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Why am I not photographing the Apple Newcastle launch?

Alistair MacDonald — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:59:39 GMT

The answer is simple. They will not let me.

As you know I like to take photographs. Some are what you might call "Artistic" and others are more of a documentation of history. Personally I love looking at old images form when I was younger, or of places before I knew them in the past. Because of this I take pictures of the here and now for people to look back on in the future.

As the an Apple store opening is something that draws the crowds I thought this was something I should look at capturing on (virtual) film. Before I did this I emailed Apple and asked if there was a problem with me doing this out of politeness.

Sadly Apple responded stating that they have a policy of no photography in the stores and would not be able to mane an exception for the launch. They did say that if I queued up and only took a couple of pictures then there "shouldn't be a problem". Not overly happy with being told that I am not allowed to take a picture, but almost saying that I could get away with taking a couple, I pushed for a definitive Yes or No. I was not surprised to get back a polite No.

In the end I decided not bother going down to capture the day and I suspect there will be plenty of pictures taken by camera phones. Most of the phones were probably iPhones so the image quality will be low and the pictures out of focus, but at least we have some records of the day. :-P

So, I have had my rant, and Apple have dropped a long way in my estimation of customer relations. In the interests of neutrality I feel it important to point out I did not ask for permission to photograph inside the Sony Shop, but Ikea have said yes (and that is bizarrely true).

What domain should I use?

Alistair MacDonald — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:53:23 GMT

I have now decided to move my blog to WordPress following Blogger discontinuing there FTP service. Thank you for the words of advice.

I have another decision to make now and your input would be appreciated. The question is... Should I move this main "tech, rant, fun" blog to another domain.

A while ago I registered "alistairmacdonald.org" and "macdonald.info". My intention was to use these as my professional front-end and keep my "agm.me.uk" for more personal projects. Last year I managed to register "alistairmacdonald.com" that I was planning to use instead of the ".org". I also have a few ".co.uk" domains that I never used in the end including "Millisecond", "Multitrack", and "Stereophonic".

I know a few people don't like my "agm.me.uk" address. The reason why I like it is that it is short, AGM (my initials) are memorable, and it is controlled by Nominet so subject to UK and not oversees law. The down side is that the domain does not instantly identify it's self as mine, the ".me.uk" is often sometimes with ".co.uk", and more recently people have been missing off the ".uk" with the addition of the ".me" top level domain.

No matter what happens I anticipate still using "agm.me.uk" for my pet projects and micro sites. I am also actively moving some pet projects to the domain in a cost saving exercise.

So, what are your thoughts?

My blog will be moving

Alistair MacDonald — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:45:56 GMT

My blog here is managed by Google's Blogger and hosted on my own web site on a Rails Playground server. This is done by giving Blogger FTP access to my site that is used to upload the pages when they change. Sadly Google are deprecating this FTP feature and I will either have to run the blog from the Blogger's servers (but I can use my own domain name) or host the my blog myself.

I have always had a plan in place to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress. This will continue to be hosted on my web site and the URLs will not change. You never know when a service will disappear so I tend to plan ahead like this. There is a nice migration path and this is currently my favoured solution.

My main concern about moving to WordPress is the amount of comment spam that friends get despite using recaptcha. I have had to disable the comments on the BarCampNorthEast web site that was receiving a couple of spam comments a day.

So, do you think I am doing the right thing. Should I use WordPress or something else? Should I use another comment service like Disqus to cut down on spam, or should I host the whole thing somewhere else? All comments welcome (unless they are spam :-) ).

USB printing on Ubuntu 9.10

Alistair MacDonald — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:04:59 GMT

Last year a purchased an Aspire Revo R3600 with a 160GB HDD that I installed Ubuntu on. It has been a great little machine and I am very pleased with it.

Somewhere down the line my old LaserJet printer (from Freegle/Freecycle) that is connected using a cheep USB to Parallel adapter (off ebay) stopped working. It is a problem that many people appear to have had when they upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). After a bit (okay, a lot) of debugging I have figured out that you need to treat the USB device as a parallel printer and not the default USB printer. To do this change the URL prefix from "usb:" to "parallel:", or if that is nonsense to you use the following instructions.

Go to the printing devices by selecting "System", "Administration", and then "Printing".

Right click on the old printer (if one is there) and select delete.

Click the "New" button.

