I'm a huge Kickstarter fan, despite the fact that my Rasp Pi looks like it will arrive before the Twine that I backed back in 1987 (actually, I think it was November last year, just feels like it was '87).

The Makey Makey looks great fun - we already make stuff with the arduino that the wee lads play with (mainly by scrunching bits of tinfoil into other bits of tinfoil to make things light up / buzz) but this makes the hookup to the screen much easier. And it looks cool. And it has crocodile clips. And look - pacman!

You still have plenty time to back it aswell.

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This months Techmeetup was fun - no speakerlist - just a call to the audience to give brief talks about their work, side projects, and general 'stuff'.

Varied topics touching on dynamic typing in C#, personal data, mindblowing bitstring processing and web optimisation.

I gave an introduction to an idea I've been kicking around with a few others, most notably Kevin, to come up with a 'web retreat' inspired by Code Retreat, but taking a broader approach to involve everyone you would expect to find in a web shop / agency. I'll post more on that over the next couple of weeks.

So, now that the cat is out of the bag, if anyone would like to hear more, get involved, take part in our test runs, or just chat about it over coffee do get in touch. I'll be announcing test runs, and the real thing later in the year here, and on the Refresh Aberdeen mailng list. So get on the list to hear more.

And on the topic of techmeetup - it's every third wednesday of the month, announcements etc at Techmeetup.co.uk and on Facebook.

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I just found out that the New Scientist has back issues available to read on Google Books - See the list here.

I'm delighted with the cover that was on the shelves when I was born. Delighted beyond belief.

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Just to lock it in the blog - we've been playing with robots at work, and giving the robots things like twitter accounts and birthday muffins. Lately it's all gone a bit photoshop. A fuller gallery is available at http://twitter.com/#!/borkbot/media/grid

See the full gallery on Posterous

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The eldest wee lad is almost 4. He loves the Octonauts. His favourite two phrases are "I want to do it all by myself" and "we could make one of those". He likes to be in control. 

He is learning his letters in a pretty unstructured, self learning way, where he asks questions about them when they interest him. He understands that letters give access to "stuff" on the iPad / phone / computer when you can't find an icon or a thumbnail of what you are after.

He types 'co' to bring up the 'octocompass' on my iPhone because the icon is hard to find. The iPhone search rewards this with a wee icon of the compass. He clicks it. He wins.

The BBC iplayer search is terrible for him.

So yesterday, at the end of an episode, he copies what daddy does - and clicks in the search box. He then starts hunting for letters. He makes a couple of mistakes but he does ok.

This is how the iPlayer search rewards his search for OCTONOTS.

No results. Personally, I think he did pretty ok, I'd let him watch Peso and the crew for that effort. The iPlayer search is just being mean. Like witholding pudding unless he says please.

So please, iPlayer team, make the search a little more forgiving, especially for kids stuff.  

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Saturday mornings with a one and a half year old and a nearly four year old can be 'fun'. Before you are even half awake the phrase "can we watch a wee episode?" or "do you have the iPad?" will have set the tone. The lure of the Octonauts is strong.

Not being keen to produce four eyed little gogglebox addicts - we limit TV access. So I have to be creative in how we satisfy the Octonauts addiction. We make octocompasses, papercraft GUP-As and I could draw a GUP-B being attacked by an axe wielding octopus in my sleep.

None of this was working on Saturday.

So, as with web development, when your usual approach isn't working you reach into your tool belt and get out the ... JAVASCRIPT.

After the keynote from @seb_ly at DIBI this year I've been itching to have a play with particle emitters and different images to create animated particles with different frames. 

A quick "git clone https://github.com/sebleedelisle/JavaScript-PixelPounding-demos.git" followed by a Google image search for Octonauts and we're into some interactive javascript funtime.

Then a half hour over breakfast with the wee lad shouting "add a giant sea squid", "make them faster", "make them more explodey", "nooooo - not the GUP-B - noooooooooo.

