dave's blog of art and programming

Category: random thoughts

  • How to back up your encryption keys

    Without really noticing it I’ve gradually acquired more and more encryption keys without understanding how to back them up properly. Until fairly recently I lazily assumed that remembering the passphrases would be enough in case of my laptop catching on fire, but this is not the case. I use GPG keys both for authenticity over…

  • Cornwall “Let’s Get Digital” presentation

    Here’s a presentation I gave at the end of last year at a Creative Skills Cornwall meeting at Falmouth University. I introduced the problems of a growing producer/consumer digital divide – the need for more public discourse in the politics of technology and how free software, codeclub, livecoding, algorithmic weaving and sonic bikes can indicate…

  • Some post-Snowden thoughts

    One of the most interesting outcomes of the the Snowden revelations for me are that they have exposed to the light of day an awful lot about how different groups of people relate to technology and authority. There are the side that worries about the internet becoming the “worst tool of human oppression in all…

  • Project Nightjar: Camouflage data visualisation and possible internet robot predators

    We’ve had tens of thousands of people spotting nightjars and donating a bit of their time to sensory ecology research. The results of this (of course it’s still on-going, along with the new nest spotting game) is a 20Mb database with hundreds of thousands of clicks recorded. One of the things we were interested in…

  • Fascinate Falmouth

    It’s not often that you get to go to the first edition of a festival or conference, but last week was the first ever Fascinate Conference, in Falmouth – a varied collection of artists, performers, musicians and experimenters with technology, some from far away on their first visit to Cornwall, others were local – both…

  • Compiling Scheme to Javascript

    Recently I’ve been continuing my experiments with compilers by writing a Scheme to Javascript compiler. This is fairly simple as the languages are very similar, both have garbage collection and first class functions so it’s largely a case of reusing these features directly. There are some caveats though – here is an example of the…

  • /* vivo */ musings

    So much to think about after the /* vivo */ festival, how livecoding is moving on, becoming more self critical as well as gender balanced. The first signs of this was the focus of the festival being almost entirely philosophical rather than technical. Previous meetings of this nature have involved a fair dose of tech…

  • Public perceptions of programming…

    I’ve recently been collecting stupid images from major news websites reporting on stories involving programming, some examples: Check out this disembodied hand:

  • New game design

    I’m working on a new game as an art/science collaboration, and thought that it might be interesting to try the technique of making a board game first. The idea is not so much to make it work first time, but use physical pieces to figure out possible rules and try them without thinking about limitations…

  • Users > “drivers” of software

    I’ve finally had a chance to sit down and comment on John Naughton’s article in the Guardian and it’s manifesto addressed to the education secretary The Rt Hon Michael Gove MP on computer education in the UK. This joins an avalanche of recognition that programming – or “coding” – is suddenly a Good Thing for…