I wanted to mount the Pi vertically to show off the intricately beautiful circuit board (and possibly to take up less space, but this thing is tiny!) and I’ve used window bricks that line up with the Pi logo. For my first attempts I tried designing a case using the lego designer – but beware, many of the bricks aren’t available from the pick-a-brick store. I’ve had to use 1×1 tiles stacked in groups of 3 to make the corners, and 2×1 tiles for the top.

It’s a bit bigger (4 bricks wide on the inside) than my original design – the GPIO pins stick out slightly too far to fit with 2 bricks wide. Windows and arch bricks form the holes for the various plugs, with the USB and Ethernet cables emerging from the top. I’ve used the mini USB power supply from Amazon Kindle combined with a remote controlled socket for power.

The latest version has the coloured bricks at the bottom, and more clear bricks at the top to refract the light from the various power / activity indicators. It also stands a little bit taller to allow for the USB mini power plug and a grip to hold the Pi motherboard in place.

Total cost is about £30, but I do have plenty of bricks left over for other lego projects…

Dear All
I was shocked when I took a small amount of lead tubing  to our local scrapyard last week.
The metal fetched £2.50 / Kg now and I came away with over £60 in cash.
I was shocked that it is so easy to get cash – just a name and address and vehicle registration number.
They didn’t check that the vehicle number I gave was correct, let alone look it up on the national database.
Would you consider signing the ePetition that seeks to force a change in the rules, please?

It is a government website and quite safe:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/406

Yours sincerely

Stephen Taylor

They’re at about 25,000 signatures – reforming the legislation is a relatively easy thing for ministers to do, and it’s particularly upsetting when things like this are stolen for a few quid (about 0.05% of it’s actual value). Plus it would be nice to see an epetition succeed that’s not a Daily Mail repatriation / anti-europe / king canute type subject.

Although I love the ease of digital photography I miss the magical moment of watching the perfect image appear on a print in the dark-room developer tray, often after many failed attempts.

Recently I picked up an old Kodak brownie camera in a junk shop – it was a “Number 2 Cartridge Hawk-Eye Model b” – proof that the practice of giving your product an impressive complicated sounding technical name is not a new one. It’s a very basic camera, consisting of a leather covered cardboard box with a mechanical shutter and a single element meniscus lens, which is inside the camera (giving it a confusing look of having lost it’s lens). It dates from  between 1926 – 1933 and takes 120 roll film – still available from the Lomography people and ebay.

Once I’d worked out how to get it open (you rotate and  pull out the film winder and then release the 2 fastener hooks) I thought I’d have a go at taking some pictures. Since the safe light window on the back of the camera was showing it’s age and was a faded orange I covered it up with a blu-tacked penny. After a bit of experimentation with a roll of paper I was able to work out how much to wind the film on – for reference 4 turns of the winder are enough to load the film, and 2 turns to advance to the next frame. The camera has a shutter speed of 1/30 second. I’ve no idea of the aperture, although the rotating shutter has a fairly small hole. The mechanism is similar to that found in the Lomo Holga.

Next step was to get some pictures developed. I initially opted for develop only from the lomo store, as I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d see anything back. My first film only had a few photographs on it as I hadn’t then worked out the proper winding / picture ratio.

To get the negatives into the computer I built a shoebox slide copier.

Attempt 1:

Well it works. I’m not sure of the shoe-box photo method for colour negatives, although the ghost like quality of the images presents an interesting creative opportunity.

With Attempt 2 I spent a little more to get the prints as well as negatives:

Anything closer than 6 feet from the camera is a bit blurry. Landscapes came out better, although colour was quite interesting (the photos already look old) either as an artifact of the lens, or as a result of the film and processing.

I’ve dug out my old 120 black and white film stash and processing spirals to have a go with black and white.

Update: my old school photography got a mention on the BBC!

I’ve been on the lookout for a cheap as chips digital camera for a while now, with the purpose of using it for things like underwater photography / space program / CHDK hacking. I was able to buy a nice PowerShot A480 for about £30 on ebay (they’re about £100 new on Amazon). It’s small, light, and works off AA batteries – although is a bit fussy about what type of AA battery it takes (prefers NiMh). Imagine a box brownie type camera for the noughties – cheap and super simple to use.

The A480 has a ten megapixel sensor and was launched in 2009 – although newer cameras are now in the 14 megapixel+ range a lot of this is besides the point since lens quality starts to become a limiting factor. It even has a 3.3 zoom, although with a camera like this it’s generally easier to take a few steps forward. It’s still infinitely better than the camera in my mobile phone.