Select "Other" and enter the device URI as"parallel:/dev/usblp0".

Select your printer as you would normally and it should then work (a reboot may be required).

Remember this is only for if you are using a parallel printer with a USB converter. I hope this helps you, and if it does and you have posted for help elsewhere, please help someone else by going back and posting the answer (or link back to here). Finally, before you smug Windows users start having a go, it took me longer to get the converter running on my XP machine. :-P

If things were a little different

Alistair MacDonald — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:03:57 GMT

Today I was looking through some fonts for a project and came across some familiar ones. Just for a giggle I wondered what they would look like if things had worked out a little different.

Mr Duck's Amazing Web Site

Alistair MacDonald — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:35:01 GMT

So, at long last Mr Duck has his web site. I have been taking pictures for Duck 365 for the last year, and stupidly have agreed to continue by popular demand. What I never quite got round to was making a web site for it. Eventually I managed to find some time by using the good old excuse of it being a learning exercise.

The site is a little tong in cheek fitting in with the Mr Duck back story. It is the web site that a small yellow plastic duck would have asked for. :-) It has a lot of new CSS layout in it that I have used as an experiment, but it does degrade gracefully. The thing that most amazed me is that the CSS font-face actually works, although there are bugs that I needed to work around. Also I accidentally I created a new simple templating system using an error document to catch the requests and build the web page. I shall probably build on this for other projects.

I have also found a new way to work on IE computability. It appears that IE6 and IE7 have very close layout problems. The markup for IE6 also fixes the problems for IE7. So what I have done is built the site using Chrome and Firefox, and then fixed the layout in IE6 for IE7 and below in a separate conditional CSS file. Then all I needed to do was work around the PNG transparency issues for IE6 and below in a second conditional CSS file. Everything else just works then, and I only needed one version of IE installed for development.

The best thing about the site from my point of view is that it should be zero maintenance. It automatically pulls the pictures from flickr and even uses flicker to manage the comments. I decided not to display the comments on the site at the tims as there a security implications of allowing users to add content to your site, but I do display a comment count and link back to flickr. I even dynamically generate the site map and RSS feed.

There are a few more things I would like to do. I plan to add some slow cloud animation, improve navigation, and intermittently add a few more random Mr Duck images to the background. For now though I will leave it or I will just not get anything else done.

So please check out "Mr Duck's Amazing Web Site", and you can also follow his antics on Twitter. Also please let me know if it works well or not on your browser and if there is anything else you would like to see.

(dot)goodidea

Alistair MacDonald — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:34:49 GMT

Last month I came up with the idea of Chocify, a tong in cheek web service taking the community aspect of Spotify and applying it to chocolate. In another of my fits of madness I decided I could come up with an idea every day and put it on the Internet like an advent calender.

Naturally I did not tell anyone because at the time I did not know if I could keep it up or if it would be any good. I also wanted to get a bit of design work done for it. As it turns out it's completely rubbish, but I am still going so you might want to have a read anyway. You can follow these winning ideas on the blog, or on Twitter. Naturally I never got round to designing anything.

Goodbuy Wake up to Wogan

Alistair MacDonald — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:37:30 GMT

So, that is it, the end of... something. I will not go on about it, but I felt the need to blog something to commemorate it, so this is my last email to the show...

Hi Terry and the posy,

I was trying to find something clever and profound that sums up the moment. Something that brackets everything we are all feeling and summarises our many years together. Something that notes those we have lost along the way with joy, and reminds you that although we write our show, we can only do this through you. Sadly my mind is blank so I will take this opportunity to ask who's stupid idea was this WUTWAC? It's completely useless.

Mad Alistair (No relation)

A WUTWAC is a Wake Up To Wogan Alarm Clock that were given out as prizes many a year ago. My signed photo of Terry is still hanging on the back of the toilet door. :-)

I like Twitters Retweet feature

Alistair MacDonald — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:22:44 GMT

Can I just put on the record that I like Twitter's Retweet feature.

In March I blogged about how I would like to see a Retweet feature built in to Twitter and we have recently seen such a feature slowly rolled out.

It takes a little getting use to seeing other peoples' icons in your stream, but I have grown to find that useful as well. I was also worried that because it is so much easier to retweet that people might get carried away, but this has not happened, and you can block the retweets from just one user but still see there own tweets. What I love the most is that fact that when several friends retweet something I only get it once instead of several times like in the past. I am back in control.