Live Reload and MASSIVE font in the editor made it good fun - I'd say 'pick a number to go here' and we'd wonder at how the GUP-A suddenly appeared 10 times the size. Every change led to bouts of huge laughter and the announcement that javascript was "crazy".

Magic fun.

Next weekend - a 3D kelp forest background.

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Yesterday we held the first Code Retreat Aberdeen. About two dozen coders (and one designer) gathered to take part at the University of Aberdeen. It was a joint effort between myself on the Refresh Aberdeen side, and Bruce Scharlau on the Aberdeen Uni side. 

If you haven't heard of code retreat before the description at http://coderetreat.org/ does a better job than I will here... Code Retreat is very much a coders event. We tackle a single problem in pairs, writing code for 40 minutes before having a quick review, deleting our code, swapping pairs, and starting again. We do this all day. Insane. Insanely brilliant.

Adrian Mowat from Edge Case facilitated, and kept it pure with an instistence on pair programming and TDD. The TDD part caused some funny looks at the start, as many of the participants had never worked a truly TDD workflow before (a fair number of students). The first iteration (or two) were largely about getting to grips with testing frameworks and principles.

The general hubbub between iterations changed really quickly through the day from "why TDD?" to "TDD makes me slow" to "TDD changed how I thought about the problem" to "TDD led me to a more elegant and smaller solution".

I'd call that a pretty successful day.

I took part properly for the first three iterations to keep numbers even, and then looked to spend more time getting to grips with facilitating. 

My three iterations covered Java, Ruby and JavaScript. In all three the writing of tests was the focus, rather than the writing of code. I loved this. I don't write as many tests as I should - and have a habit of bashing through a rough solution rather than writing tests to test my assumptions. So this was good discipline. 

The afternoon was interesting. Talking to everyone about how they were finding the process, seeing where a nudge in the right direction can kick people out of timesinks, and generally observing the workings of the code retreat was fascinating.

Thanks to Adrian for facilitating. And thanks to the sponsors Codify, Fifth Ring and The University of Aberdeen - because of them we managed to keep the event free to attend and provide breakfast pastries, a great lunch from itsyworld and some pixelly event t-shirts.  

Feedback has been excellent, so we are definitely planning to do another later in the year. If you fancy it make sure you're on the Refresh Aberdeen mailing list to hear about it.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Thanks to Kevin for the photos above, and to his kids for helping us finish the cakes.

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A quick run through the talks from DIBI '12, as much to remind myself later as to inform the masses. You'll find links to all the speakers on the dibi site at https://www.dibiconference.com/schedule/ until I get time to come back and slot them in. I jumped tracks a few times - why don't you play 'guess the track' basd on the description.

Seb Lee-Delisle, 'Design it and build it'

This was a great talk - really upbeat, enthusiastic, and I would imagine most of us left with a feeling we should really play a bit more with 'visual stuff' built with code.

He live coded a javascript particle emitter on stage - piece by piece - to show the 'designers that don't code' how easy it is. Before that he'd used a C64 emulator to create generative art. Great stuff. Reminded me of the old days of drawing line patterns on the speccy to get weird moire patterns wiggling about on the screen. Speccy for loops ftw!

Takeaway - the journey informs the destination - just get stuck in

The 2 Pauls, 'the challenges of designing for everyone - revolutionising the UK government online'

I should really have gone to the node.js talk on the other track - but this is really interesting stuff. The talk centred on a review of the key design principles of the project - with examples of how they are applied. Some of the comparisons of the 'old way' and the new interpretation are properly impressive. I love the thinking behind most of this. To hear government talking about MVP, RWD, Agile etc... is pretty exciting actually. If you haven't been already, have a rummage around https://www.gov.uk/

Takeaway - user test user test user test

Brian LeRoux, 'Mobile web programming is a bloody mess!'

This was a good run through of the landscape for mobile, and background on phone gap. Brian obviously knows his hardcore JS and I got a lot out of this one - one of the more practical talks.

