Roo Reynolds

New podcast: Shift Run Stop

2009-11-03T21:15:26Z

I’ve been working with Leila Johnston on a new thing. It’s a fortnightly podcast called Shift Run Stop and as she explains it’s “an ambient soundscape sort of production, an undulation of chatter and noise, ideas, games and food”. Editing it is a lot of fun, as are the weekly recording sessions.

It lives at shiftrunstop.co.uk and in iTunes for your subscribing pleasure. Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Playful ‘09

2009-11-04T20:30:19Z

Playful 09 was great.

I really enjoyed Playful 08 so was delighted to be asked back. Last year I demoed my Rock Band MIDI guitar hack. This year, rather than extend my P5 Glove project into another MIDI instrument, I decided to set myself the challenge of talking about games and films. This was perhaps a little foolish, as I know only a little bit about games and barely anything about films. However, the audience were mercifully forgiving of my ill-prepared nonsense and laughed in all the right places.

In case you missed it, here are my slides, complete with dodgy audio recording of the talk.

Playful 2009 – Roo Reynolds – Games And Films

Thankfully for all concerned, the rest of the day was much better. Here’s some of what happened:

Leila Johnston talked about Enemy of Chaos (“something for the aging nerd market…”).
Kareem Ettouney (Media Molecule Art Director) talked about being a servant rather than a director, and the importance of letting people pursue personal projects.
Daniel Soltis talked about physical computing and games.
Lucy Wurstlin talked about 4iP.
Matt Locke interviewed Robin Burkinshaw about his amazing creation Alice and Kev: the story of being homeless in The Sims 3.
James Bridle not only described but actually showed us a working version of MENACE, Donald Michie’s Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine, a physical computer made of 304 matchboxes. (A similar machine for ‘Go’ would be “about the size of the crab nebula”.) His excellent presentation is now online.
Katy Lindemann showed us how fun and play drive change with some lovely examples (including Vinspired Voicebox, Chore Wars, Didget glucose monitor for DS, Fiat Eco:Drive, Thefuntheory (including the Piano Staircase, Bottle Bank Arcade Machine) and more.
Tassos Stevens talked about cricket.
Russell Davies made us agree the Four Square conventions for London (Parks: in, Outdoor markets: in, Small shops: out, Train stations: in, Tube stations: out, Supermarkets: out, Your home: out) and talked about and prototyped ‘barely games’.
Molly Range talked about the serious games scene in Scandanavia.
Duncan Gough wondered what it would be like to play a game of ‘Kes’ (or ‘The Wire’…), and imagined fictive worlds which are somewhere between fantasy and casual games. He also pointed out the ‘the golden age of children’s story-telling’ (Press Gang, Running Scared) was at a time when broadcasters didn’t keep everything. Where’s the archive of those TV programmes? Lost forever?
Alfie Dennen and Paula Le Dieu talked about Bus-Tops.
Rex Crowle did live scribblings on an Over Head Projetor and talked about selling his flock of sheep to buy an Amiga.
Simon Oliver explained that designing games is hard but you can discover the fun through prototyping.
Tim Wright talked about his Kidmapper project which involved following the route of Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped in real time.
Chris O’Shea finished the day by sharing a portfolio of his work.

A great day with lots to take home and think about. Thanks to Toby Barnes and everyone else at Pixel-Lab for making Playful happen.

More people who have written about it: Suw Charman-Anderson, Leila Johnston, Howard Pull, Adam Davis, Lawrence Chiles, Libby Davy, Daniel Soltis and more, plus the official record: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

‘Enemy of Chaos’ walkthrough

2009-10-04T20:59:39Z

Spoiler alert: when viewed large, this is a complete map and walkthrough of the wonderfully geeky ‘choose your own adventure‘ meets ‘Fighting Fantasy‘ style interactive book/game, Enemy of Chaos by Leila Johnston.

You might have read her previous book, How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People. More recently, Leila’s reading from Enemy of Chaos was one of the forty very interesting things that happened at Interesting 2009. If you were foolish enough to miss that, I hope you’ve at least read Cory Doctorow’s review of the book on Boing Boing.

Earlier this week, Leila was kind enough to give me a copy. I loved it, and within a day I’d decided I absolutely needed to see what a map of every possible path through the book would look like.

