have very similar requirements to what I feel a local economy manager would need: The typical version control software used for programming with open source, issue trackers for reporting software bugs, project planning software and team/groupware have basically all the functionality needed. Also they're written in convenient languages allowing a new project to have a peek or even lift functions to get the same things done - some (like the version control software Bazaar) are distributed systems. This is good because they'll not need a central server, but will be made up of all the individual little computers running it. Moodle also has similar capabilities.
Most importantly - It would aspire to the lofty goal of being a "Moodle for communities". A free, open source, world wide project which could then be used by lots of different groups on a local basis. From speaking to Gary Alexander (who wrote the Norfolk based Diss exchange system) , I know there's a systems philosophy called VSM that can be used to inform the development of this, as well as of course the participative and self organising aspects of Web 2.0, permaculture as a design science rather than strictly for gardens, and finally Participatory Economics(or Parecon) - an underused field that I don't believe has an implementation but which I find a good basis. The wikipedia article on population mentions this as possibly the only system that could allow economies to continue functioning at the scale we are at now, without involving a huge die-off (or a war) first.
The first simple thing that Parecon gives is that for example on a web page about a particular transaction, anyone would be able to have their say on it - like "you can't buy those eggs, we need them here at the cafe" or "Oh and can I have the egg shells? I use the powder for my bone disease" etc - which would be a very web 2.0 way to buy and sell, and would make the experience of trade into more of an ecosystem.
The first great thing about VSM on the other hand, is that I was actually born into it! It was only ever implemented on a national scale in Chile during Allende's rule. So there's something wonderful about all this!
Here are some of my notes on this(written on the laptop while gardening, out of range of any internet):
Database-wise it would need tables for people, items, projects/interest groups and actions, a plug-in system for extensions and integrations (like with feral trade for international commerce), a strong wifi-mesh enabled back end allowing stronger traffic with wifi networks running same software. And lots of ways of exchanging resources as a community.
All the systems need no more than a way to profile an item - this could be an idea or an instruction, a bit like an issue in a request tracking system or in a project management system.
The system needed is a stripped down, simple to use and expandible(plugin based) way to
buy/sell
Exchange: offer/"take"/advertise/ask for
Exchange indirectly using internal system (timebank extension plugin fits here, as do many others).
So allowing for exchanges - it becomes like a marketplace of skills and resources, products and deliveries.
A funded programme might pay for bikes, lessons and legal system for teenage kids to be able to deliver items in return for meals, food, items, services, training etc, but also money. 2 quid for a delivery is not much to ask, and economy of scale means lots of little things can be delivered (eg flyers).Also it should allow for the complex elements involved in organising a more extended project requiring stages of production - it would also have inputs and outputs, and tasks allowing for their organisation in a decentralised way - a tasks wiki.
It shouldn't tell you what to do with it, but allow lots of generic options. So this system is like a programmer's CVS of the 90s. It's a first stage towards a programmed economic/exchange system for a community.
So for example a chicken coop: You
* Healthy things I did that sunday (from above): I planted lots of recycled potatoes in the garden, hoping they'll come up in a clump (but I think I should have put some mushroom and fungus poison on them first), and I bought an SWC. It will have basil, cucumber, tomato and an assortment of other things like green beans for nitrogen. I learnt a bit about companion plants and germinating seeds rather than planting direct. I might look in ebay for other seeds of nice herbs... Also I cycled off to see a friend, did some exercises, figured out a compost-food recycling system for my house which now needs black magic marker penned instructions as to what goes where. I invented, on a proverbial napkin, the concepts of
And I called an electricity company for a quote to do my house up with solar panels. Nice lazy sunday.