Takeaway - mobile is hard, but debug tools are here and they work so stop wining

Chris Mills and Bruce Lawson, 'The DIBI Panto'

That's not the actual name of the talk - but it may as well have been. Costumes, sound effects, boos from the audience. Banging the drum for standards, accessibility and feature detection. Nothing particularly new for me - but a good fun presentation.

Takeaway - funny is good

Ted Roden, 'Going Solo'

Ted has a pretty brutal, focussed, down to earth view of the 'startup landscape'. And his view is from a distant hill. His approach to releasing features - don't start something you can't ship today - makes me happy. I'm not sure why - it just does. I'm kind of annoyed this clashed with Paul Boag - who I'd also like to have seen - but I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. Great talk.

Takeaway - 'it ships today' 

Scott Rutherford, 'Failing up'

This wasa really interesting run through of the birth and toddler years of User Voice. Some funny stuff, and some really interesting stuff about how to deal with software / hardware fails in the face of customer demand.

Takeaway - react quickly and openly when stuff goes wrong

Cameron Moll, 'The burden of being creative'

Cameron did some of his presentation live using the Paper ipad app to draw his slides. It was an interesting approach, but slowed things up in a few places. I was impressed with his penmanship, the standard pen in Paper is a nightmare to write with.

Cameron built up an equation to define creativity. I'm not sure I agree with his final equation - but I like the idea of demystifying creativity in this way. 

Overall

So Seb gave the most awesome/brilliant (delete as applicable) talk, and Ted gave the best takeaway (it ships today). The workshop on Monday was great fun, and the conference day flew by. The beef noodles for lunch were tasty, and the pizza at night appreciated. I even got a 5am Saint in. 

DIBI is a great conference - you should definitely go next year.

Now, I'm off to write some generative javascript art to be seeded by some arduino interactive tinfoil fuzzy connections through the analog inputs to run through a node.js back end, sync'd onto every screen in the house.  Should be fun. 

See the full gallery on Posterous

PS - I've no idea why the pics above have random order. I'd fix it, but posterous is likely to be subsumed into twitter before I figure it out!

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I now love arduino beyond reason. This was a genuinely enjoyable afternoon spent surrounded by pretty focussed nerds playing with LEDs and C. I seldom get a chance to take part in a workshop - and this was good fun.

@nrocy ran a pretty good workshop. It felt structured, but flexible enough to handle questions, and was paced well to cover material while allowing a bit of play during the afternoon. We had to type stuff out, actually writing code with some guidance rather than just listening to explanations of what 'test-proj-4.txt' does. Perfect approach.

We ran through the 'hello world' stuff, some theory, and had to build circuits based on circuit diagrams (rather than arduino wiring diagrams) which was a solid start. I haven't written C in anger since the mid 90s - so you certainly don't need major C skills to get stuck in. 

We even got to play with tinfoil. No hats though (sad face).

What I enjoy about arduino is the same thing I enjoyed back when I was first learning BASIC on the spectrum - you can achieve a host of cool things using a small test code set. Tinkering with a small program - just changing variables, sequences, and testing in / out puts gets a new dimension when you have physical STUFF to play with.

If you get a chance to do this workshop take it.

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Earlier today I went to Whisky Web.  

I went down on the train on the morning so missed the opening keynote (sad face) as I only got to venue at 9:45.

But here's a quick round up of the talks I saw:

Open street map
Derick Rethans

I loved the obvious passion for the subject matter, and totally want to organise a Refresh Aberdeen mapping party in the summer. Maybe map everything at Balmedie before the BBQ?. I've also doodled out half a dozen things I need to investigate on OSM. You can't ask for more from a talk. Great stuff.

Essential Node.js
Mike Amundsen

I've played with node.js a bit, I like it. It's nice. I got a fair bit out of this talk. A reminder of the reason node exists, some tips on using it, and some reassurance that I'm doing alright with express and socket.io in my project. JS is fun. Mike was probably the most polished speaker.

