suckmypixel

I've been thinking about video over the internet recently, especially with the growth of bit torrent and new software such as Joost and BBC's iPlayer (which seems to have been getting less than favourable coverage on the blogsphere). I've been thinking about what the idea situation would be and have come to the following conclusion, which would be such a paradigm shift as to be impossible. I think all videos, tv programmes and music should be free and exist in a cloud, so that everything is available at all times. There would be many interfaces to the cloud and this is where people could make money (if they wanted). I'm thinking these interfaces could include magazines that don't just talk about films or music, but provide the media with it and even tv channels where editors have preselected videos and the user just surfs between channels, even physical devices (similar to phones) could be interfaces to this cloud. The content is free, but the selection and editorship is paid for. Also, in a world where all music is available forever there would be no need to hoard large collections of media as it would be there on demand.

Posted by atom at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm sitting in kew gardens without a map and needing the toilet (and not wanting to scare one of the people wandering around), i decided to see if google maps (which has gotten me from gig to hotel many times) could help me. Sadly google maps bearly knows kew gardens exists, which is a real shame. This has made me start thinking... I'd like to see an app that gets beamed to people's phones as they enter kew and they can use to find out (or alert them) to interesting things as they walk around the grounds. To basically provide a personalised tour guide for visitors to the gardens. Perhaps regular visitors could save their favourite walks to share with others. Finding out information about all of the plants would also be really cool, maybe if they had rfid tags? There could be units dotted around the gardens which the app can connect to to find out info about the local area. Of course a 'find the nearest toilet' option would be top of my list :-)

Posted by atom at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of some Sancho Plan development i've build an app that will send MIDI into Flash. The app, which has the catchy title of MidiRemote, sends note on, note off and controller data to Flash via Local Connection. All the flash movie needs to do is create a Local Connection object with id 'midi_swf' and listen for 'onMidiTrigger', 'onMidiTriggerOff' and 'onMidiController' messages (with channel, note and velocity parameters).

In our tests the latency isn't too bad, but if there are too many hits at the same time then the local connection buffer gets a bit clogged up and a delay appears while it processes all of the messages (so it probably won't be much good running against a gabba track :-)).

Download the Mac app here, Windows exe here and an example flash file here

Posted by atom at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've done a few VJ gigs and have been dissatisfied with sitting in front of a computer for most of the evening and barely talking to anyone. As a result I have developed an app that allows anyone with a bluetooth camera phone to send pictures to the screen. This allows me to get away from the computer and interact with the people in the space.

I've run it in 2 modes: public & private. The only technical difference is that the public version displays an explanation of how to send to the screen, whereas the private version doesn't. So far I have run it several times in public mode and only the once in private mode. Public mode surprised me, because I thought people would take pictures of the people they were with and send that to the screen, but instead they send pictures that are already on their phones, such as their holiday snaps or pictures of their pets.

So far the app is only for OS X, mainly cos I don't have a windows machine and also cos a mac can be set up to accept any bluetooth file and i'm not sure if this is possible under windows (I'd be keen to know if this is possible).

There is now a download for the photogallery, which includes a mac and a windows executable. Get it from here

Posted by atom at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had the good fortune to see gavin bell again last night. He's inspired me to start using this blog to post more than just flickr pictures and del.icio.us links. So I'm going to start trying to put some stuff up here and see what happens. :-)

Posted by atom at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)