Big Kids Did It - Mark McAulay and his Blog

Open Knowledge Network 5th December 2008

As several people have now asked about this, I thought i'd just blog it!

The first Open Knowledge Network event is being announced for Friday 5th December 2008 at Peacock Visual Arts from 6.30pm until late.

The confirmed list of speakers and topics for this event is as follows:

• Adam Proctor - Animation using After Effects
• Sean Delaney - Developing Air Applications
• Scott Couper - Developing for the Mobile Web
• Joe Howe - Making the 'Joemus' Album using Cubase
• Claire Singer and Jack Keenan - An Introduction to MaxMSP

And yes, the Open Knowledge Network does/will have it's own website. The site is in production and will be announced as soon as it's available. We are very eager to hear peoples ideas/functionality etc for the ongoing design and development of this website and encourage you to let us know.

Read the official announcement on the Peacock website

...and for those of you staring blankly at your screens right now, here is a brief intro to the Open Knowledge Network:

The Open Knowledge Network is a free event aiming to bring together the many disciplines found in the creative/digital/technology industy by means of "show and tell" sessions, presentations on various disciplines and general networking with a laid back atmosphere. Developed by Peacock Visual Arts in partnership with East Coast Interactive, the aim is to promote the creative/digi/tech industry and investigate the many cross overs between disciplines that you may not know exist. A series of mini presentations by people specialist in their respective areas, on many subjects gives way later on to a networking session. The whole event will reveal an interesting overview of what is currently happening in the industry both localy and further afield.

To be as relevant to it's attendees as possible, we have a unique method of both registration and for selecting topics/speakers at each event. We are asking each and every person what they do, what they would like to learn more about and if they would like to do a mini presentation on their craft. This ensures the needs of the people are firmly addressed.

Also of note is that if a particular lineup doesn't appeal to you and you'd rather not sit through a few presentations on things you dont have much interest in, the networking session which follows is not to be missed, there will be music, screenings, geek chat and drinking involved, all with people who you probably want to speak to.

Held at Peacock Visual Arts on a regular basis, this promises to be a very worthwhile and enjoyable event. see you there.

ﾠ

3 comments - Posted by mark at 8:56 AM - Categories: Meetup | East Coast Interactive

connect my iPhone to Orange Livebox

wow, this one had me stumped for some time... every time I punched in the wpa code it would fail, regardless of whether I'd used lower case or all caps...as it turns out, you need to make sure that every letter is a capital but that's not all that's needed.

NOTE: I dont know if this is the right way/best way to do this but it got me connected, feel free to comment if you have anything to add.

1. first things first, press "1" on the side of the Livebox to put it into pairing mode.
2. in the iPhone, I selected "Settings > Wi-Fi", my livebox was in the list and I pressed the blue arrow to the right.
3. pressed the "Static" button under the ipaddress header and punched in the ip address and Subnet Mask(which I found in my livebox admin at 192.168.1.1)
4. pressed the "DHCP" button (in the same row as the "Static" button)
5. when requested, I added the WPA code remembering that it's case sensitive so ALL CAPS
6. ...and I was away...all working fine for me now

2 comments - Posted by mark at 12:06 AM - Categories: General

Future Aberdeen Meetups

Last night we had the second Aberdeen web meetup with a slightly larger attendance than the first so that's progress!

Talking of progress, we made a bit of an announcement last night about the future of the meetups which I for one am quite excited about. My long term beer assosciation with Jack Keenan from Peacock Visual Arts has now produced something special. Jack, and Peacock have been considering holding a tech/media/creative event and so it was only a matter of time before we rammed the two together. Last night we announced the format and regularity of the meetup and I have to say it was well received by those who'd turned up for the web event.

The new meetups will be held at peacock, will cover a much larger range of geekery and creativity and will (hopefully!) run once a month. We are aiming to bring in guest speakers and hope to grow links with groups accross the UK. This is a huge step forward for our little meetup which is only two events in but I think shows the hunger for this kind of meetup in Aberdeen. We are also building a website for the meetup and will release more details when we have something to show you all.

I encourage everyone involved in the digital/tech/creative industry localy to come along. We're all very excited about it!

Oh and for the record, the excuse "I'm baking a cake" will not be considered a valid reason to not attend...not now, not ever.

2 comments - Posted by mark at 9:47 AM - Categories: Meetup

bookmark to delicious from your iPhone

I had been using the slightly dodgy method of emailing links to myself from mobile safari and then adding them to delicious when I got back in front of a "proper browser" until I discovered that it needn't be this way...Safari on the iPhone can synch your bookmarks with Safari or with IE on the computer you use to synch with, and seeing as how I'd already set up a "bookmark to delicious" link in my bookmarks toolbar it would make sense that this could also be available to Safari on my iPhone...and it can be!

Here's how:

1. If you haven't got the delicious bookmarklets set up yet, log into your delicious account and navigate to "help".
   
2. Nearly half way down the page you'll see "Bookmarking buttons and add-ons for your browser or website", click on that.
   
3. Select theﾠ3rd option downﾠ"bookmarklet buttons for any browser"
   
4. Choose the instructions for safari or IE (basicallyﾠyou'll need to synch one of them)
   
5. Now, with your iPhone plugged in, in iTunes select the "info" tab for your iPhone
   
6. Scroll down to the "Web Browser" section and select the browser you added the delicious bookmarklets to
   
7. Synch your iPhone
   

Thats it!, now when you're viewing a site on your iPhone that you want to bookmark, select "Bookmarks>Bookmarks Bar>Bookmark on Delicious" and you get the same tagging options you would if you were on your main browser.ﾠI should probably note that I've not tested this with IE but safari works fine.

0 comments - Posted by mark at 9:59 AM - Categories: General | Resources

Second Aberdeen Web Meetup

Just a quick post to say that the second Aberdeen "Web Types" Meetup will be going ahead at 6pm on Friday 17th October 2008 at The Globe on North Silver Street.

This meetup will have a bit of an announcement/pitch going on as although it's only the second meetup, I have recently had a discussion with another organisation about the future of this particular meetup. I promise you it's all VERY positive and if you want to know more, you know where to be!

It would be great to see anyone in or around the industry coming along, the feedback from the first meetup was great and I hope this one will be even larger in numbers.

3 comments - Posted by mark at 8:43 AM - Categories: Meetup

Online Business Card Designer is go

0 comments - Posted by mark at 8:42 AM - Categories: Launches

Browser vs Photoshop Mockups

I recently read this post and it gave me the urge to post my thoughts on something I've been mulling over for some time in my web design/development career. The value of building website mockups in Photoshop. At work I'll take it on a case by case basis as to if I really need/want to mockup the site design in Photoshop before breaking out the XHTML/CSS. For the past several years I have more and more gone straight to writing the markup after making a few initial sketches. Some clients specifically ask for Photoshop mockups but I'm wondering if we should be guiding clients down the road of having browser based mockups only....here's what i'm thinking:

I work as quickly in the markup as I do in Photoshop and therefore the time I spend aiming for a browser based mockup is not wasted.

Read more...

2 comments - Posted by mark at 11:06 PM - Categories: General