Bryan Rieger: Rethinking the Mobile Web
"A few months back I submitted the smallest speck of an idea for a talk I was hoping to present at Over The Air in London. Having presented at Over The Air before I assumed my experiences this time around would more or less be the same - a chance to bounce a few of my recent thoughts off two-dozen or so UK developers.
To suggest that my assumption was wrong would in-fact be a massive understatement...
Three weeks later, the dust is still settling on the 90,000 140,000 presentation views, hundreds of tweets, and multitude of conversations, and I finally have time to provide the presentation with a much-needed introduction."
(Bryan Rieger)
Fig.1 "Rethinking the Mobile Web" by Yiibu
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Wacom Inkling: a digital drawing pen for artists
"Wacom's Inkling pen has caused quite a buzz in the creative community. A ballpoint pen with a tracker in it that records your strokes to a small box you can carry with you, it's been described as the ideal digital tool for artists who prefer real pens to digital substitutes. ...
One key thing to be said about the Inkling is that it's not a replacement for traditional drawing pens. The captured digital files are not a full-quality representation of a drawing. But then Wacom have stated clearly that the Inkling is for sketching -- even if that has been drowned out a little by the overstretching enthusiasm from some online commentators.
'The line was certainly not as crisp as it was hand-drawn,' [illustrator Lizzie Mary Cullen] notes. 'The layer function is amazing but when uploaded some of the layers appeared to have moved ever so slightly. The line simply isn't as true as a scan, and that is exactly why it's for brainstorming, sketching and rough drawings as opposed to polished artworks."
(Neil Bennett, 08 September 2011, Digital Arts)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film
"A short documentary film about letterpress and one of the few remaining movable-type printing workshops in the UK, situated at Plymouth University, featuring Paul Collier."
(Danny Cooke)
Fig.1 A film by Danny Cooke dannycooke.co.uk, soundtrack by Tony Higgins tonyhiggins.org.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Will Li-Fi be the new Wi-Fi?
"FLICKERING lights are annoying but they may have an upside. Visible light communication (VLC) uses rapid pulses of light to transmit information wirelessly. Now it may be ready to compete with conventional Wi-Fi.
'At the heart of this technology is a new generation of high-brightness light-emitting diodes,' says Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, UK. 'Very simply, if the LED is on, you transmit a digital 1, if it's off you transmit a 0,' Haas says. 'They can be switched on and off very quickly, which gives nice opportunities for transmitting data.'
It is possible to encode data in the light by varying the rate at which the LEDs flicker on and off to give different strings of 1s and 0s. The LED intensity is modulated so rapidly that human eyes cannot notice, so the output appears constant. ...
But some sound a cautious note about VLC's prospects. It only works in direct line of sight, for example, although this also makes it harder to intercept than Wi-Fi. 'There has been a lot of early hype, and there are some very good applications,' says Mark Leeson from the University of Warwick, UK. 'But I'm doubtful it's a panacea. This isn't technology without a point, but I don't think it sweeps all before it, either.'"
(Jamie Condliffe, 28 July 2011)
Jamie Condliffe (2011). New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2011.
Fig.1 Harald Haas, July 2011, TED.com.
2). Steve Perlman "Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output (DIDO) Wireless Technology: A New Approach to Multiuser Wireless".
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Dot. miniature stop-motion animation character shot on a Nokia N8
"Professor Fletcher's invention of the CellScope, which is a Nokia device with a microscope attachment, was the inspiration for a teeny-tiny film created by Sumo Science at Aardman. It stars a 9mm girl called Dot as she struggles through a microscopic world. All the minuscule detail was shot using CellScope technology and a Nokia N8, with its 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics."
(Nokia)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
