Technology
Entries related to technology.
Ingress
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/29/2013 - 21:01A month and a half ago, my brother invited me to play the game Ingress. It is an augmented reality game played on Android smartphones. The smartphone becomes a 'scanner' searching for "exotic matter", the energy in the game, and portals. All of this is tied to physical locations and the GPS on the smartphone is an important component.
There are two factions in the game, The Enlightened and The Resistance. Each faction tries to capture portals belonging to the other side, and from there, establish links between portals. These portals can be linked together in fields. Besides attacking and linking portals, you can also "hack" portals, to gain game pieces. As with many games, you gain experience and go up in levels.
In the six weeks that I've been playing, I've made it up to level seven, out of eight levels. I've captured many portals, created fields, destroyed fields, and gotten to meet some interesting people.
Over this time, my style of play has changed as I've become more experienced, gained more items and gotten to know people.
Beyond this, there is a whole complicated backstory, with information in YouTube videos, Google+ pages, and at various gatherings. The game is still in closed beta, but invites are becoming easier to get.
From the geeky side, it is a fun game, merging a virtual world with the physical world. There is plenty of strategy to explore. Yet the creative side is perhaps more interesting. As with other virtual games, the players are participating in an unfolding story. I haven't followed this story that closely yet, and I'm curious about to what extent the game play effects the way the story unfolds are takes shape.
As I have more time, I'll continue to level up, visit new portals, get to know the community better and perhaps start following the storyline more closely. It is a strange new world that I find fascinating.
#pcwm G33k Speak Recap
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/01/2013 - 17:42Like PodCamp WesternMass #4, perhaps the session that I got the most out of was one of the least attended sessions. This year, it was "G33k Speak". Perhaps there were only three of us that self identified as "G33k"s. Perhaps there were too many other good sessions going on at the same time.
So, three of us sat around and talked about technology we were really excited about. I spoke a little bit about Google Glass and Raspberry Pi. Tom Galanis talked about software. He currently teaches high school technology and wanted to get people's views on different languages. Which do you like more, Java, Javascript, C++, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, or something else? How do you get people excited about programming.
I talked about how I've always told my children they were free to play any computer game that they could write. They started off with Logo and Scratch. In many ways, I think of Scratch as drag and drop logo. Of course I mentioned Scratch on Raspbery Pi.
Tom mentioned a site that is on my list to explore, Snap! Build Your Own Blocks 4.0. Essentially, it hosted scratch. I've played with this a little bit and may be recommending it to more people as a good way to get started with Scratch.
Another site that Tom mentioned as Construct 2.
Construct 2 is a powerful ground breaking HTML5 game creator designed specifically for 2D games. It allows anyone to build games — no coding required!
I started programming computers over forty years ago, and I like coding. I try to get others to like programming. I like working at the command line and writing my programs with a text editor. I'm not a big fan of integrated development environments or IDEs. At a later point in the discussion, we talked about the lack of good IDEs for HTML5, but as best as I can tell from first glance, that is exactly what Construct 2 is.
One review talked about Construct 2 nicely connecting with kongregate. I prefer to write games than to play games, but kongregate appears to be a good place for sharing games. I'll continue to keep an eye on how HTML5 and development environments for it evolve.
We talked briefly about databases. Generally, I use MySQL. Tom, or the other person in the session (I forget who it was), mentioned MariaDB. I've started reading about MariaDB and I will try to find some time to experiment with it. Some day. When I'm not as swamped with everything else in my life. As an aside, I started looking at installing MariaDB on Raspberry Pi, but I'll save that for another day.
There was also a brief discussion about Mir as a replacement for XWindows. Again, interesting to think about in terms of Raspberry Pi, but I'll save that for another day.
#pcwm Notes on Bitcoin
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 03/30/2013 - 22:08At PodCamp WesternMass, one of the sessions I attended was led by Joe Cascio about Bitcoin. "Bitcoin is a digital currency, a protocol, and a software…"
I've kicked around Bitcoin in the past, but never really jumped in. This time, I figured it was a good time to explore it in more detail. At least as I understand it from Joe, Bitcoins are an alternative digital currency. It is shared over an encrypted peer to peer network, and the coins are stored in a wallet, as opposed to an account somewhere.