As with most things the reception has been mixed, but on the whole most of the people I am following are using it, and although some like it and some prefer the old way of doing RSs, I don't think it can be described at "Hated". I only mention this because of the Tech Crunch article who's title annoyed me enough to write this post. I feel that article just a personal view of Mike Butcher and not a valid statement of fact.

Chocify, it's the future

Alistair MacDonald — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:56:54 GMT

Today I came up with a cracking idea for a web service called "Chocify".

People have been using Spotify to jointly build up playlists for the day, the season, or events. Why can this not be extended to chocolate? For example I like the idea of starting off with a KitKat Chunky, followed by a slightly more sticky Twix, and throw caushion and commen sence to the wind and top those off with a Double Decker.

Now, someone could see my mistake, that being the lack of a Crunchie bar, and insert it in to the eat list for me. I can also share this list with anyone I am visiting who needs to get supplies, or anyone who shares my taste in chocolate.

I know what you are thinking, but there is a revenue stream here. Yes people can take the lists and head down the sweet shop, but just imaging the convenience of a "buy it now" button, and within two or three months the postman (or woman, we don't want to be sexist at Chocify) will deliver them to your door.

The domain name is still available but won't be for long with such a great idea. It's a winner. Anyone want to invest?

Happy Twitter birthday to me

Alistair MacDonald — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:13:40 GMT

It was three years ago today that I first signed up to Twitter. I was user number 12838, and you can check your own number by clicking on your RSS feed and looking towards the end of the URL. Luckily the user name alistair was still available at the point.

I can not remember my first tweet, and Twitter removed all the older ones before I was able to make a backup, but like so many people's first tweet it was along the lines of "Figuring out what Twitter is".

Although I have not used it continually for three years I have for the last couple and and frighteningly it has become part of my life. I have made some great friends through it, keep in contact with a lot more, become part of one of the best (and possibly maddest) photo walk groups, know what is happening in the tech and non tech world as it happens, and feel part of a great set of online communities.

Originally it was a great way to keep in the loop and know what friends are up to. Today people are more open and broadcasting to the works when then tweet, but as a result they are [very sensibly] less open, and that in many ways is a shame. I am considering doing the same by being slightly less open and unprotecting my updates.

I think the secret of Twitter's success is naturally luck, but also adapting it's self and allowing user to almost add functionality. I don't know if it can maintain it's position forever, but unless it does something really stupid I see it continuing for quite a while.

My popular poppys

Alistair MacDonald — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:00:57 GMT

As you may know I like taking photographs. I often go on photo walks with friends, and nearly always have a camera to hand. As part of BarCampManchester2 some of us took some Geocaching virgins on a Geocaching trip, and on the way back I spotted a poppy wreath from the earlier remembrance services. I have wanted a good remembrance poppy picture as a stock photo so had a go, and the result is above. I must confess I was not really happy with the picture as it had nothing special, and I feel I could have framed it slightly better, but I uploaded it to flickr anyway.

I thought nothing more about the picture until Sunday when all of a sudden people started commenting on the photograph and marking it as one of there favourites. It turns out that it was the first of 5 poppy pictures featured on the Flickr blog. This means that picture also shows up on a user's flickr home page. Then things got a little silly with hundreds and hundreds of people looking at the picture and then looking throught the rest of my photo stream. Probably because of this the picture was listed in flickr's explorer, that I have never really understood to be honest, but apparently it is a privilege to be listed so I am grateful. This got more people looking and after a couple of days 4,000 plus people have viewed the picture, 144 marked it as a favourite, and it has had more comments than I can be bothered to count. All this on a picture that I don;t believe is my best work.

The down side of this is that I have been starting to get the odd daft tag on some pictures so I have had to restrict the tagging of my pictures to contacts only. I am also deleting comments that link to another site that look like spam to me. Apart form this nuisance it is all good and I have a warm feeling knowing that so many people are enjoying your work. I would like to thank those who have taken the time to look through my other photos, found some you like, and commented as such. Not forgetting those daft nuts who continue follow my work on an ongoing basis. It is nice to be appreciated.

Dorkbot NCL is back

Alistair MacDonald — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:59:50 GMT

Some good news. Dorkbot NCL returns for a second time on November 17th. This is when we get together to have a look at what exciting things we have made.

