Buzzword Overload

Web Tools For Plymouth – Now What?

edward — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:05:39 +0000

I recent gave a talk to the Devon Social Media Cafe about how we can use social media tools and web apps to improve our city . We had a good discussion about the tools we already use, tools we could start using and some of the issues to do with them, so this post is part of a series bringing that talk and and discussion out to the wider community.

So post your thoughts in the comments, get a conversation going and hopefully we’ll be able to come out with some concrete ways we can help Plymouth as a city.

first off, take a quick look at the first 2 posts in this series, which are examples of the kind of tools I’m talking about

What tools should we be using, or using better?

Do you have any examples of tools that work well that we should be using?

What have other cities done that’s worked for them?

What tools don’t exist that you would love to see?

How do we get people using the tools?

In the discussion at #dmsc, we concluded that while there are a lot of useful tools out there, most people don’t use them simply because they don’t know about them or don’t understand how to use them-

So how should we solve that?

Should there be a group running workshops for the general public on these tools or should it go into the existing IT education systems?

Should it be down to the council to choose, develop and promote useful tools or should we figure out ways of spreading tools with word of mouth?

Where should this fit in with the #loveplymouth social media stratagy?

Web Tools For Plymouth- Resource Sharing

edward — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:03:41 +0000

I gave a talk to the Devon Social Media Cafe about how we can use social media tools and web apps to improve our city, here are some of the tools I talked about in case you haven’t seen them:

FreeCycle

Freecycle is a recycling site where people with stuff they don’t need any more with people who need it so that we don’t have to throw quite so much away and don’t have so many fly-tipped TVs cluttering up alley ways.

so if you buy a new sofa and need rid of the old one, or you’ve decided to give up fishing and want to pass on your gear to someone who’ll use it, freecycle will hook you up with someone who needs it and can come pick it up off you.

It’s free to use and has about 3000 members, so there’s plenty going on there.

Devon Car Share

Our roads are chock a block with traffic every rush hour and anyone who has to drive to work is feeling the strain of rising petrol costs, so devon car share is a site which helps people set up car shares- if someone is already driving the same route as you every morning, it’s much cheaper to either hitch a lift with then, or let them hitch with you and split the cost of petrol.

Less cars on the road, money saved for everyone- check it out if your morning commute is getting to you.

IdleLibrary.com

Idle Library is my own recently launched project- It’s a way of effectively running your own library between you and your friends using the books sitting on your shelf gathering. You list the books you own and don’t mind your friends borrowing and idle library will keep track of who has borrowed what and send requests when one of your friends wants to borrow something and then reminders to return books until they give you it back.

I’m trying to use Plymouth as the first city it runs in, so it would be very cool to see plymouth people sharing their books, so sign up today.

Fon

It would be great if Plymouth had free, city wide wifi and the Fon project possibly has a way of making that happen.

With Fon, anyone who shares their home broadband connection to other Fon users gets to use the broadband of those other Fon users in return. Fon gives you a free wifi access point which handles the security and network setup, so you don’t have to worry about it.

So if everyone in the city used Fon, every inch of the city would be covered in a free wifi network

Have you got any other tools Plymouth people would find useful? Post them in the comments!

Web tools for plymouth – Communication Tools

edward — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:03:15 +0000

I gave a talk to the Devon Social Media Cafe about how we can use social media tools and web apps to improve our city, here are some of the tools I talked about in case you haven’t seen them:

#Plymouth twitter search

If you’re new to twitter or haven’t tried it before, hashtags like #plymouth search all of twitter for what people are saying about plymouth.

It’s great for finding out about events and local news in the city, to keep an eye on what peoples opinions on things and it’s a place where you can ask questions and have disscussions with the people of plymouth in a quick and easy way.

What Do they Know

Freedom of information requests let you ask government organisations such as the local council for information about them, for example questions about their budget or how they run their organisation.

whatdotheyknow.com is a mysociety project so that makes it easier to send FOI requests and also to put the replies in public where everyone can see them.

Why is this neat? Because if someone asks the council an interesting question, they’re legally required to respond (within certain conditions) and their answer is up for everyone to see.

for example, how much did plymouth council spend on postively plymouth branding: here’s the FOI request and response.

They Work For you

www.theyworkforyou.com keeps track of what your MP is doing in parliament- You give it your postcode and it will find out who your representative is and searches government data such as hansard to:

link to speeches they’ve given and questions they’ve asked in parliament
their voting record and how often they follow against the party whip
you can send them a message via the site so you don’t need to search for their contact details yourself
it even provides some details of their sponsors and shareholdings so you can see if they’re likely to have a conflict of interest

WikiTravel

Wikitravel takes the wikipedia model and applies it to building a global travel guide written by the locals.

Plymouth is unlikely to get it’s own copy of Lonely Planet any time soon, but because anyone can edit the wiki, if you live in Plymouth, you can sign up to the wiki and add suggestions for tourist attractions to visit, details on how to get here and plymouth culture.

