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Books Read in 2012
In the theme of life-logging games from yesterday’s post, here’s all the books I read in 2012, and some I recall reading in 2011. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Dec 22, 2012 Hack / Slash Volume 1: First Cut – Dec 18, 2012 Flex Mentallo – Grant Morrison – Dec 18, 2012 Shake Hands…
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Games of Life
I got my first smartphone, a Nexus S, back in early 2010 when I was living in Cambridge, UK. Impressed by the novelty of the beers there, I started snapping photos of taps and bottles: When I uploaded these to Picasa, I discovered, gloriously, that my phone had been saving location data, and Picasa automatically…
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Manually Clustering 275 Images For Qualitative Analysis
Grounded Theory is a technique for developing a theory about some empirical data you collected. This is in opposition to having some hypotheses in advance, which you will either verify or not. However, if you’re collecting data in an entirely new field, you might not know what hypotheses are important, and the hypotheses you have…
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User Groups and Their Needs
For the course I’m TAing this semester, CSC318: The Design of Interactive Computational Media, the main group project is to develop a contacts/address book application. Part of the design process we get the students to go about is to think of a specific user group and then go do interviews, questionnaires and other investigations to…
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The State of Kinect Gaming
I’ve played almost every Kinect game available, and I have to admit, most of them aren’t very good. There are a few exceptions, which I’ll get to below. The “controller-less” aspect of the Kinect was what brought it so much initial excitement. However, we’re still not good at designing experiences that take advantage of this.…
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Kinect Body Paint – Kinect Workshop @ Pervasive 2012
Look at what I and my team made in a couple hours at the Kinect Workshop (run by David Kim): There are “buckets” of paint on either side of the space. One can grab paint and draw it all over your body and your friends! Only two people can play at a time. “Sorry”. Download…
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Your code doesn’t need to be THAT good
I’m currently crunching to finish a software project. It’s my first time collaborating with a large number of non-co-located people with a shared repository. It’s been interesting and frustrating to manage tasks and larger-scale goals across such a group. One of the problems is that different members have different aesthetic values on what “good” software…
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Test Strip Hero
You know when a compulsively cool idea occurs to you, and you can’t stop yourself from doing it? I’m thinking of playing other parts of the world, too.
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Dustin Freemans of the Internet
My name is relatively rare, but not so rare that I’m in the only one with it. I first became aware that there were other people with my name out in the world when I was 12. I was getting my first bank account so I could be paid for a paper route, and my…
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Truckers 4 Life
I like the artifacts of sub-cultures, by sub-cultures and for sub-cultures. I another one of my many, many transits across the 401, this time from Kingston to Toronto, I can across this wonderful booklet: Over The Road, June 2011 issue. A magazine for and by truckers. It is…fantastic. It’s a little secret window in to…