There are pros and cons to this. If you lose your wallet, you lose whatever was in it. On the other hand, if it were an account somewhere online, and the server that had the account goes away, you'd lose your money that way. Joe talked about the Cyprus banks as an example of the second type of risk. You can store your Bitcoin wallet somewhere so that it acts more like an account if that's what you're interested in.
I installed Bitcoin on my Android phone. If anyone wants to put some money in that wallet, an address is bitcoin:1PNepVfV6wmnpUDAz3oLMQmCuJ7cP44fiQ. I also installed Bitcoin on my Mac. An address for that wallet is bitcoin:1ACM16Gntx4ekgwB2LvL3NokT2wKvaT5fB.
Joe did go into a little bit of detail about Bitcoin mining, or how new Bitcoins get added into the economy. However, that didn't have a lot of practical value, at least to me. I doubt I'll ever have the computation power to mine Bitcoins.
So, the other way of getting Bitcoins is to buy or earn them. Joe recommended a site, Coinbase. I set up an account there. They are particularly focused on buying and selling Bitcoins, particularly based on bank transfers. Joe noted that in setting things up, they can transfer and and from whatever account you've linked, so he recommends being cautious, such as linking it to a small account that you don't use for much of anything else. I set up an account there, but I haven't linked a bank account to it. So, essentially, right now it is a hosted wallet with a bitcoin address bitcoin:1MKhWL7xPiMZgLTC6zaQzC6MhPq72WK6gu
I was particularly interested in connecting bitcoins to other virtual currencies. Virwox, or Virtual World Exchange, allows you to trade between Second Life, Open Metaverse currency, and Avination, which appears to be another Second Life like virtual world. You can also deposit money from various bank accounts in different currencies.
The downside is that primary currency seems to be the Linden Dollar, and you have to pay exchange rates to get in and out of Linden dollars. So, if you want Bitcoins from US Dollars, you deposit US dollars, use them to buy Linden Dollars, and then use the Linden Dollars to buy Bitcoins; two sets of commission charges.
When you set it up for Bitcoins, it also becomes a hosted wallet. My Virwox hosted wallet has this address, bitcoin:13wtvg7P97voZTcjFn8sKs62E5P3NhZQKQ. They charge a transaction fee of .01BTC to transfer bitcoins out of Virwox to other accounts. My sense is that they are probably good if you are making money in Second Life and want to transfer it to Bitcoins, but even with that, their transaction fees seem a bit much.
Currently, 1 Bitcoin is worth about $92. However, you can do things at small fractions of a Bitcoin. Often transactions are in milliBitcoins or microBitcoins. A milliBitcoin is currently worth about nine cents, and a microBitcoin is currently worth nine thousandths of a cent.
With this microcurrency aspects there are lots of other things that can be done. People are offering milli or microBitcoins for people to visit sites online, and perhaps take some action on the site. skude.se is a site that links to other sites where people can earn small amounts of Bitcoins this way.
For example, there is an affiliate site that if people click on, I'll get a microBitcoin for each link, up to 100 per day. That works out to unto nine tenths of a cent a day. Probably not enough to bother with, but, every little bit can help.
I'm kicking around other ideas that I hope to do with Bitcoins, but right now, I'm waiting for my wallets to synchronize so I can start experimenting moving cash around.
Podcamp WesternMass
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/29/2013 - 08:58Podcamp WesternMass is tomorrow and I've been following some of the discussions about ideas for different sessions. There has been a bit of talk about '101' sessions, introductions to various aspects of social media. I always worry about these sort of sessions, where there is an information based power imbalance; the person leading the session having lots of information, and many of the other participants mostly having questions. I know these sessions are important, but I prefer dialogues between equals, so I haven't stepped up to facilitate a session like this. If I did, I'd probably want to talk about broad based strategy issues. What is your goal or mission? What is your message? What is your audience? Perhaps a little bit of a discussion about metrics and all of it leading back to the ideas of intent and impact.
