So back a while I blogged about the Makey Makey. An arduino based bit of kit with the added fun of crocodile clips aimed at making electronics easy and fun for kids.

Well it arrived a while ago and it’s more fun than I expected, and I expected loads of fun.

The set up below kept the two boys entertained for a whole morning working our way through the various games on the cbeebees site. Well, I say the set up below. Over the course of the morning we’d tried just about everything as a button.

The Makey Makey just acts as a keyboard up down left right panel – with a space and return. You hook up those ‘keys’ using the croc clips to anything conductive, and then poke the button with something else that’s conductive. