Plastic lizards from the moon.- July 28, 2006 In the past month or so I've been testing... er... wearing Lizard Footwear's Agile 500.With distinctive sculpted lines and entirely made of pliable plastic, they would probably be at ease in the company of props from Space: 1999.As Oren Horev told me: "... they do look like they come from the future, but I wouldn't be caught dead wearing them...".Ahem, yes... and no... but these are indeed shoes that tend to elicit all sorts of spontaneous comments from people.Esthetic considerations aside I...http://www.freegorifero.com/weblog/2006_07_01_weblog_archive.html#115403196879277485 freegorifero PBS.- July 21, 2006 Two upcoming notable events worth attendingparticipating to.Workshop: near field interactionsOrganized by Timo Arnall, Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker the workshop will focus on user-centred interactions with the internet of things, and it will be held at Nordichi 2006, October 14 and 15, in Oslo, Norway.Applications are due August 1st, and space is limited to 25 participants, so do hurry if you are interested."The so-called Internet of Things is a vision of the future of networked things that.http://www.freegorifero.com/weblog/2006_07_01_weblog_archive.html#115346766780198674 Do machines look for animal shapes in pixelated clouds- July 15, 2006 Spurred by the words of Charlie Schick and Matt Jones I've been recently thinking a bit about 2D barcodes.2D barcodes are glyphs that encode digital data, and typically look like dense checkerboards chaotically rearranged by a crossword enthusiast.A dedicated camera-based application can precipitate these pixelated clouds into sequences of ones and zeros: hyperlinks, strings of text, images and the like, the limit only being the varying amount of data each barcode type can encode.Examples...http://www.freegorifero.com/weblog/2006_07_01_weblog_archive.html#115296718143042406 Everyware is where you find it.- July 6, 2006 The other day I found myself stuck in a lo-tech scenario exemplary of many of the theses enunciated in Adam Greenfield's excellent book, "Everyware".It happened, of all places, in the restroom of one of Italy's largest department stores (and if you think that reporting on semi-sentient bathrooms is at least a bit strange I will quickly point you to Don Norman's own reflections on toilet paper algorithms as a disclaimer of sorts).Without further ado here's what happened, albeit a bit...http://www.freegorifero.com/weblog/2006_07_01_weblog_archive.html#115210074967951259 |