Working with young people – opportunities worth looking at

April 8th, 2009

I am a volunteer mentor with On The Level: a Rethink project providing mentoring to young people leaving care, to ease their transition from being “looked after” to living independently.

The nature of the role means it’s something that I rarely blog or tweet about. However, we have monthly training sessions that sometimes cover interesting topics that can be shared, such as how youth mental health services work and drugs awareness training.

Tonight, one of the things that came up was an overview of some of the other youth mentoring projects in the area. I’d heard good things about them before, and it was interesting to hear more about them.

I thought it was worth sharing an overview of two projects in particular that sounds like they are worth looking at. If you live in the Southampton / Winchester area, maybe one of these would be a fun way for you to help make a difference in a young person’s life?

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Presenting with the Twitter backchannel

April 3rd, 2009

I went to Bath for openMIC this week (part conference, part barcamp – a brilliant and informative day on innovation in mobile).

The first half was made up of traditional conference-style presentations, and during one of these presentations, I noticed tweets with the #openMIC hashtag become particularly active: feedback that the presenter was missing.

I wondered about ways that the presenter could have got that feedback before finishing his talk…

thinking about fun ways presenters can get realtime audience feedback via twitter. PowerPoint VB script to embed hashtag search in slides?

This isn’t a new idea: I’ve heard of large US tech conferences where the backchannel is displayed on a second screen or projector next to the presenter’s slides. But I rarely get the chance to present where there is the facility for projecting to two screens at once.

So I got thinking about how a compromise could work: embedding a live twitter search somewhere within a presentation.

I had a bit of free time this afternoon to play with the idea a little more. As is sadly often my way, my first few ideas were needlessly overcomplicated: using macros, VBScript or something like that to try and get data from the web and embed it within my slides.

Fiddly. And prone to a number of fundamental issues, such as trying to avoid reloading the twitter search every time you change slide.

But then I had a flash of what, for want of a better word, I shall call ‘genius’. 😉

Instead of fighting to embed a website within a presentation, what about embedding a presentation within a webpage?

A little bit of playing around with code, and I managed to pull a quick proof-of-concept together.

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ScriptFu – scripting with Gimp

April 1st, 2009

I wrote on Sunday about my first attempt to use Gimp to script some image manipulation stuff I wanted to do – specifically, combining multiple images into a single, multi-layered image.

A few people have asked me for more info about how to do this, so I thought I’d share my script here. Gimp is an open-source image editor, but it also comes with a batch mode where you can run it’s functions from a script. The scripting language for Gimp is called ScriptFu, and is a Lisp-type language. I’ve not done anything in Lisp since learning Scheme at University… so it felt a little odd at first.

This was my first attempt at writing in ScriptFu, so it’s worth pointing that I’m not an expert, and what I’ve written might not be elegant or the “right” way to do it. But I did manage to get something working in a few hours of playing with it.

To start with, a few tips from how I got started:

The doc – The documentation on scripting at docs.gimp.org is fantastic, and got me off to a quick start. It includes enough snippets and samples that I could see the sort of thing I’d need to do.

Gimp’s PDB – If you launch Gimp, go to Help -> Procedure Browser. It starts up a very neat searchable API doc for all of the Gimp functions. Even when I didn’t know the name of functions I needed, typing a quick guess (e.g. “layer”) into here would show me a few sensibly-named options, and show me the full API info for them all.

Photobucket

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Creating multi-layered screenshots (a BarCamp London hack)

March 29th, 2009

I’m on a slow (gah, engineering works!) train back from an awesome BarCampLondon. I’ve got a ton of notes from so many fascinating talks and sessions, but not quite sure how to share them… they would make for the world’s longest blog post!

But as I have a little time to kill, I thought I’d quickly share a little hack that I pulled together overnight. An old idea, but a fun one – and it’s amazing what beer and interesting people will do for your creativity. 🙂

The hack is a little Windows utility to capture more useful screenshots.

By way of background, when you press the “Print Screen” button, it copies an image of your desktop to the clipboard. Very useful. But it has limitations.

What if a window you want to see in the screenshot image is obscured by another window? Or minimised entirely? That information is lost.

Not with my hack! 🙂

My tool captures “interactive” multi-layered screenshots – a picture of each window is captured separately on it’s own layer. This creates a screenshot that (even after you’ve taken the screenshot) will let you move windows around, hide/restore windows, and change the z-order of windows.

It creates a sort of simulation-like snapshot of what your desktop was like at the time.

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minibar meets geomob

March 28th, 2009

I went to Corbet Place in London yesterday night for Minibar.

MiniBar is a social evening in Shoreditch, which offers people a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, web applications, start ups, social networking and general Web 2.0 mayhem & fandango.

photo 016I’ve heard of Minibar before, particularly from Andy and Roo, but never actually got around to going to one. In fact, the main reason that I went to this one is because it was being done as a joint event between minibar and geomob (a geo/mobile developers meetup group which I have been to before).

Despite being a newbie, I had a few ideas of what to expect. Andy described the place as a “dimly lit … brewery bar“, which pretty much sums it up. And more usefully, warned me to turn right when I arrived, to stand a decent chance of hearing the presentations – definitely a useful tip. 🙂

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v Awards Portsmouth 2009

March 26th, 2009

photo 094Tonight was the v Awards Evening 2009 in Portsmouth – a youth volunteering achievements awards event to celebrate the work done by young people in Portsmouth.

It was run by Solent Youth Action, as we deliver the vinvolved youth programme in Portsmouth, so I went along (originally to watch and lend moral support, but I ended up getting roped into going on stage to present some of the awards and be a guest speaker!).

It was a great evening. Awards evenings can often be dull and repetitive affairs, but I loved this one. I find it inspiring to hear the wide variety of ways that the young people have contributed to their community, and the evening was a great taster of the work that we are doing in the Portsmouth area.

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Twitter Developer Nest

March 25th, 2009

Last night, developers of twitter clients, apps and mashups came together at Sun’s Customer Briefing Centre in London for the first London twitter developer nest.

I’m not really a “proper” twitter developer, but I’ve thrown together a twitter client and a web app before, so I figured I could pretend for an evening. 😉

It was a very interesting evening, and I’ve copied my (sorry – fairly sketchy and incomplete!) notes from the evening below. If you really want to see what you missed, Chris did a great job filming all of the talks for UStream.

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BathCamp evenings

March 18th, 2009

bathcamp T-shirt

In September last year, a barcamp was held in Bath. It was called, somewhat predictably but not unreasonably, “bathcamp“. 🙂

I blogged about it at the time, but in short it was a fascinating weekend that brought together a great group of people.

But it didn’t end there.

There will be another bathcamp event, but the organiser Mike Ellis had the very neat idea to keep the momentum going in between the full barcamp weekends with a series of monthly evening meetups.

The first Wednesday of every month, BathCamp becomes an evening event at Revolution in Bath. It works really well, keeping the sense of community going in between the full barcamps. Many turn up early, in time to have a drink and something to eat in the bar downstairs. You get a group of people all sat together, but it’s very welcoming and friendly. You can sit next to anyone there, and get involved the conversation – not always the case with every geeky meetup I go to.

At about 8pm-ish, everyone goes upstairs for an informal presentation on some tech topic of interest. Then there is a break where everyone gets themselves a drink, and talk and bounce around ideas about the presentation.

Then another (generally somewhat related) presentation from a second speaker, and another chance to talk about the topic with everyone else there. These bits make a difference – sometimes these events can drift into “turn up, listen to talk, go home”. But so far, the Bathcamp meetups have been a long way from that.

The talks so far…

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