CHDK is a download that sits on the SD card in the camera – the software loads off the SD card when you switch the camera on. It sits fairly neatly alongside the existing camera firmware (you can still access all your normal menus), and if you switch to an SD card without CHDK your camera reverts to it’s default state.

There’s a really easy to follow guide on the CHDK website – the only hitch I encountered was having to use a loader script since I’m using a mac – other than that everything worked smoothly.

The difference it’s made to the camera is incredible – it can shoot in RAW format, and you have complete control over aperture, exposure, ISO and a whole load of more advanced things like colour balance and flash power. There’s a huge array of settings to discover and play around with, but for me the real killer feature is the scripts.

Accessed through  CHDK you load a script from the Scripting parameters -> load script from file menus, and then run the script by hitting the shutter button whilst the <alt> text is displayed. I did a bit of experimenting with the time lapse script and created the animation below.

This is the sort of movie camera functionality that I always dreamed of when I was little – back then the only option was cine film / video, and even with that it wasn’t really in the budget of a 10 year old. It’s a blurry first attempt, but I’m quite into creating doodles.

CHDK alone is a really good reason to invest in a simple Canon compact, and although the site comes with lots of disclaimers, as I’m sure it voids warranties / Canon will come and hunt you down etc etc it’s a fairly easy way to dip your toe into the world of hardware hacking. Long may it continue!

How epetitions work (from government site)

There are a few provisos: the petition has to be approved (by the relevant department) and the petition can’t relate to appointments - presumably to avoid things like the ‘sack Gordon Brown’ petition which gained lots of names during the last governments attempts at digital democracy. There are also a few rules about joke petitions, and the slightly catch all “the issue is not the responsibility of the government”.

As someone who does a lot of online campaigning, and has an interest in hacking together ideas for running online petitions, this is potentially really exciting.

But, there are a couple of issues:

1. It’s a closed system. This is a massive issue. Charities and other organisations rely on online activism to recruit new members to their lists and encourage them to take a more active role in their campaigns (and yes, to fundraise from – but fundraising is activism too – see how the Obama campaign publicised it’s large number of donations as committed support).

   Take for instance a hypothetical example: a small campaigning organisation launches a campaign for the UK government to do something about a UK company supporting a dictator. The petition captures the public imagination, hundreds of thousands of people sign the petition. It has it’s day in parliament, but then the campaign moves out of the public eye. The small campaigning organisation can’t contact the petition signers to ask for help in moving the campaign forward.

   One of the big criticisms of online campaigning is that it’s low value ‘clicktavism‘, but if you have no way of capturing the details of the people who sign your petition, how can you get in touch with them and encourage them to be more involved, have tea with their MP and do some high-effort campaigning? Online petitions are often seen as the first step in engaging people with issues, and getting them more interested in politics.

   This leads me to think that a lot of campaigning organisations will ignore the system, and instead it will be used by the likes of the Sun to run campaigns like ‘Lets have the Red Arrows at the Olympics’.

   Worse still, it seems that newspapers like the Daily Mail are intent on using the petition system to launch campaigns like bringing back the death penalty. Given the current structure of the e-petition system it actually favours tabloid campaigns, since they have high circulations and don’t have to think about engaging in long term campaign work.

2. It doesn’t tackle the big issue of how MPs respond to online campaigning. There is a massive variance in how MPs respond to being lobbied online. Some ignore email completely, others respond just to individual emails, and a few more respond to identical emails in the same way they would to letters. Recently a number of MPs have been very vocal in their opposition to online email petitions.

   Personally I believe that as our elected representatives, MPs have a duty to respond to their constituents, but at the same time appreciate that trawling through a lot of emails that are all the same might tax the resources of the average constituency office, and cause the kind of annoyance that can alienate MPs from otherwise worthy campaigns.

A proper online petition system would enable campaigners to do the things they need to do to work effectively, and at the same time give the politicians reasonable ways to gauge opinion and thus hopefully respond.

So how could it be done better?

• Involve civil society: Involving the people who write the software that campaigning organisations use would be a good start. The e-petition system was written by a civil servant department bizarrely named ‘Skunkworks’ for £82,000.
• Build out the e-petition system as an API - an ‘API’ allows other pieces of software to access a system – twitter uses this very effectively to allow all the tools like tweedeck and hootsuite to send tweets. Organisations could feature the petitions on their websites and recruit activists to their own email and supporter databases at the same time.
• Create a set of guidelines / protocols for lobbying MPs, ministers and departments and for people wanting to lobby them:

  It could be as simple as specifying something in the subject line of an email e.g. PETITION_mycampaigntitle for identical emails, and
  PERSONALQUERY_mycampaigntitle for individually-written emails. Or perhaps sending an MP a daily / weekly email informing them the number of constituents who have signed a particular petition, and inviting them to respond  (essentially taking over the task of managing the petition).

