Archive: May 19th, 2007

Color Oracle

A very handy little app that sits in your menu bar on OS X and can instantly show you how your screen would look if you were colour blind.

R2D2 Projector :: Scene It :: RED5

This is the ultimate geek gadget: a projector in the shape of R2D2. I want one!

Wintec WBT-201 Bluetooth Data Logger GPS Receiver (Auto on/off, WAAS, Bluetooth, USB, Push to Log, Google Earth Integration with Photo) (Bonus Bottle Cap Tripod) (Your Choice of Free Mount)

I gotta get me one of these. Just think of the mashup potential!

The Implications of OpenID

Pausing for breath is for pussies. Simon's slides illustrate how to pack everything including the OpenID kitchen sink into 45 minutes.

StarCraft II

Whoosh! That's the sound of productivity being left behind. After ten years, Starcraft 2 is finally here. Simultaneous release for Mac and PC.

Talk Like a Pilot on 19 May

I say, bally jerry pranged his cabbage crate right in my how's your father into the drink.

Microformats 1:01—Exporting microformats via bluetooth

On the last day of XTech 2007 I abducted Ian and forced him to shoot a quick video of a microformats demo that I didn’t have a chance to include in my presentation.

The video is one minute and one second long. It’s a quick demo of John McKerrell’s bluetooth version of the Tails plugin.

Here’s a transcript of the 1:01 minutes of video:

This is my website. This is my mobile phone. My website has microformats. This is a version of the Tails plugin for Firefox. It exposes all the microformats I have on my website. I can convert and export those microformats as vcard, iCal, whatever I want. With this version of the plugin I can also export to bluetooth. So let’s take an event for example. I click on bluetooth. My computer asks me which device to export to. I have previously paired up my phone. So now I’m going to send the event to that device. And there we go. I have now exported from the World Wide Web onto my mobile phone. Easy!

The video is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. You are free to share, remix, caption and translate this video (as long as you provide attribution).

XTech 2007, day three

The last day of Xtech rolled around and… whaddya mean “what happened to day two?” They can’t have a conference in Paris and not expect me to take at least one day off to explore the city.

So I skipped the second day of XTech and I’m sure I missed some good presentations but I spent a lovely day with Jessica exploring the streets and brasseries of Paris.

Ah, Paris! (uttering this phrase must always be accompanied by the gesture of flinging one arm into the air with abandon)

The conference closed today with a keynote from Matt Webb. It was great: thought-provoking and funny. It really drove home the big take-away message from XTech for me this year which is that hacking on hardware now is as easy as software.

I can has Arduino?