People used to shun games now they ‘tion them

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This title People used to shun games now they ‘tion them is something I tweeted to @TheKevinDent when he was riffing on the use of games being referred to as gamification by adding fication to common task was doing. I was joining in identifying that there is a rush towards games being acceptable, yet at the [...]

Unity Networking – Techie info

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I have been diving into Unity3d multiplayer again. Whilst previous attempts I was using a socket server I had ignored the simplicity of the Peer to Peer networking that Unity can do to make life much easier to prototype things.
The way this works is that unity3d provide a broker a.k.a a Master Server which acts as [...]

Join in NOW on government future of ICT plans

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There is currently a government consultation on the future of ICT open to all to comment on. It is here. There is an online form to fill in with just 4 pages.
Any of you concerned with the future of computer science and technology education in the UK really should just fill this in firstly as an [...]

This year will be printed – 2012 fabricaneur

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My journey deeper into the RepRap 3d printers is continuing at a pace. This is good as it is about 14 years since I “quite fancied getting one” but didn’t have a spare £200,000 and the company I worked for couldn’t quite see the point, which at the time was fair enough.
It was in 2006 when [...]

A concerned citizen of the web – SOPA? PIPA? – Blackout time

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Firstly, I do not condone piracy, theft, unfair use of others work. However, I really am concerned that the gains we have made, and continue to make, in human communication online are going to be impacted by laws made in individual influential countries, like the US seeking to restrict some behaviour they regard as wrong.
There will [...]

Car advertising the virtual way – Hyundai Veloster

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Way back in the early days of the web I worked on, amongst other things, the Vauxhall car website. This was on an off for several years (we worked on multiple accounts in the early days). This was around 1997, a time when many of the things we wanted to do were not technically possible, or [...]

The future of tech education – ICT upgrades to open source

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In the final show of Cool Stuff Collective series 3 I put forward my wish for 2012, which actually occurs at 20:12 in the show that ICT in schools needed a revamp (there a few days left before this rotates from the player, I don’t have the rights to youtube it AFIAK yet). Now I am [...]

Another virtuous loop in 3d printing/metaverses

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It is a few years back now that we started to see applications that would print our digital 3d designs form Second Life out into physical form. Now the current king of user generated content in a 3d multi user virtual world toolkit/game (metaverse) – Minecraft, is getting the same treatment.
Eric Haines has created an open [...]

Cory Doctorow warns DRM is just a mini boss to defeat

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It should be no surprise that Cory Doctorow has thought this all through but in his recent presentation at 28c3 he talked about The Coming War on General Computation – The copyright war was just the beginning. What was interesting is that it was based on extrapolating the current war on copy protection, DRM and the [...]

Use the Force (feedback) – Haptic Driving

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For christmas I got the wonderful new Mad Catz Force feedback steering wheel and pedals for the xbox 360. You have to be careful buying steering wheels as many of them just regular controllers, i.e. the haptic feedback from them is merely a rumble.

This wheel (like the discontinued microsoft one before it and along with the [...]