  This is a two way process: for it to work politicians would have to agree to respond if the ‘rules of engagement’ are met, and online campaigners would need to respect the rules.

• Give campaign targets a platform to reply on – if it would encourage reluctant MPs to engage with online campaigning it would be worth offering the opportunity to put their views across.

In today’s modern world we carry out more and more of our daily activities online, banking, paying bills, buying insurance, shopping etc. It seems that providing the option to engage properly with politicians on the web is long overdue.

Thoughts? disagree with me completely? leave comments below!

You can donate via the Disasters Emergency Committee who are co-ordinating the relief effort from the UK.

For the first time they are now accepting donations via SMS text message – TEXT 70000 with the word HELP in your message. DEC receives the full £5.

For longer term solutions ONE have launched a petition to put the pressure on world leaders to defend international aid budgets – to this end I’ve had a go at building an embedable widget to use on blogs:

It’s super simple, but interesting to have the ability to do slightly more with the online action system. Looking forward to having creative ideas about generating additional signatures in the future.

There are some handy instructions available on google on adding the button – it involves some Javascript in the header and a plus one tag <g:plusone></g:plusone> to render the button.

Not entirely sure how useful this is – particularly if it’s just related to Google Buzz which picks up my twitter feed anyway.

It seems very similar to Facebook like, but lacking the massively popular social network to back it up.

Update:

Now the plus one button has a massively popular social network (10 million users by July 2011) to back it up – the launch of Google Plus integrates with the button. For anyone not yet on plus one, in 10 seconds it:

• Has an activity stream just like facebook.
• Allows you to organise contacts using a neat drag and drop interface into ‘circles’ e.g. friends, family, colleagues which is much easier to use than facebook’s privacy settings.
• Allows you to share content with each circle differently e.g. hello friends here are my drunken photos from last night, hello colleagues here is my presentation for today’s meeting, again facebook sort of allows this but it’s horribly complicated to set up.
• Has a group video conference feature.
• lacks group or organisation/company pages – although this feature is coming soon.

The sharing content bit is where the plus one button comes in. Initial testing indicates that it helps with discovery of new pages into google, but has no effect on their page ranking.

#1 Crowdsourcing

The idea of outsourcing work to the internet is hardly new – Amazon has effectively crowdsourced all of it’s product reviews for years, but there are a few interesting projects that have popped up recently.

Hunch is a project by on of the people who developed flickr and is effectively a technology demonstrator – it’s a social network with questionnaires which learns from the answers given by the community and & builds up idea of who you are and then helps you identify what things you would be interested in. Although the commercial potential is obvious, this approach could work for matching campaigners (or donors) with charities they’re likely to be interested in. SocialActions.com

During the expenses scandal the Guardian newspaper uploaded nearly 500,000 documents and crowdsourced the analysis of them on their MP expenses website.

Crowd sourcing translation for emergency info was used in Haiti by Ushahidi although it posed problems with matching the expectations of users on the ground with what was practically possible by the aid agencies.

Taking the concept even further The extraordinaries is a mobile phone app which describes itself as micro-volunteering – and which seeks to answer the question “I have 20 minutes right now what can I do?” by matchmaking suitable volunteers with tasks.

Google Animal Translate

Introducing Translate for Animals (beta): Bridging the gap between animals and humans

Google have now updated their real time translation software with an android app (sorry iPhone fans!) that provides animal translations. So now you can answer the question as to what Mr Dog/Caesar is actually talking about.

get the app here from google

DIY Carbon Freezing Kit

Yes I know you love me dear, but why can’t I move my arms and why am I now someone’s favourite wall decoration?

Now you can cryogenically freeze yourself for 5-30 years. Yes, really! Making a complete Han Solo of yourself has never been easier. Or possible.

Make a Han Solo out of yourself

full details available here (via firebox.com)

Textp

Help save youtube bandwidth by selecting textp rather than video. For every person who selects TEXTp and keeps it on while they watch a video, they save YouTube $1 a second, resulting in potentially billions of dollars of savings (not to mention the environmental benefit of saving server load).

TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system — and have the added benefit of promoting literacy!

see the above in all it’s textp glory on the Youtube website