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.

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.

Boxee Media Centre
Originally uploaded by mackers

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.

In November, we launched Fashion Your Firefox, which was a collection of add-ons that we felt were great for a novice user just getting started with customizing their browser. Now, we’d like to take it a step further and let anyone create their own collection of add-ons that can be shared with their friends, posted on blogs, and featured on the Firefox Add-ons website.

Working with Briks, I was the lead developer for the Add-on Collector extension, which allows Firefox users to share and discover add-ons from within the browser. I’m very pleased at the result and the positive feedback that we’ve been getting so far. That people are using it to discover new add-ons is great.

Some more coverage:  Mozilla Blog – A week of collections, Lifehacker’s Firefox Add-on Packs, New York Times Gadgetwise Blog.

o2sms is a program to send SMS messages using the websites of Irish mobile operators.

All of these were as part of “tech” articles or programmes, appealing mainly to geeks and GIS types. However, now Dartmaps has entered the world of the arty farty. From February 24th 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City are running an exhibition titled “Design and the Elastic Mind“, which features Dartmaps as one of its exhibits. From the blurb:

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale.

I’m not sure how Dartmaps fits into all that, but someone somewhere must have decided it does. The exhibit takes the form of a video recording of the site in action and a short descriptive text.

I couldn’t make the opening party and I probably won’t make it there to see it at all. But if anyone is in the city between then and May 12th, then be sure to pop in and take a gander :)

Edit March 9th, 2010: the installation is no longer live, but here is a video screencast of dartmaps in action:

Dartmaps Screencast from Mackers McMackers on Vimeo.