I made this using the `dot` renderer from GraphViz, which does all the hard work of drawing the graph and laying it out. The source file only took about 20 minutes to create. I quickly flicked through the book from beginning to end, documenting all the ‘now turn to page x’ choices like so:

digraph g {
  node [ shape = plaintext, fontname = Tahoma ]
  1 -> 166
  1 -> 37
  23 -> 201
  24 -> 48
  24 -> 178
  31 -> 110
  31 -> 191
  // ... (etc)
}

Viewed as a graph, it also acts a walkthrough, revealing the dead ends and the various paths to the final page. It also highlights a few interesting things about the structure:

A six page loop between pages 201 and 23.
A glitch which means page 227 can’t ever be reached except by flicking randomly to it; it’s a reverse dead-end.
There are quite a few ways to reach the end, but a lot more ways not to. It’s very hard to win, and gets increasingly hard towards the end.

Below is the same map, laid out horizontally. As Leila points out, it “looks like a big Romulan ship”, which is quite appropriate for what must be one of the geekiest books of the year.

Recent Reading

2009-10-03T17:57:42Z

Here’s what I read in September:

The Pythons’ Autobiography By The Pythons, Monty Python and Bob McCabe – pulled together by McCabe with care and loving attention to detail. Wonderful to see the personalities revealed via the history, the disagreements and differing perspectives. A rare thing: a top notch autobiography.
The Other Hand, Chris Cleave – the first book I’ve read for a while which I didn’t want to put down. I was instantly hooked (although not, I should mention, but the rather vomitous introduction by the editor) and wanted to eat it all in one go. I then lent it to my wife, who also, one she’d started, read it one day and had to finish it before she went to sleep. ‘Page turner’ isn’t the right term for it, but it begs to be finished and the characters are fascinating, three-dimensional and ambiguous as they get.
Incendiary, Chris Cleave – While it doesn’t quite match The Other Hand, it’s still an intriguing read which makes some interesting (if sometimes blunt) political points. Not quite a post-9/11 Nineteen Eighty-Four, but worth picking up. I will be keeping an eye out for more stuff by Cleave. I hope he gets some film deals too.
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell – Meh. As always with Gladwell, there are a few central point here which can be made quickly, but he manages to labour them into pages of anecdote strews essays without the sense of any real underlying purpose. The essays that are interesting enough, but fail to really make you care. A bit better than Blink. (How’s that for faint praise?)
If it Bleeds, Duncan Campbell – Double meh. Laboured in so many ways. If you like good crime fiction you’ll probably want to avoid it. I wondered, more than once, how many times Campbell was going to use the is-that-my-heart-oh-no-it’s-just-my-mobile-phone-going-off thing.
Catch-22, Joseph Heller – Yay, yay and twice yay. I’d forgotten how good Heller is, at his best. This is it.

P5 Glove – Rock Paper Scissors and other fun

2009-09-26T22:00:06Z

The P5 Glove is a consumer wired glove (tactile but not haptic). I bought one boxed as-new on eBay a while ago for not very much, and I’m glad I did as they now seem to be increasingly hard (and expensive) to get hold of.

It contains five analog bend sensors, 3 buttons plus in theory x, y and z coordinates and yaw, pitch and roll (it emits IR which is picked up by a big USB IR tower so it knows where your hand is in space).

Here’s the P5 Glove intro movie…

I say in theory because while the p5osc Mac drivers handle the bend sensors very well the x/y/z output is jittery and yaw/pitch/roll sadly non-existent.

I’ve been experimenting with bridging the outputs for the buttons, fingers and thumb into MIDI custom controls so that I mess around with them in ControllerMate. Here’s a demo of a simple setup which detects whether each digit is straight or bent, and uses that to determine whether your hand is describing a rock, paper or scissors shape. For now, it just displays ‘Rock’, ‘Paper’ or ‘Scissors’ in large type on the screen but it would be pretty straightforward to turn this into a simple game.

P5 Glove – MIDI Rock Paper Scissors from rooreynolds on Vimeo.

Here’s the ControllerMate patch I made to do it (click through for the annotated version on Flickr).

Lots more fun to be had here with virtual pianos and guitar strings too; arpeggiating the MIDI guitar, for example.