The emperor's new clothes
Kevinjohn Gallagher

This wasn't my cup of tea. I can live without argumentative Zeldman bashing, boobies on slides, and endless innuendo laden star trek jokes. Sorry man - maybe caught you on a bad day.

Mashing Up JavaScript
Bastian Hofmann

I found this one a little frustrating. Great content, fired through at lightening pace, with huge enthusiasm. Jumping from presentation to editor to terminal to browser was hard to keep a handle on though - making it feel really disjointed. That said, I've also filled a couple of pages with js stuff to try out around ideas from the talk. So with a bit less jumping around this would be a great talk. Or a really good day long workshop.

Is your App ready for the cloud
Thijs Feryn

I really don't look after any apps that need the level of hosting that Thijs gets excited about. I enjoyed the talk though - interesting issues and knowledgeable speaker. I want to find out more about the MS cloud offerings just out of interest.

How the Web evolves with Hypermedia
David Zülke

Loved it. Keynotes should present a world view. We saw a world view. And a shark. Have some code to change next week off the back of this. Great fun, thoughtful stuff.

For a conference pulled together at such short notice it had a great atmosphere, some good talks, and tasty vegetarian lasagne.

Well done guys.

As I type this (sitting on my train north drinking a cold Nero triple latte) everyone else is getting a whisky master class from @whiskycraig. Bad timing of the last train home - Craig is the man! :(

I don't know how everyone else felt about the ticket price. Personally, £50 for a full day catered conf with sharks and malt whisky at a proper venue seems cheap.

Juozas said in the closing remarks that they hope to bring it back next year, you should all get a ticket.

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A list of the handsets being used on one of my sites.

It goes without saying that the iOS devices head the list. Looking in Google Analytics at the mobiles being used it blows my mind that I have no idea what most of these phones look like.

I have truly passed through the iOS event horizon. I can't look back. Something must be done.

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I thought it might be handy to post a list of the various links that I mentioned last night, in various chats, while at Refresh. Save me from sending a stack of tweets.

• https://www.backupify.com/ - back up your google docs / cloud apps content with a paid service that's unlikely to be acquihired
• http://www.arduino.cc/ - a good jumping off point for arduino stuff
• http://aberduino.co.uk/ - the local arduino stuff
• http://www.raspberrypi.org/ - the cheap wee computer everyone loves
• http://refresh-aberdeen.posterous.com/announcing-code-retreat-aberdeen - the code retreat in April
• https://www.dibiconference.com/ - the web conference in the Newcastle / Gateshead
• http://2012.beercamp.com/ - the flip book website that will test the fan on your mac
• http://www.responsinator.com/ - the wee rwd preview thingummy
• http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3137-using-event-capturing-to-improve-basecamp-page-load-times - bubbling and capturing

If I missed any - shout.

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I'd love an extra cm or so of screen below the 'two thumbs' keyboard on iPad to be dead space - i.e. you can't tap there. Why? See the pic:

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I wrote a wee post for the Refresh Aberdeen Open Mic blog - listing some of the webby events I'm looking forward to. 

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Using twitter as a route to channel data to other apps is something I've played with for a while. 

Back in 2009 I knocked up a wee site to turn tweets into charts - mainly to document coffee overconsumption and cycling mediocrity - some examples here. (I haven't kept the ever changing twitter API stuff up to date, so it's not consuming new tweets, or allowing new sign ups any more.)

The downside of using datatoy was that I looked somewhat mental and self obsessed to my followers. "bikerun 21 km" and "coffee 1 nero triple latte" are hardly classic tweets.

It was like the Path sleep/wake nonsense.

I'm now playing with things like Arduino, Twine and odd toothbrush APIs  - and I really want to feed some of the data from these through twitter. Routing through twitter opens up options for easily processing through sites like ifttt.com, and lets me watch the stream of data in one place if I want to. 

But this would create a lot of junk tweets. Junk tweets really annoy people. And really annoyed people sometimes kill. I don't want to be killed. 

I could create a new twitter account just for these tweets, but that's a bit faily. There has to be a better way.