Intent and Impact are issues that I'm particularly focused on these days. What is your intent when you follow someone on social media? When you retweet them? When you post something of your own? What is your intent when you post or share a political comment or a cute picture? How does this fit into group dynamics and parallel processes between groups? How does it relate to Zeitgeist? I wonder how much other people are thinking about this or are interested in talking about this?
I'm also especially interested in some of the more geeky discussions. My good friend Joe Cascio is going to be talking about Bitcoin. I hope this will be a lively discussion, perhaps tying in other issues like alternative non-dollar based currencies, micropayments, point systems and other rewards, etc. I wonder if anyone else there is playing with Raspberry Pi. I could talk a little bit about that, but it probably wouldn't be a great discussion unless a few other geeky people gathered and we shared ideas and brainstormed about what could be done with Raspberry Pi.
Staying on the geeky thread, I'm interested in augmented reality. I was accepted into ProjectGlass, which means I may be getting a pair of Google Glasses soon. What will I be able to do with these? What else is out there for augmented reality? What else is out there for immersive glasses?
One of the things people talk a lot about with Google Glass is taking pictures and videos. We've seen Instagram take off. What else is happening or coming in digital photography and videography? Anyone playing with Vine? What about creating your own Instagram like filters with Photoshop or Gimp? Are their other video tools people should be looking at?
Here, I'm especially interested in mobile, and I wonder what else is coming in Mobile. What are some cool things people are doing with mobile that I'm missing? Are there tools to encourage creativity? Audio, pictures, video production and editing tools? HDR? Panoramas? 3D photography? New ways of looking at creativity? Anyone playing with SuperColider on Android? (I haven't had a lot of luck with it yet). How about Creatorverse? Ingress?
This gets me to what I think was the most valuable session for me from Podcamp last year. I think it was supposed to be about Evernote. I like Evernote. I'm kicking around Google Keep. I've used Onenote in the past, and I'm wondering if there are things that I can be doing with Onenote at work. I've also been interested in mobile audio note taking. "Note to self" spoken into the cellphone to launch an app that does speech to text note taking. Maybe there will be some discussion about these apps at Podcamp WesternMass.
However, only a couple people showed up at the Evernote session, so we sat around sharing ideas. I learned a lot about Evernote that day, and especially ideas about using IFTTT with Evernote. If you haven't checked out "If This Then That" ifttt.com and your a serious social media person, then you're really missing something.
I guess that gets to what I like best about Podcamps, going to sessions where you discover something unexpected, maybe even as the session goes off topic, and everyone gets engaged in the discussion. Because after all, engagement is a key goal in social media and it should be in Podcamp as well.
So, are you interested in any of these topics? Are there other topics your interested in? Let's build the discussion and momentum going into Podcamp WesternMass.
Creatorverse
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/27/2013 - 20:05I've been pretty swamped with life recently and haven't had as much time to play with technology as I would like. Being a geek, playing with technology is an important form of relaxation. On top of that, I'm very interested in constructivist forms of education.
My daughter, Fiona, loves playing games on her smartphone, and I've been trying to find good geeky, constructivist oriented games, and yesterday, I found one, by happenstance.
Every day, Amazon Appstore gives away certain premium apps for free. Mostly, they are games that I'm not all that interested in, but in some cases, they are pretty interesting. Yesterday, the app was Creatorverse. The title kind of caught my eye. The image for the app looked interesting, but what really caught my attention was that it was by Linden Labs. That's right, the folks who brought you Second Life have an app for Android phones. That was enough to get me to download it.
The interface wasn't intuitive and it took a little while for me to get going. Put simply, Creatorverse allows you to create images where the rules of physics applies to the objects. So far, I've only played with gravity. I create balls which fall, and bounce depending on their density. I've created slows that the balls can roll down. It is fun. Relaxing for a geek, and Fiona, who has been playing a lot of mindcraft recently found it interesting.
I'm glad I downloaded it. As I play with it more, I will figure out how I can share some of my creations. Until then, I'm going to try and catch up on my rest, and maybe relax a little, from time to time, playing with Creatorverse.
