Ben and Kate are blogging, Schulze and Webb are blogging. The former is possibly London's only left-brain/right-brain blog about contemporary dance, finance and food. The latter is a space for thoughts, sketches and observations that aren't yet fully formed projects. Both are worth your attention.
Also found this week (via del.icio.us/toxi) Matt Pyke and David Barrington are collecting graphic design inspiration from outside the field at Everyone Forever.
Paul Marshall makes beautiful music and sings beautiful songs. I ordered his CD and he hand wrote a little note to go with it letting me know when he'd next be playing London and what he was up to at the moment. Nice!
One half of Paul's album is by Tascam Tapes, who also makes beautiful music and sings beautiful songs, alone and with her band The Minor Fall.
Browsing all these connections again on myspace is a little strange, because I never remember where I find these things. It turns out they all have releases on Seduction Records alongside a band called Whores Whores Whores who my brother has done a bit of PR for recently. And then I find my brother's band recommending Paul Marshall to Marsha from XFM as a response to her podcast where she recommends them, and it's all neatly tied together.
Nicholas Street, a recent MEng Computer Science graduate from Imperial College London, posted last week to the mysociety maps mailing list about his final year project work, TimeContours: Using isochrone visualisation to describe transport network travel cost.
His work includes a comparison with my own maps, which he says are "effective prototype implementations, but the unfamiliar unlabelled layout makes it difficult to relate to the underground". Touché! To his credit, Nicholas addresses almost all the deficiencies of my tube maps with his own software and goes significantly further in implementing the same kind of analysis for other transport networks (even including an example of using street data from my friends at OpenStreetMap).
His approach and background reading are covered in detail so the final paper will be a great resource for people working in this area in the future. I do hope he finds time to release the software for us all to use too. As well as the more traditional academic and print references, it's nice to see a hat tip to people putting their thoughts and experiments online such as myself, Rod and Oskar. Whilst a blog is no substitute for peer review and academic rigour, I strongly believe that the more of these ideas we share then the better all our work will become.
Last weekend, I attended day two of dorkbot Ghent's dorkfest. Due to a few people over-running and a later than expected start, I didn't actually speak for anywhere near as long as I had planned. I even missed out my tube maps in the rush which was disappointing. I hope to return and give a better presentation another day because I definitely liked Ghent and lots of things caught my eye.
Many thanks to Lieven and friends for inviting me, and to all the participants for showing their excellent and interesting projects. Highlights for me were Sven Koenig's sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, Heiko Hansen's overview of HEHE's work and the increasingly impressive NodeBox - think Processing meets Python plus lots more, sadly Mac OS-only right now but work on porting it is in progress.
This weekend, I hope to catch the end of the RCA Summer Show (particularly Interaction Design as covered by Tom at plasticbag) and the Bartlett Summer Show (alas I missed the MSc AAC show last weekend due to the clash with dorkbot Ghent). With luck, I'll also make it to Future City at the Barbican.
Looking further ahead, I'll be in Manchester for Futuresonic from 20th-22nd July. I'm taking part in a panel for the Social Technologies Summit with Stanislav Roudavski and Matt Webb entitled Iterative Architecture (Built On An Internet Of Things). The rest of the festival is shaping up nicely, I'm pretty excited about seeing Battles again on the Friday night.
One of my fellow EngD students at the Bartlett, Karen Martin, is helping to organise Why Wait? (a workshop on place, time and future technologies) to be held on the 27th and 28th July. You might also like Karen's blog, Mr. Watson. I'll be at the first day of the workshop before I leave London on the 28th for two weeks in Chicago, New York and Boston. If you've read this far and you live in any of those cities, let me know - we should probably meet!
Lots of stuff is free this week. New-ish blog from Steve; nice simple idea.
Processing Hacks is progressing nicely. Toxi made a few updates this week, so we have better Processing source code highlighting (and links to the official reference) as well as the ability to post applets. We've moved the contents off the front page, and you can also generate an index to see what articles actually exist right now.
I've just added Chris O'Shea aka Pixelsumo's Processing category to Processing Blogs, as well as Ricard Marxer's fantastic Caligraft sketchbook. As always, if you're posting regularly about Processing or closely related topics, let me know and I'll add you as soon as I can.
Processing Blogs welcomes Ivan Safrin and William Ngan into the fold.
Welcome Nathaniel Reinhart and Ryan Alexander, both recently added to Processing Blogs.
Please leave a comment if you know of other people blogging their Processing sketches.
Update: Douglas Edric Stanley has just been added too. Welcome!
Alison Mealy's blog has been added to Processing Blogs.
You might know about Alison from her hugely and deservedly popular Processing-UnrealEd mashup, UnrealArt and despite her initial reluctance I'm looking forward to seeing what else she comes up with. I'm sure you'll agree that the culture of sharing of what she unjustly calls her "pathetic" experiments is actually what makes Processing such a great thing - keep it up Alison!
The fabulous Daniel Shiffman has been added to Processing Blogs. I'm a big fan of his course site for The Nature of Code, so it's an honour to have him on board.
In other news, I think the problems with Blogger feeds (empty links and images for some posts) have been fixed with the latest updates to FeedWordpress. Fingers crossed. Unfortunately my cron job for automatically updating the blog has broken, so for the time being I am updating by hand - apologies for the laggy updates.
I also have a new domain for Processing Blogs which I will announce soon.
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