The easier it is for potential visitors to find out about interesting things in plymouth and the details they need to organise the trip, the bigger the tourist economy will get and there’ll be more money and opportunities flowing into the city.

Have you got any other tools Plymouth people would find useful? Post them in the comments!

Plymouth Geeks: Laptop Lan Party in the park (21st May 2011)

edward — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:57:37 +0000

It’s almost summer, so who wants to be stuck inside playing video games when it’s sunny out?
So how about we bring the games out in the sun?

Meet us in the park with a fully charged laptop and some picnic grub, load up some multiplayer games and we can while away a relaxing summers day fragging eachother back to the stone age

interested? here’s the important details:

first off, yes, this is a ridiculous and almost entirely pointless plan.
We’ll be in Beaumont Park from 1pm to 4pm on saturday the 21st of may
We’ll be setting up a wifi network and running open source games that don’t require a hardcore gaming machine, so as long as your laptop can handle wifi, quake 3 or a megadrive emulator and has an hours battery life, it’ll do. If you have a mouse, spare batteries, a UPS, bring that too.
for the love of cthulu, *BE ON TIME*. We’ll only have an hour or two of battery life, so if you turn up 2 hours late, you’ll have no one to play with.
bring picnic stuff and feel free to bring non computer games. DS, PSP, board games, roleplaying
there’s a facebook event here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207761365930976

any questions, post a comment…

Idle Library- at last it lives!

edward — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:52:30 +0000

I’ve been working on Idlelibrary on and off for over a year now, so it’s about time it gets thrown out to the public and actually used

What is IdleLibrary?

It’s a book sharing site, for people who love their books and want other people to enjoy them too and for people who love libraries, but can’t find books they want.

The idea is that you put up whatever books you’re comfortable with your friends borrowing, then you can see what books eachother has and if you want to borrow something, idlelibrary tracks who you’ve lent what to and sends you reminders to return books you’ve borrowed.

It’s up to you who you lend books to, so you can lend books just to your friends or to anyone at all.

It’s still somewhat in development, so let me know what you think, what kind of improvements could be made and if you come across any bugs, tell me so I can fix them

http://www.idlelibrary.com/

My computer is broken, what do I do?

edward — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 22:39:00 +0000

My cousin/housemate/whatever is good with computers, I’ll just ask him!

For every geek, every return home for Christmas, thanksgiving and family reunion starts the same way-”its good to see you again! By the way, when you’ve got a minute, the computer’s playing up again”. We tend to be nice people, so when someone asks us for help, we’ll usually oblige and usually without any expectation of a reward, but normal people don’t seem to realise how much time being “good with computers” can take up in doing free tech support. Some “computer guys” charge their clients £50 an hour for the same services they provide you for free…

So what should I do if I need something fixed?

Stop, pay attention and think.

If you get an error message, read it and try and understand it. if necessary look up the technical words. Yes computers can be scary, but to be honest most of the time its just people people think “ahh, this is too complicated for me to understand” instead of spending 30 seconds thinking.

Check the basics.

If I had a penny of every time I’d spent half an hour trying to work out why something wasn’t working only to realise the cable was sitting on the shelf, I’d have…un…lots of pennies. Check the cables are plugged in, the blinky lights are blinking, settings are actually set.

If it used to work, what changed?

if it worked before, chances are something has changed in the meantime. If you can find out what that is, theres a good chane you can fix it. Sometimes the change is that your power supply is on fire. This is a bad thing. Have you installed anything new, changed any settings or are you doing something in a different way than normal?

Read the manual (or better yet, the internet)

Everything comes with a manual or a help file. This is then immediately ignored and is usually on read as a last resort when praying doesn’t seem to be helping. Shockingly however, the manual tend to have useful information in it, especially when something does something unconventional or unintuitive.
The alternative to the manual is the internet. A simple google search for what you’re trying to do (eg: “set up wifi in windows” or “password protect a word document”) will usually return a bunch of tutorials that will show you step by step how to do it.

Isolate the problem

Computers are made up of lots of bits plugged together to do something neat. If one bit stops working, the neat thing never happens. Check the simplest things first, then work down the chain until you find the bit that doesn’t work.
So for example, if you can’t look up a website, first check if you can view other websites. If you can, then its just that site thats broken. If you can’t, check if anything else on the computer can use the internet, like email or msn. If they work, then its just your browser broken. If they don’t then its the whole computer. So then check if the other computers in the house can get on the internet. If they can, then its just your computer thats dodgy. If they can’t then its the whole internet thats up the spout.
Do this for as many different parts as you can think of until you’ve narrowed it and you’ll at least be able to google for the problem easier, if not fix it outright.

Ok, thinking sounds like too much effort, isn’t there an easier way?

Learn the voodoo

Try turning it off an on again. Computers have so many complicated bits going on at once, sometimes something goes a bit wobbly. Turning it off and on again makes it start everything from scratch and theres a good chance the wobblyness will get tidied away.
For some hardware problems, switching it off and leaving it for a few minutes can help. Sometimes computers get too hot or a few other bits of voodoo happen that can take a while to return to normal.

Google is your friend!