This month we will find out about the mystery of Humanaquarium, Brendan Ratliff will be composing using tracking techniques, and Touchscape will be showing off touch technology.

More details can be found on the Centre for Life web site.

PayPay security key

Alistair MacDonald — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:34:21 GMT

Earlier in the year I waffled of at BarCampLeeds about multi factor authentication and tried to persuade everyone to get a PayPal security key.

I learned at Charity Hack that PayPal were discontinuing the security key. I don't know the full story, but it has been suggested that it could be because of cost.

The security key has essentially been replaced by SMS in the UK. So now you can register your mobile number, and when you try and log in as normal PayPay will send you an SMS message with a one time password to enter. Although not 100% secure or reliable this does overcome the authentication security concerns affecting most PayPal users. Because of this I strongly recommend you use it if it is practical for you to do so.

Now the good news. You can still purchase a PayPay security key for £3 from the US PayPay site, and it is the amazing credit card sized hardware key pictured above. This key can also be used on ebay and other VIP web sites. There are no excuses, even if you only log in once a year you should please get one now.

Manager Tools Effective Manager and Effective Communications Conferences, London

Alistair MacDonald — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:43:26 GMT

I have been a Manager Tools podcast listener for quite some time and have found it most useful in my business career. It is a product of the American businessmen Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne. They have taken there military experience and applied it to modern day business practices with amazing effect. The podcast is a great learning resource if you are new to management or wanting to improve your skills by learning from others. You can find out more and download the podcast at manager-tools.com.

The reason why I mention this is that mark and Mike are holding two one day conferences in London next January. The first day is the Effective Manager conference, and the second is the Effective Communications conference held the following day.

Currently I can not justify spending this kind of money on a one day conference so will not be attending, but if you can justify spending the money I do recommend looking at spending it on this.

Hardware Hack Day in Newcastle?

Alistair MacDonald — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:59:38 GMT

At last night's Dorkbot Newcastle the idea of organising a hardware focused Hack Day before the second European Maker Faire in Newcastle was floated.

A "hack day" is when like minded people get to together to create things. This would create interesting things to demonstrate at the Maker Faire, bring people together and introduce others to our local tech community, and help support anyone stuck on an element of there home brew projects.

This will not be a massive event with lots of the razzmatazz of larger Hack Days, but should still be a fun event focused on producing interesting things.

It could be a one or two day event, or perhaps even spread over several evenings. It could also be a weekend event, or potentiality in the days before the Maker Faire. It all depends on what people and when we can squeeze it in.

So.... What are your thoughts? Are you interested in attending? When is good for you? Please let me know your thoughts.

Freecycle

Alistair MacDonald — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:04:17 GMT

I was writing a long post about Freecycle and where it is going in the UK at the moment, but then realised the guardian had already written what I was going to say.

All I want to add is that I have always like the concept of Freecycle and am on the whole pleased it exists, but have always been disappointed by the heavy handed approach dictated by the central organisation. I find the way they threaten legal action against people using the word Freecycle for exchanges not moderated by them disgraceful. Lets hope that the now independent truly community driven versions are a success.

Update: The UK Freecycle groups that have left Freecycle, that to me looks like most of them, have now got together and branded themselves Freegle.

I would also like to give my support to Ema Wright who Freecycle have threatened legal action against on there web site. I believe such comments were a knee-jerk reaction, but still shockingly unprofeciaonal.

Dorkbot Newcastle

Alistair MacDonald — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:19:17 GMT

Our fist monthly Dorkbot Newcastle is launching on the 5th October 2009 at the Centre for Life.

A Dorkbot is an event where a group of people interested in making things get together to talk about their projects and share ideas with each other.

To start the event we have three guest speakers. Evan Raskob who is a visiting Dorkbot regular London, Aaron Nielsen who will be talking about developing with the Arduino, and, errr, me who will be trying to inspire fellow creators by showing off a percussion machine that can be built in a few hours.

So please come along meet other like minded and creative people, see what others are building, and perhaps show off that you are playing with.

Photosynthing BarCampBrighton4

Alistair MacDonald — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:37:23 GMT

Two years ago I boggled about Microsoft Photosynth but have not had opportunity to play with generating a synth before now.

