091 Labs

You know. That season. The Season. The Season where half of your extended family gets a new electronic gadget from that man. The half of your family which happens to be technologically illiterate.

Well, help is at hand.

Are you tired of cheerfully helping fix their problems, even as you wish a painful venereal disease upon them behind clenched teeth?

Have you been looking for a way to aggressively passively-aggressively assert yourself in a charming manner?

Well, look no farther, good Hacker!

From me, to you, comes this delightful mashup of the infamous Keep Calm and Carry On poster. Available you today, for free. You can download it from here, now, in A3 size, under a permissive Creative Commons license that allows you to share and edit the poster.

Or if you so wish, you can purchase a high-quality printed version from me for €5. €2 will go toward the cost of printing, and the other €3 will go straight into the kitty at 091 Labs for our Christmas party fund. Delivery will be on December 16. Please contact me directly if you want a print.

3Dcamp, the “un-conference Barcamp which looks at The Internet Beyond Web 2.0″, will be running on Saturday June 11th in the University of Limerick. Areas of interest include:

• 3D visualizations (Blender, Sketchup),
• Gestural Interfaces (Kinect)
• Robotics
• Gaming
• Mapping mashups, GPS,
• Location based Services (LBSs),
• Haptics and augmented toys (eg. Wiimote hacks),
• Augmented reality
• Virtual worlds (Second Life, the Metaverse),
• Mirror worlds (Google Earth and Virtual Earth),
• Interactive art installations
• …and all things 3D.

There will be plenty of hacking-related talks and workshops this year on subjects such as “Tracking objects in 3D space” by Jeffrey Roe of TOG hackerspace in Dublin, “Escapism, Pedal Through Google Streetview On A Stationary Bike”, by Lette Moloney, and “How I built a Sheep Herding Robot” by Niall Dempsey. Registration is from 9am, with specific building details to follow. Attendance is free and all are welcome to the event.

You can keep up to date with all the latest details at: http://3dcamp.barcamp.ie/

This is a must watch for hacker spacers..

Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton, for anyone who doesn’t already know, is a Principle Researcher at Microsoft Research, and before this turns off the linux folk, he is one of my top 10 most passionate and interesting speakers. He has some incredible insight into the history of design of technologies, and a theory called the long nose: he reckons technology inventions have been around in some shape or form for 20 years before they hit mainstream.

At this recent talk in Copenhagen, he talks about the Natural User Interface, NUI: What’s in a name, and it’s well worth a watch for anyone interested in looking at the world with new eyes, especially those interested in interface design and product creation.

He is a collector so he shows some amazing geekery that he has accumulated, including some nifty casio watches that had touch screens way back in 1984.

It’s an hour and 30 minutes of your life you will not regret!

Here is a link again: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TechTalk-NUI-Whats-in-a-Name

P.S: I have his book, Sketching User Experience, for anyone who wants to borrow it, but I want it back! :)

One of the most beautiful things about free and open source software is the native freedom to alter, extend, adapt, trim, reduce, repackage and reuse the code as I see fit, within the terms of the license. Sometimes – as is the case of the of Canonical and Ubuntu who began their work with a simple bundling of Debian’s package software (as an aside, Ubuntu and Debian are still fairly compatible, to the point that, if you feel brave, you can use one’s repositories with the other’s distribution) – these changes are huge and massively sweeping. And at others, it is the freedom to change three lines to grant a new set of defaults.

/wonder