Mozilla Summit 2010

Last weekend I attended the Mozilla Summit 2010 in Whistler, Canada. What an amazing location for 4 days meeting other Mozillians and discussing the future of the open web! The hospitality was incredible and we took the opportunity to ride a cable car to the mountain top and to go swimming in mountain lakes.

I wrote an add-on that won the ‘most creative’ prize in the Rocket Your Firefox competition: Quakeyfox shakes your browser window whenever there is an earthquake anywhere in the world. Not so useful, but a good demonstration of rapid Jetpack development and lots of fun. The prize was a Jetpack hoodie, here modelled by Matjaž.

Since then I’ve been knocking around Vancouver. This city is in a spectacular location and is a great place to be vegetarian and green in general. Continuing the good vibe I went to a Calexico concert in the park yesterday as part of the Vancouver Folk Festival. Add some eccentric raccoons and mischievous hobos and you’ve got yourself a fun place to live.

Paranoid Tees

Click for a large version on Flickr.

Paranoid Tees have opened their doors in Plaza Cedro, Valencia! From the website:

If you are a designer or illustrator, you love t-shirts or you know that you have something distinct to offer, and you would like to be a part of our team.

If you are a music group and you want to promote and generate cash with your t-shirts without investing anything, we’ll make it easy. We’ll produce and sell your t-shirts and then pay you. Everything is of the same quality as your posters and CD covers.

If you’re a t-shirt fan, then you’ve arrived at the right place. If not, then you’ll soon see. The countdown has begun…

Here are the two t-shirts I designed for them.

The t-shirt on top shows the molecular structure of everyone’s favourite analgesic. The formula appears to be projected onto a conical surface. The material is 100% bio-cotton, and hopefully they’ll soon be able to offer it on organic hemp.

The bottom t-shirt is, of course, a homage to Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science). It turned out quite well. On the back will be a unique bit.ly link (redirecting to the youtube video) so I can track who actually bothers typing it in.

jQuery.webcam

I have created my first jQuery plugin. Called jQuery.webcam, it is a plugin which allows jQuery to read data from a user’s webcam or other video capture device.

Features:

• Until browsers support native webcam capture, an (open source) flash blob is used for the actual capture.
• The plugin can optionally prompt the user to allow flash access the webcam.
• The plugin writes the video to a canvas element.
• Support for adding callbacks and filters.

There is a demonstration available (testing on Firefox 3.6). The performance is terrible at the moment, but I will be working to fix that.

I’m planning to use this plugin for my next interactive art installation, which will allow the participant to interact with a virtual environment using facial emotions. Stay tuned!

Update: I’ve put the source on github.

Bug in a Rug

There exists an old Persian legend about a bug who spent his entire life in the world’s most beautifully designed rug:

All the bug ever saw in his lifetime was his problems. They stood up all around him, he couldn’t see over the top of them, and he had to fight his way through these tufts of wool, in the rug, to find some crumbs someone had spilled in the rug. And the tragedy of the story of the bug in the rug was this; that he lived and he died in the world’s most beautifully designed rug, but he never once knew that he spent his life in something which had a pattern.

Boxee Media Centre

A few months ago I decided to build a new media server from the bottom up. I needed something to sit in the living room and be able to play and stream music and videos.

It’s in the living room, so it has to be quiet and, as it will be turned on all the time it has to be relatively green. It also has to look good so I chose the very quiet Antec Fusion Black 430 chassis. For the hard drive I went for a 1TB WD Caviar Green. Again, almost silent and very energy efficient. I made sure the graphics card had a HDMI out and I accessorized with a DVD burner, TV Tuner card, WiFi and a remote control.

As I’m running linux on a new model, configuration was arduous, but I now have the remote control, volume knob and LCD display working nicely.

For the software, I’m running Boxee (on Ubuntu). Whilst still in Alpha, its mostly stable and looks very slick indeed.

I’m delighted with the final result. It’s a PC, but looks spiffy tucked there under the TV. I unplugged the keyboard/mouse; all interaction is via the IR remote (or the Boxee iPhone app).

Some highlights:

• 1TB is plenty of storage, but with Boxee having integrated bittorrent downloads, this will probably fill up fast. However, there’s loads of online content available through the interface. Boxee also has support for showing Photos (local, flickr, facebook).
• I can run emulators, games and things like Google Earth on the box. (Google Earth looks incredible on the HDTV!)
• I’m running mpd on the machine so I can play music without turning the TV on (via the MPoD iPhone app).
• The new version of the above app also allows me to stream music to my iPhone. This is especially cool, I can stream my music to my iPhone wherever I am (even over 3G).
• Boxee has mad social networking support, so if I recommend a movie or whatever through the interface it gets tweeted to my account.
• I also have mt-daapd running to stream to iTunes.

All-in-all very sweet, but I’m going to the beach now.