This weekend I decided to give it a go at the more unusual BarCampBrighton4 venue. I followed the Photosynth tutorial with a few alterations to cope with dividers. The resulting synths are...

Ground Floor

First Floor

Basement

Yard

Out Front

They may not be perfect, and I have learned a few things from the exercise, but I remain impressed with the technology. Please let me know what you think and think about having a go yourself.

Thank you to Martin for lending me his machines to do the uploads at the venue as the Photosynth software will not run on my Netbook.

Upcoming Hack and Geek events

Alistair MacDonald — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:44:09 GMT

Oddly I have been asked a few times what events are worth attending. I have also been asked to help pimp a few events recently as well, so this post will hopefully help everybody. If you are interested in learning, building, or socialising then have a look at the evens and consider coming along.

August

Sat 29th : Geek Steam BBQ

September

Sat 5th - Sun 6th : BarCampBrighton
Fri 4th - Sun 6th : Geeks in the Peaks

Fri 11th - 12th : EcoMo09
Sun 13th : Big Geek Day Out

Sat 19th - Sun 20th : Charity Hack Day

Fri 25th - Sat 26th : Over the Air
Sat 26th - Sun 27th : BathCamp

October

3rd - 4th : Hack North

Sat 17th : BarCampBlackpool

24th - 25th : BarCampLondon7

Sat 31st : VampDevCamp

November

Sat 7th - Sun 8th : BarCampManchester2

Sat 14th : BarCampBradford

The only filtering criteria I have used on this list is if it is an event that I would like to attend (if I had the time). In truth I will be attending quite a few of them, probably more than I should.

Update: BarCampLondon7 added.

Goodbye to my 0870 numbers

Alistair MacDonald — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:00:02 GMT

As of today my 0870 telephone numbers will no longer work. I have been prepared for this and have changed these numbers on the various web sites and registrations where I use them. This is because Ofcom have changed the regulation on these numbers reducing the termination fee (the fee a the company operating the numbers gets when the number is called) from 6p/minute to 0.5p/minute.

Although I am loosing the use of my 0870 (unless I pay for then) I am very much in favour of this move. People have been told that 0870 is the same as a national call, and this was technically true, it was the same price as a full price call from a BT line, but we almost never pay the full price of that call because of the calling package we are forced to take with a telephone line. All these free and 5p an hour call offers do not apply to 0870 numbers.

So when you called an 0870 number you were paying way over the odds, and the company you were calling was often very happy with this as they normally made a little bit of money whenever you called them. Because of this I refer to 0870 numbers as premium rate numbers.

For reference I have not made any money by using 0870 numbers, but they do have other advantages. They can be mapped to any other number so if I move or go on holiday I can get the calls to follow me, they cost a little bit more so I do not get marketing calls on them, and they cost next to nothing to set up (if you use the correct company) so can be used as disposable numbers for when you don't want your details to be in the public domain.

Hopefully more telecommunication companies will now include 0870 and 0845 in there calling packages so they are free (BT have already started doing this) and more normal companies will use 03 numbers (that are the same as 01 and 02 numbers but non geographic).

Finally if you need to call an 0870, and 0845, or an 0800 (normally free, but often costs more on a mobile) then check out Say no to 0870 first. You enter the number or company that you want to call and more often than not it will give you a normal (01, 02 or now 03 number) to call instead.

So long Plaxo and thanks for the syncing

Alistair MacDonald — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:51:00 GMT

In the past I found Plaxo very useful. It started life as a contact manager where you stored the contact details for business and personal use. It's unique selling point was that your contacts could update there own details once for all Plaxo users, so to update your list you just need to click a button to accept the changes.

This was fairly useful, and it became more so and more of my contacts started using it. It took me a while to trust the site, as it does with all sites that hold personal data, but I do trust it as much as I do any other online service.

It also had the advantage of syncing contacts and calenders between Outlook, GMail and many other online services. While friends were using many services to sync there contacts and calenders I was using just Plaxo with one plugin. I did start to write a blog post about how great this was, but like so many I never got round to finishing it. Sorry.

Then at some point Plaxo realised that they had the backbone of a Social Network, and created "Plaxo Pulse" that brings all your content in to the Plaxo interface. In some ways this is nice, and optional, but not something that was useful to me or the Plaxo user base at the time.

