Category: random thoughts
-
Penelopean robotics theory and the woven cosmos (part 1)
The Penelope project is concerned with many things, pattern structures in ancient poetry, comparisons of Andean and Greek mathematics, and the role of liveness in thought processes – to name just a few. We can also add robotics to this list. A weaver in action is often mistaken for a robot – perhaps it’s the…
-
Futurecrafting in Cornwall with FoAM Earth
The future is in short supply at the moment, particularly in a country with so many things changing – it is a constant surprise that there are so few ideas about where we could be headed. At the smaller scales too, at FoAM Kernow, in common with many organisations there is a feeling we tend…
-
My first buffer overflow exploit
I know worryingly little about the world of computer security – I’ve probably written a huge amount of exploitable code in my time, so it’s a good idea as a programmer to spend a bit of effort finding out more about how our programs can be compromised in order to gain awareness of the issues.…
-
A cryptoweaving experiment
Archaeologists can read a woven artifact created thousands of years ago, and from its structure determine the actions performed in the right order by the weaver who created it. They can then recreate the weaving, following in their ancestor’s ‘footsteps’ exactly. This is possible because a woven artifact encodes time digitally, weft by weft. In…
-
The UAV toolkit & appropriate technology
The UAV toolkit’s second project phase is now complete, the first development sprint at the start of the year was a bit of research into what we could use an average phone’s sensors for, resulting in a proof of concept remote sensing android app that allowed you to visually program different scripts which we then…
-
Loose threads from weavecoding
Midway through the weavecoding project and our researches have thrown up a whole load of topics that either don’t quite fit into our framework, or we simply won’t have time to pursue properly. Here are some of the tangents I’ve collected so far. Coding with knots: Khipu One of the cultures I’m increasingly interested in…
-
Organisation hacking (part 1)
Over the last six months I’ve been taking a crash course in company formation, treating it like any other investigation into a strange and esoteric technology. Last year I registered FoAM Kernow as a UK non profit organisation in the mould of FoAM Brussels. Starting off with absolutely no knowledge at all (but with a…
-
Robot nightjar eggshibition at the Poly, Falmouth
As part of this year’s Fascinate festival we took over the bar at Falmouth’s Poly with visualisations of the camouflage pattern evolution process from the egglab game. This was a chance to do some detective work on the massive amount of genetic programming data we’ve amassed over the last few months, figure out ways to…
-
Why teach Kids Coding? (Royal Cornwall Show update)
On Saturday I teamed up with Falmouth University’s Makernow team to do a kids coding event at the Royal Cornwall Show with a new Raspberry Pi cube (based on the one used at the DeerShed Festival last year). We had a constant stream of families and kids wanting to try Scratch coding, and we had…
-
Thinking Digital 2014
Last week I had the honour of both performing with Alex and presenting at Thinking Digital 2014. Suzy O’Hara invited me to represent the intersection of art, science and education of FoAM kernow and present the work I’ve been doing with the Sensory Ecology Group at Exeter University. I did a quick Egglab game demo…