#self

A standard marker like #self at the end of the tweet would allow clients to filter out all these auto tweets. So followers see a nice clean twitter feed, the tweeter has the convenience of a single twitter account, and the auto tweets can follow a nice clean path. A lot of clients have mute filters. Adding #self kills these tweets immediately.  

So my examples above become "bikerun 21 km #self" and "coffee 1 nero triple latte #self". 

Wider adoption of this principle beyond twitter could make the Path wake/sleep option useful again. I love the feature, but I don't want to flood everyones stream with my boring sleep tracking. Applying a #self tag would allow others to easily ignore that message. 

If I want to use runkeeper, track my blood pressure through a sensor, or hook my wireless bathroom scales to my twitter, or monitor the quality of my toothbrushing - I just apply the #self tag.

Then when I want to process the data I just hook up to my tweets mentioning #self.

The tweets are still public, and can be viewed like any other when not filtered out. So 3rd party sites don't need full auth to just consume my feed and do stuff with my data - produce visualisations, summaries, reactions.

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The wee lads love eating toothpaste and chewing the toothbrush. They need some serious cajoling to actually brush properly though. To be fair Robin is a bit young, but Dugald is in the zone for proper brushing. So I backed this on kickstarter:

This looks like a fun way to make toothbrushing competitive. And nothing motivates the wee lad like a bit of competition.

And it has an API. So when this arrives - my son's toothbrush will have an API. We are living in the future people. We are living in the future. A toothbrush - with an API. And an iPhone app. Who needs a flying car when your toothbrush has an API.

I'm already kicking about ideas for an Arduino thingummy that watches the data feed from the toothbrush and does something in the real world when he hits two minutes. Like start a clock that shows how long since he brushed. 

There's more from the guy behind this thing here - worth a watch. 

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In the middle of January I got a chest infection - not uncommon in a Scottish winter I'm sure - but it thumped me hard. A week later I had to give in and take some time off work. It had turned into pneumonia and all my energy, focus and enthusiasm vapourised.

After a couple of failed attempts, we eventually found the antibiotics that would sort me out, and I pretty quickly came back to life. But not before I'd essentially lost 2 or 3 weeks use of my brain.

I'm now working through my notebooks, todos, evernote, book pile, email etc... getting everything stacked up in my brain again to pick up where I left off a month ago. It's flooding back in pretty quickly, but the written notes are amazingly useful during the process.

I'm really glad I'm a note taker.

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I had the longest Christmas break ever in 2011. 25 straight days away from the desk. It would have been way too long were it not for the fun to be had from my 3 1/2 year old having his first proper Christmas where he 'gets it'.

A side effect of the break was a return to filling notebooks with ideas, building little side project tools in the evening, and generally creating stuff in a way I haven't done for some time.

So what drove this?

I have a creative job. I design things. I build things. I solve problems, or at least delve into and define problems. Every day. My brain obviously has a drive to do this - so during the break it directed the energy at other problems.

And, in the few weeks before the break I'd been to Build and to the Northern Lights conferences. Both were inspiring. Both got the brain working. Summed up by one wee line in the build talk from  @wilsonminer: "You know what we get to do when we leave here? We get to make things."

But I think there's something more.

Looking at my behaviour over the period there was a huge drop in my consumption of media. I spend a couple of hours a day commuting, and spend almost all of that time listening to (mainly) tech / business / science podcasts. A fair chunk of my evening will be spent working or listening to podcasts, reading books, touring kickstarter, keeping up on hacker news etc...  

It's a guess, but I think that some creative drive is partly satisfied simply by the knowing that other people are out there creating. By listening to smart people talk about the smart things they did, my brain gets a little hit of innovation, and relaxes. The urgency to make stuff disipates because so much stuff is already being made.

Like when serial killers watch Steven Seagal movies and then just stay in on an evening.

So I'm experimenting with keeping my head stuck in the sand. Or at least one ear in the sand. Instead of listening to tech podcasts during my commute I'm listening to some Miles Davis and toying with ideas on the iPad or in a notebook. I'm avoiding wasting my 'hands free' time just listening. I can listen to TWIST while I cook!

