If you are unfamiliar with the regular Twitter cook-offs, then check out the Summer Pudding Twitter Competition post for a bit of background. Dozens of people from around the globe in an on-line cooking competition, co-ordinated via social networking site Twitter, watched by thousands. This month’s competition has less to do with cooking and more to do with making. Last month’s… Read more →
Category: geekstuff
Tweetcamp
This Saturday I’ll be up at Tweetcamp in London. I caught up with driving force Farhan Rehman to ask him what it’s all about. And he’s posted more about What to Expect at TweetCamp: The aim, is to bring people together in person who know each other through Twitter, but don’t necessarily know each other well in person. Given that, of the people… Read more →
Saving on Standby Power
I’ve been out buying gadgets to save on standby power. The exciting one mentioned in the video is this fellow: It is a Standby Saver Energy Saving Unit – as seen on Dragon’s Den, apparently. As explained in the video, it shuts off the power to all of the sockets when the computer powers down. There is a version for for AV… Read more →
Thames Valley Social Media Cafe – Reading
I’ve tweeted it, but it deserves more than 140 characters! After the Reading Twestival, a number of tweetups in Reading have happened, but I’ve been hoping for a full on Tuttle Club style event. Finally, after a few tweets between Drew Benvie, Matt Brady, Neville Hobson and myself, it is all systems go… Drew has written a post about his hopes for TVSMC, and Neville gives a good… Read more →
CurrentCost Graphs – Monitoring Home Power
It might not look like it, but that is a wondrous thing. It represents the next step in home hacking with the current cost meter. It is a lead which connects the current cost meter to the serial port on a lower power PC that runs a simple Perl script that records our power usage. The PC runs a script that captures the information… Read more →
Camps and Unconferences – What and How
Over the last year or so I have been to a few dozen camps (mediacamp, socialmediacamp, homecamp, …) and unconferences, but I realised that I’ve never explained the concept or how they work. This post should straighten that out. What is a Barcamp? What is an Unconference? It is a little hard to explain, or rather it is easier to… Read more →