Sadly with next to no notice the syncing with Outlook has been made a premium service, so will need playing for. There is nothing for nothing and the site does need to make money to continue, so I will not complain about this, but I have decided to move away from Plaxo as it is no longer of use to me. I have decided to use the contact management in GMail for now that can be synced to Outlook using a free app.

I will continue to use Plaxo to sync with other "backup" online services (Yahoo and Live mail for example) for the moment as there is no reason to stop. I will let Pulse continue consolidate the rest of my feeds for the same reason, and one friend prefers to consume it that way. Sadly though I do feel that today is the day I regrettably stopped using Plaxo.

So, the Duck....

Alistair MacDonald — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:14:56 GMT

As some of you may know I have been carrying a yellow plastic duck with me recently and taking pictures of it. At first this might seem the actions of a mad man, but I can explain.

In 2008 I attended BathCamp, a BarCamp unconference in Bath. There was a bath at BathCamp that contained ice, cans of beer, and lots and lots of plastic ducks. At then end of the event we were given the ducks and asked to take pictures of them in cool places. There is a competition, but I don't know if there is a prize, or if it is still happening.

Now to 2009. As you may know I like to take the odd picture with a digital camera and many friends who are in to photography. I was persuaded to give Project 365 a go. This is when you take a picture every day and upload it to the Internet.

As I often had the duck with me just in case of a cool photo opportunity I decided it would be fun to do an additional Project 365 for the duck. I called this Duck 365.

Now with that almost making sense I should perhaps stop explaining, but I will instead continue. When you upload a Project 365 photo you tend to write a bit of text about the shot. With the duck photos I decided to do the write-up from the duck's perspective, and inadvertently gave the duck a personality.

The duck has slowly been gathering a back story. He just kind of came in to existence so sees what is happening but does not understand it all. In many ways he has the brain of an adult with the understanding of a toddler. He is aware that he is a plastic/rubber duck, but he also thinks he is a real duck, and at times a human. He is also rather cantankerous at times and blames me for most things that do not go the way he expects.

Originally I was pointing out that the duck did not really exist, but people seemed to get rather upset by this, so I will go along with him being real for now. People now call him Mr Duck, bring there ducks to meet him, and even given him his own conference badges.

You can follow Mr Duck on his page here, through his flickr set, on his Facebook page, or his Twitter stream. Quite a few people seems to do so and I hope it is because of the humour I try an inject.

Geek Steam BBQ

Alistair MacDonald — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:19:09 GMT

A few months ago I had the idea of holding a geek event at the NLSME's model railway track. A few weeks ago I got round to doing something about it, and today the event has been published. Of you fancy a day out playing with trains, or just socialising with fellow geeks, then why not read more about it...

Music Hack Day : My percussion machine

Alistair MacDonald — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:15:36 GMT

Last week we all turned up at the Guardian offices for Music Hack Day not quite knowing what to expect but prepared for most eventualities. I still did not know what to hack together and no one I knew had any real ideas yet.

There was not really an opportunity to find anyone else to do something with so I decided to do something with my old WaveFinder DAB radio, possibly doing something with RadioDNS and linking it to some of the sponsoring online services. Unforchantly a couple of hours later I still could not get the hardware working on my laptop so decided to play with the Arduino and make some kind of music machine as a learning exercise.

After a lot of fiddling, scavenging, stripping wires, battling with wifi, messing around with hardware, lots of chatting, a late night visit to Avenue Q, some Geocaching, three hours sleep, and drinking lost of tea the percussion machine was born.

At the end of the event I had the device using a couple of servos to play some bottles, a cup, a bottle-top maracas-tamborine-like-thing, and a can. The creation was not a practical hack, but something to learn from while I was creating it, and an excuse to be a little silly. I think the Guardian article sums it up well. I quote...

Come 2pm on Sunday, we gathered to see what people had come up with. Now, some of the presentations were a little – how can I put this – impenetrable for a non-techie like me. Others, however, seemed happy to admit they'd spent the night messing around on a project for no other benefit than their (and our) own amusement (step forward the Percussion Machine, a hardware hack using an Arduino microcontroller that involved turning some empty beer bottles into a drumkit).

I did not take the presentation overly seriously but everyone appeared to enjoy the stupidity of the creation. There were also a lot of great hacks that I enjoyed and are worth a look though. In the end I was awarded a prize by tinker.it for being so creative in using things around us to build the machine with, that was nice. :-)