Mighty Toast ^beta

Me and my sister (an artist and documentary film maker, see www.lenkaclayton.co.uk) spent an fun saturday building a ridiculous hat for a 'mad hatter's hat contest' in a nearby community festival.  We decided to build a super-tall recreation of the spire of Berlin's Fernsehturm TV tower, complete with flashing lights to ward off oncoming aircraft (cycle rear lights sellotaped to the spire).  Despite virtually everyone everyone else who entered being more than 20 years younger than us we still managed to walk away with a prize for 'most bizarre hat'.  Hurrah! 

Freecycle is a really useful online community which aims to try and reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfill. Essentially it's a yahoo group, where people post messages offering, for free, items that they don't want anymore. Other people then reply to these posts, and arrange times to come and pick them up. There are dozens of online groups around the country, but we've used the bristol group.

My boss came up to me a few weeks ago and say, "Hey you're a skiing man, aren't you? Do you fancy being flown off to a ski resort to build a game to present to a bunch of female lifestyle and fashion journalists?". My answer of course, was "YES PLEASE!!"

Fishtank! is a fun little side technology demo I worked on as part of my job at HP Labs Bristol working on the mscape project.

The way it worked was that each delegate at the recent mscape fest 2007 conference carried a 2d barcode on their identity badge. You could then use one of the ipaq 6815 devices to scan the 2d barcode and choose a fish type, and a fish with that person's name appeared in a digital fishtank on a large-screen plasma display in the refreshment 'n' networking area of the conference. You could also feed the fish - which caused them to grow in size, or, by scanning a barcode again poison or 'lurve' the fish.

I have finally got around to building a new website for my own stuff. I was planning on just sticking together a bunch of pre-built components to create the site but I ended up actually writing a lot of it myself.

Having said that, I did make use of a number of open-source and creative commons pieces of media and code.

• The layout of this page was based on a modified version of the 'terrafirma' layout by NodeThirtyThree. You can see and download the original version here.
• The gallery engine uses Plogger - a great free gallery engine where you can easily upload and arrange your pictures into collections and albums.
• A few icons dotted about the site were taken from the free 'silk' icon set created by famfamfam
• The flash audio player object (as used in the Elastic Audio page) is part of the Flash Audio Wordpress plugin by 1PixelOut.
• The admin pages I wrote in PHP (which you cannot see!) use the fantastic TinyMCE javascript WYSIWYG text editor.
  

The rest of the site is written in PHP and uses a MySql backend. Right now things are still a little rough, but I hope to tidy it all up in the days and months to come.

Cheers!
Ben