If you get an error message that makes no sense, type it into google and see what comes up. Chances are a hundred people before you have had the same problem and some of them will have had the foresight to write it down for you.

I’ve tried all that, I still can’t make it work! If only there was someone who was good with computers…

I never said you couldn’t ask us to help you, just that you should appreciate that you’re asking someone to give up their valuable time for free. Hopefully if you’ve done all this and tried to fix it you’ll be able to gve us a better idea of whats wrong so we can fix it for you faster and if they know you’ve made an effort for yourself they’ll know its something you actually need help with instead of just being lazy.

ps. if you’re a geek and have any suggestions to add to this, put in a comment or send me an email!

(This is a repost of a blog post on my previous and long dead blog, so you may have seen this before, but I figured it’s still worth having up somewhere)

Using Justgiving.com to build cunning fundraising web apps

edward — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:24:20 +0000

The internet has massive potential for cunning new ways of fundraising, but the fine details can make it painfully complicated. Paperwork, handling the cash, processing gift aid can make for a headache, which is why companies such as www.justgiving.com are so successful by making those headaches go away by doing it all for you.

And now they have an api that lets you integrate most aspects of their process into your site: apimanagement.justgiving.com

As an example of what kind of things you can build with it, for the Plymouth Twestival and to raise funds for the Chestnut Appeal, we built a votes application to let the public decide on whether the organising team had to take forfeits:

http://plymtwest.org.uk/corsetboy/

How Does it Work?

First we had a normal justgiving fundraising page already set up:

http://www.justgiving.com/twestival-plymouth/

Then to make a donation to that page that your application can keep track of, use the justgiving documentation to create a custom donation url, eg:

http://www.justgiving.com/donation/sponsor/page/2979285?amount=2&exitUrl=http%3a%2f%2fmysite.com%2fhandledonations.php&donationId=JUSTGIVING-DONATION-ID

then once the user goes through the donation process, they’ll get returned to

 mysite.com/handledonations.php?donationId=12345

the donation id can then be queried against the REST api to check how much the user actually donated, whether it went through etc.

From there, it’s up to you how you use that information in your application, eg:

unlock cheat codes in a game in exchange for a donation
allow the user to download an ebook or give permission to access a members only section of the site
basically anything you could normally use a conventional payment system for

In our case, we posed a poll question and kept track of how much was donated to each option, then whichever answer had the most donations won the poll.

With donation values and donor messages stored in a database, it was easy to display charts, totals, message lists etc. like any other app.

Anything Else?

The justgiving api can do quite a few more things like creating and querying users and fundrasing pages and it’s even got a sandbox testing version so you can test that your donation processing is working without having to use real money.

It does have limitations on what you can do with it, which is effectively the same as what you can do as a normal fundraiser (eg: no gambling, nothing illegal etc.)

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to post them in the comments, otherwise check out justgiving and come up with a cunning way of raising funds yourself

Swearjar

edward — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:55:40 +0000

Swearjar was built for the London 2010 Charity Hack, but I figure I ought to post it here for posterity.

It’s a prototype of an online/mobile version of the traditional swear jar, back with the missionfish hosted donations API to handle the donation side of things:

http://buzzwordoverload.co.uk/swearjar/

Someday it may actually get turned into something useful, but turning it from a prototype into a full app will have to wait until I have some free time.

Hide and Follow Sound game prototype

edward — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:43:52 +0000

Another experimental game mechanic I’ve demo’d a few times is following around a sound using directional audio, check out the full post to give it a go:

A sound based game in flash

This is more of a proof of concept than an actual game, but it’s entertaining for at least 30 seconds.

Player one (blue bar) uses A and S keys to move left and right.

player two (red bar) needs to put on stereo headphones, close their eyes and controls their player with the left and right arrow keys.

The idea is that player two can’t see where player one is, but that can hear the sound that they give off and try and chase them around, while player one tries to stay away.

Aargh Zombies (game prototype)

edward — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 13:55:30 +0000

I’ve been working on a few sound based games lately and will publish a few of the prototypes and experiements up here for people to check out, give feedback and maybe learn from.

The first one is a zombie game, which some of you might have seen demo’d at the extended play meetup, click through to the full post to fire it up.

A zombie flash game done in pure audio

It’s still a work in progress and needs better quality sounds etc, but if you’ve got any feedback, put them in the comments

credits:

“Zombie In Pain” Creative commons licened by Mike Koenig (http://soundbible.com/1033-Zombie-In-Pain.html)
“Metal Clang” Creative commons licened by Mike Koenig (http://soundbible.com/1217-Metal-Clang.html)
“Mummy Zombie Sound” Creative commons licened by Mike Koenig (http://soundbible.com/1059-Mummy-Zombie.html)
“Bounce” Creative commons licened by Mike Koenig (http://soundbible.com/1120-Bounce.html)
“footsteps” Creative commons licened by Mike Koenig (http://soundbible.com/911-Footsteps.html)
“nighttime” Creative commons licened by Mike Koenig (http://soundbible.com/951-Nightime.html)