I’ve been watching Skyfire quite closely over the last few months. Since purchasing my current phone (MDA compact 4/HTC Diamond) I have been looking for an alternative browser to the pre installed Opera 9. ALthough this is a great browser and works really well with the touch interface, it does not support flash/Ajax elements yet (as it is in beta).
Enter Skyfire…”a free, downloadable mobile web browser that allows you to experience the internet on your phone exactly like on your PC. Now, you can use the full web from your mobile phone with unprecedented speed and simplicity”. When I initially installed skyfire, there was only support for US and canada customers. It also didn’t support my device and so didnt work at all. Today I receieved an email from Skyfire to say that UK support was now available and the most recent version of the beta also suported my device…WHOO!
Initial impressions are mixed however…it does support all the flash/ajax stuff and youtube/iplayer etc. work quite well but the user interface is nowhere near as polished as operas. It is still in beta however so I’m going to watch this space.

I have been having a mess around with Arduino. I built a simple circuit using and LED and a push button to simulate what I want to achieve in the end; a circuit that outputs something when I press a button essentially! I then wrote a simple push button program in Arduino and loaded it onto the board et voilà! Worked first time. Although this is seriously basic stuff in Arduino I wanted to get something working to boost my confidence in using it. The world is now my oyster!

After my last project meeting (the first since the Xmas break) Chris and I both decided that I should start to make something! I am now pretty certain that my project will consist of a ‘datalogger’ that will wirelessly send a signal to a server to log the data in a database of some sort. This data can then be published in the public domain. As iI am going to make the Datalogger myself I thought it would be a good call to get started with some basic electronics. I purchased an Arduino Diecimila USB board (which arrived on friday!) to start having a mess around with. So my first steps were to plug it into my computer and sort the USB drivers out on my computer…which I have just done. It lit up like a christmas tree and installed first time with no problems…great! Next stap…get some electronic bits and bobs and make em do stuff! More on that later…

I’ve been looking at the Internet Archives ‘Wayback machine‘. The Internet Archive has been archiving the web since 1996 and has snapshots of every webpage that has existed in that time. The wayback machine can show you all the different variations of a particular URL. Its really interesting to see what sites looked like back in the days when the web wasn’t really the web we know. This shows a really interesting map of a particular URL and how it has been used over a period of time. Take a look at the entries that were found when I searched against google (there were thousands!) and also the prototype google page back in 1998.

I was looking at google mars last night. Its a new service from google that maps the surface of Mars in a google earth/maps stylee. They show it with 3 different views elevation, visible and infrared. It is the elevation view that I am most interested in as it uses a contour map of the surafce. This got me thinking about my space project. It would tie in nicely with the greenfield and brownfield theory and would provide some nice visulaisations of the space. Using the colours in the map I culd map the ’stains’ people leave on the space even developing it furtur showing the marks that people have left over a century giving some really rich maps of the space.

On monday the 3rd Dec 07 Adam, Luke, Simon and I went along to the mscapeFest at the Hewlett Packard research labs in Bristol. Mscape is a beta software package that allows you to put hotspots over certain areas of real space using GPS and a windows mobile based device. This hotspot can then be assigned to trigger an event on the mobile device, be it a sound, image, video etc. They are also currently in the process of including other sensory devices such as RFID, active RF, infrared and barcode recognition for proximity sensing with many others on the cards. The two day event (we only went for the first day) consisted of various workshops outlining the various aspects of Mscape such as pervasive gaming, community building etc along with networking sessions and tonnes of free food! We managed to get some people interested in what we are doing for the games module which is always a bonus. We also got to have a play with some mediascapes (in a ‘here’s one we made earlier’ blue peter stylee) out in Queens Square in Bristol…it was freezing and we managed to find loads of animal noises (it was a mediascape about animals!) but was good to have a go! All in all it proved to be a very interesting day and certainly sparked off some ideas. It has helped me with my ideas for the space module and can also reinforce some key issues with the games module…well worth the trip out!

Its finished! at last after 3 intensive days working solely in processing we have finished the workshop. It all ended with a presentation of the pieces using the green screen in the window on portland square. There is some footage of the presentations on its way along with a video documenting the 3 days but for now Adam took some photos for me and can be viewed here. Below is an Image of my final sketch (hopefully I will try to get it live on the web).

So, I’ve been taking part in a 3 day processing workshop in order to improve my programming skills. As part of the workshop we have to produce visualisations for data streams from iDAT’s archOS system. I’ve been working on a simple 3D visualisation of the temperature readings from the sensors of Portland Square where a cube grows and shrinks according to the outside temperature over a 24 hour period. I also incorporated a visualisation of the time of day that the individual data was taken in the form of a light source that mimics the sun’s path through the sky. I am still working on this and hope to include some colour changing aspects to make it look nicer! At the end of the second day we got to test our visualisation on the Green Screen in the atria of Portland Square ( a huge LED mesh screen) and they all looked really good. I have some images of mine below.

Lets face it…I’m not the best programmer in the world and with doing a degree in digital art and technology it can leave me a bit behind the rest of the year (playing a small violin). Ex-MLA/DAT graduate Ruari Glynn is going to run a processing workshop this week to which I am signed up to. Apparently processing is a programming environment and language based on java which has been developed for artists, designers and non programmers to help them learn how to program using object oriented methods. Although I can program to some extent using java and actionscript, I think this will help me broaden my horizons to the world of progamming.

Ok so last night saw the first of this years Apollo seminars hosted by iDAT. Presenting was Gianni Corino, an Italian digital artist and all round digital explorer who is currently working alongside and teaching at iDAT. Below are some notes taken from the evening including a list of his past projects. I have to confess that these notes are blatantly stolen off Adam as he has a PDA with a keypad where as I have a silly little stylus touch screen jobby and cant keep up with the typing! Thanks adam!

Cultural and social interface for public and open spaces

Social Processes
Creativity
Knowledge
Consciousness
Technologies

Media art

Locative and mobile
Mixed reality
Net art
Digital storytelling
Crossmedia
Concepts of network and mixed space undermine my production and research

Dissertation on locative media and quixote as project

Social networks and locative media.

Trame
Project concerning technologies and online for cultural memory of 21st century. A multiarchive web system based on open source video technologies for multimedia online archives.
Trame.polito.it/trame

Remote risonanze
Telematic audio installation. A bridge between the inside and the outside, the online and the offline. Voices from the virtual world come back to the real world to their visitors.

Quixote
A collective project that is made as a moblog and locative media, a diary in real time of quixnote adventures made of images and text to create and send through performance participants phones. Puppet tracked through a gps signal. Suprised how the artefact can create an emotional reception to people.

Dn[T]3
An interactive installation for public spaces. A semantic ecosystem a memetic ecology, where the tag is equal to meme as a semantic unit according to Darwinian theory and lasting all of the installations time. It analyses words sent via SMS with an inferential engine and tracks each word received as absolute frequency, relations frequences. The project applies folksonomis model a typical internet digital world to real world. We can assume semantic clustures thru doing this.
Met.amor.ph

Metrobosco
An installation which has profound social and ecological value. A sort of game to be played by people, creating places of discussion and reflexion around urban replanning and its deeper meanings.

Practice based research in the context of interaction design and social adventure.