Our story begins with a group of adventurers living in the medieval kingdom of Larion. The kingdom is filled with small villages and thatched cottages and has been relatively peaceful until now. The adventurers are on a quest to find the magical staff of Zalos. They walk through the forest and notice a band of […]
Category Archives: General
Hello World
Guess who spent the afternoon on sysadmin? > FLUSH PRIVILEGES
Near Futurism
Blessed with the gift-curse of seeing ~24h into the future, I spend it on bad TV. Monday Nov 17th 2014 (IRC): 10:06 danbri: I’ve figured out what the world needs – a new modern WestWorld sequel. 10:06 libby: why does the world need that? 10:06 danbri: just that it was a great film and it […]
OpenStreetMap for disaster response – raw notes from Harry Wood talk
Very raw, sometimes verbatim but doubtless flawed notes from Harry Wood‘s excellent talk at Open Data Institute in London. #odifridays Many thanks to Harry for a great talk and to ODI for putting together these lunchtime lectures. The ODI have also published slides and audio from the talk. “An introduction to OpenStreetMap, the UK born […]
Vocab stats (2008 experiment)
XMPP untethered – serverless messaging in the core?
In the XMPP session at last february’s FOSDEM I gave a brief demo of some NoTube work on how TV-style remote controls might look with XMPP providing their communication link. For the TV part, I showed Boxee, with a tiny Python script exposing some of its localhost HTTP API to the wider network via XMPP. […]
‘Republic of Letters’ in R / Custom Widgets for Second Screen TV navigation trails
As ever, I write one post that perhaps should’ve been two. This is about the use and linking of datasets that aid ‘second screen’ (smartphone, tablet) TV remotes, and it takes as a quick example a navigation widget and underlying dataset that show us how we might expect to navigate TV archives, in some future […]
Lonclass and RDF
Lonclass is one of the BBC’s in-house classification systems – the “London classification”. I’ve had the privilege of investigating lonclass within the NoTube project. It’s not currently public, but much of what I say here is also applicable to the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system upon which it was based. UDC is also not fully […]
Sagan on libraries
“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and […]
Archive.org TV metadata howto
The following is composed from answers kindly supplied by Hank Bromley, Karen Coyle, George Oates, and Alexis Rossi from the archive.org team. I have mixed together various helpful replies and retro-fitted them to a howto/faq style summary. I asked about APIs and data access for descriptions of the many and varied videos in Archive.org. This guide should […]
Local Video for Local People
OK it’s all Google stuff, but still good to see. Go to Google Maps, My Maps, to find ‘Videos from YouTube’ listed. Here’s where I used to live (Bristol UK) and where I live now (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Here’s a promo film of some nearby art installations from ArtZuid, who even have a page in […]
NoTube scenario: Facebooks groups and TV recommendation
Short version: If the Web knows I like a TV show, why can’t my TV be more useful? So I have just joined a Facebook group, “Spaced Appreciation Society“: Basic Info Type: Common Interest – Pets & Animals Description: If you’ve ever watched (and therefore loved) the TV series Spaced, then come and pay homage […]
WordPressing from iphone
Is this thing on?
Karen Coyle on information linking
Just stumbled across this, after meeting Karen Coyle here at DC2008. A nice account of why we might care about linking information (and linking data): Much like people, the real meaningfulness of information is how it interacts with others of its kind. Information that is alone or out of context is inert and cannot reach […]
YouTube/Viacom privacy followup (and what Google should do)
A brief update on the YouTube/Viacom privacy disaster. From Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post: Yesterday, lawyers for Google said they would not appeal the ruling. They sent Viacom a letter requesting that the company allow YouTube to redact user names and IP addresses from the data. “We are pleased the court put some limits […]