Too Thine Own Self Be True – Keep Wire In Correct Groove, Man

2009-09-17T20:11:28Z

Conway Hall has a couple of iconic photographs that everyone seems to take…

Interesting 2009 – forty even more interesting things

2009-09-15T08:52:41Z

As is becoming traditional (2007, 2008), I’ve made a very brief list of what happened at this year’s Interesting

Tom Loosemore on the race to sail faster than 50 knots.
Jessica Greenwood on why the least interesting things about sport is the score (football, with all its attendant drama, is a $500B industry).
Robert Brook spoke on being a gentleman (by birth, costume or behaviour).
Toby Barnes on a brief history of cheating in video-games (cheating, when it involves other people, is wrong).
Leila Johnston read some snippets from her very funny book, ‘The Enemy of Chaos‘
Cait Hurley talked about Arthur Jefferson (Stan Laurel’s dad and an awesome guy).
Alby Reid told us that everything we knew about nuclear power was wrong (How many people died as a result of Chernobyl? 56.)
Katy Lindemann enthused about robots (Tweenbots are especially adorable).
The very cute Bubblino made an appearance on stage (blowing bubbles across the stage every time ‘interesting’ was mentioned on twitter).
Dominic Tinley explained why we don’t see the colour violet on our computers and cameras, as well as what Radio 4 would look like if we could see sound.
Andy Huntington took us on a tour of keyboard instruments and explained ‘equal temperament’.
Alice Taylor talked about ‘merchants vs craftants’ (give some love back to the crafters).
Tim Duckett kindly taught us morse code in 10 minutes. For example: Z = Zinc Zoo kee-per = - – . .
Michal Migurski talked about maps and paper and a much-photocopied intersection map of San Francisco (paper wiki).
Josie Fraser talked about psychological violence in UK 1970s and 80s girls comics (’it can be dangerous to mock a monkey’).
Dan Maier talked about Sir Francis Galton (I now really want to read Galton’s book ‘The Art of Travel‘, and to a lesser extent his thoughts on ‘Africa for the Chinese’ (”one of the 5 most racist things I’ve ever read”, according to Dan) and ‘Arithmetic by Smell‘).
Asi Sharabi showed us 6-8 year old children’s ideas of interestingness (which centered around technology, friends, motors and animals).
Meg Pickard taught us about drinking rituals and associated customs (toast, cheers, your good health, chin chin, rule of thumb).
Alex Deschamps-Sonsino got us to make a very complicated origami box.
Tuur Van Balen talked about yoghurt and DNA synthesis (”I’ve never done bio-technology under such time pressure!”)
Jon Gisby taught us how to conduct a symphony orchestra (”It’s like riding a horse at speed; fun, but with a significant risk of abject and public failure”).
Jessica Bigarel discussed, and beautifully presented, her meta meta data data (capturing each flight of stairs travelled up or down was “an arduous dataset and it was very disruptive to my life”).
Craig Smith talked about his dad (”he sharpens a drill bit better than any man in Huddersfield”) and showed us the types of water wheels (under shot, breast shot, over shot and pitch back).
Tom Fishburne talked about innovation and cartoons.
Anab Jain talked about her Indian superpowers.
Naomi Alderman talked about greek tragedy and goats.
Gavin Bell talked about the writing of his new ‘Social Web Applications’ book (wifi is a blessing and a curse).
Emma Marsland shared the ponies she has loved, real and imagined, from since 1970
Nick Hand shared his ongoing journey around the coast of mainland Britain (5000 miles in 100 days).
We heard about the ‘BIL‘ unconference in Oxford next summer (BIL is to TED as Bar camp is to Foo camp).
Mark Earls and his Darwinian Display Team demonstrated random drift.
Robert Thomas demonstrated RjDj (’Music as Software’).
Gem Spear talked about electric trains and underground creeks (GM’s inglorious part in killing off the inter-urban railway systems in the US, and a rather nice discussion of running surface runoff water through gardens rather then through underground culverts).
Paul Hammond showed us how to win at Monopoly (if you can buy it, buy it; trade up to a full colour group asap; go for the oranges (stats!); unless it’s early in the game, stay in jail; create a housing shortage; don’t play house rules, as they’ll only make the game take too long; don’t play it at all, it’s a rubbish game. Instead, play German board games, which are not all German and not all board games).
David Smith gave a touching and powerful talk about teaching (you can’t teach children well unless you love children).
Richard Reynolds mentioned his Guerilla Gardening book and told a lovely story about planting sunflowers opposite Parliament.
We watched Jim Le Fevre’s beautiful astrotagging film.
Claire Margetts told us about the ‘Do’ lectures.
Matt Ward showed us why frivolity is important by showing his plans for watching a bullet reach the top of its trajectory (”Understanding comes through doing”).
Dan Germain talked about sunsets (”basically, when the sun disappears”, by which time it has apparently already happened) and asked why we persist in taking bad photos of them, pondering whether it’s because they remind us of death).