So far it's proving to be fun. The proof will, however, be in the shipiting!

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Last year I bought and read more books about web, design, code and innovation than I have for a while. Here is a list of a few of the more useful, interesting, inspiring or just downright helpful of those. For no greater reason than the fact that it's useful to have a list to point people at. 

I hope the reading in 2012 is as rich.

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Thinking about thinking is one of the things I've been thinking about recently. This book takes thinking about thinking to new levels - and should be compulsory reading for anyone who thinks for a living. Which is most of us. I think. I wish I'd read it sooner.

8faces

I'm a developer turned solution architect who 'gets' design in an abstract kind of way but I'm trying to dig in deeper and build a stronger design foundation. 8faces has really helped me take design seriously by treating design thinking seriously. It's also a lovely thing to have kicking around the house.

Lean Startup

Measure. Measure. Measure. The big lessons from this has really shifted my opinions as to what constitutes a successful project. It's not about delivering on time, on budget, with a happy client (although that all counts). It's about tracking the right numbers, and making sure that the charts go up and to the right. And making sure that everyone knows which numbers we're tracking, why, and what they need to do to influence them. Easily forgotten.

Understanding Comics

The talk from Scott McCloud at Build 2011 was entertaining, interesting and thought provoking. I ordered the book during the talk (amazon one click is amazing isn't it). I swallowed it whole - a great visual communication baseline. 

Ogilvy on Advertising

I've worked in marketing companies for years and never read any Ogilvy. Amazing how many of the basic principles are 100% applicable to the new world of online advertising. Not bad for a book from '83.

A Book Apart

A publisher, not a book I know. They all got bought and read though, and there's not really a stinker among them. I bought the first few on paper, but have the digital copies for the rest because I found I either had the hard copy at my desk and needed it at home, or vice versa. Continuing the a list apart genius of publishing relatively timeless stuff relating to the fast moving world of the internet. Can't wait for the next one by Mike_FTW.

Stewart Lee - How I escaped my certain fate

Oddly enough, this fits the 'thinking about thinking' thing really well. I picked it up being a Stewart Lee fanboy - it's basically three standup shows annotated as though they were Shakespear. Which sounds awful. But gives some great insights into how he thinks about how he thinks about comedy. It's also funny.

Rework

37Signals bombastic absolutist superior lecturing slap around the head for the mediocre. I find it hard to disagree with any of it - but that doesn't mean that it's all easy to apply in real life... I'd love to give every client a copy of this.

Business Model Generation

A fun framework for thrashing out business models. At work we use a lot of processes - often boiling tonnes of work down to a simple diagram. This book uses a similar approach, hugely interesting to see the layers and layers of detail applied by such a diverse range of experts to one process.

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For the last year and a bit I've been a big fan of, and occassional contributor to, the Mighty Meetup here in Aberdeen. I've even got a bit grumpy about it from time to time. Before the Mighty Meetup there really wasn't a natural offline home for the web community in town. Ian and the guys at Deer Digital did a cracking job in generating interest and giving the community a home.

In November last year I came back from the Build Conference wanting to get more involved in organising and steering the activities around town. I sounded out a few other regulars at the MM and the feeling was quite generally shared - that more of us would like to contribute to the organisation and running of events - not just the participation.

We wanted to create aswell as consume. Not unusual for web folk huh!

So on Wednesday, at the last Mighty Meetup, I announced the start of Refresh Aberdeen. Feedback on the evening, and since, has been tremendously positive, welcoming, and enthusiastic. Ian and the other Mighty Meetup folk are all on board, and we have a good head of steam already.

We're already discussing meetups, talks, events and hack days - and even the possibility of a code retreat in the city.

Exciting times.

It's great to see an idea which I sketched out on the flight back from Belfast in the middle of November turn into a live project within a couple of months.

Me making the announcement on Wednesday night.
Photo credit to Kyle Saric

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