Another great job from Russell. Three years in a row, Interesting continues to live up to its name.

EZi Entertainment Zone

2009-09-06T01:15:41Z

Simon Lumb recently spotted an amazing(ly bad) looking games console in a motorway service station which, shall we say, borrows heavily from the design of of the Wii.

I couldn’t resist trying it for myself, and picked one up on eBay for a little bit less than £20 including delivery. Quite a bit less than the RRP you’ll see quoted in some places online. A games console, complete with 87 games, for £20. Bargain. Right? Well, almost.

Observations:

The graphics are sub-SNES quality and many of the games are barely playable. The knock-off design is laughable and the bargain basement price reveals itself at every opportunity.
The two stick controllers each include four red flashing lights at the bottom, a-la the blue lights on the Wiimote, but these ones don’t do anything except flash irritatingly and constantly.
The stick controllers do include a very crude motion control. Certainly nothing like the Wiimote of course, but simply a basic (and flaky) movement detection, presumably through something like a mercury tilt switch. It just about works for the Tennis and Pingpong games but it it painful in the extreme for any of the others, especially baseball and golf where it’s practically unusable. You can turn ’sport’ mode off to disable the motion control and use the buttons instead (or just use the other game controller which you only get one of but is a much better bet for most of the games).

I have not tried all 87 games yet, but here are some highlights

Tennis

Bowling

Little Indian

While many of the other games I’ve tried so far have been predictably awful, other have turned out to be quite playable in a retro generation-before-last sort of way. Especially with the volume muted. The quality of the (18) games on the sports cartridge, while still quite mixed, is markedly higher than the (69) games on the arcade cartridge.

Some of the names are amazing. How can you not love a console that ships with titles including Cross Strert, Assart, Aimless, Polk, Grot Kid, Knocking, Ramming, Fish Journey and Girl.

I’ll try to continue to capture and review more of the games in detail. Rather than do it here, I’ve started an owners wiki where I’ve begun to document the EZi’s various games and hardware. It already includes the photos and videos used above, plus Pingpong, Boxing and others, and I’m sure it will grow as I (and others?) add more. I do hope anyone else who is brave/mad/foolish enough to buy an EZi Entertainment Zone will join me there.

Recent Reading

2009-09-05T21:14:02Z

The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith – easily the best and least irritating Zadie Smith book ever. Hated White Teeth? Try this one.
Choke, Chuck Palahniuk – dark, disturbing and funny in that way that Chuck Palahniuk (and, in their own way, Irvine Welsh and Iain Banks) can sometimes be.
Dead Air, Iain Banks – reread it again, mainly for the very-tense-can’t-possibly-put-it-down bit about 2/3 through. You know, when he’s got to do that thing wearing the gloves. Brilliant!
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, Mil Millington – Very very funny book. You should read it. (Apparently I last did so in December 2007 and it was a pleasure to do so again.) You should really also read his searingly funny website which pre-dates the book.
Love and Other Near Death Experiences, Mil Millington – nearly as funny as the other one. (And it seems I last read this one on a trip to San Francisco in December 2006. I knew blogging my reading habits would be good for something.)

MIDIguitar patch

2009-08-30T00:20:08Z

Remember the Rock Band / Guitar Hero MIDI guitar thing I made? I have not fiddled with it much since I presented at Playful 08.

However, since a few people have asked me for it, here’s the current version of the ControllerMate patch which contains two versions; one for Rock Band (Harmonix) Xbox guitars and one for Guitar Hero (Red Octane X-Plorer Controller) Xbox guitars.

You’ll need ControllerMate to use it of course, but more importantly you’ll need the MIDI-enabled version (which means you’ll need a registered copy) but honestly, once I’d tried ControllerMate I knew the MIDI addition was well worth the $15.

Enjoy, and do let me know if you make any interesting modifications.

Things that might help you get started: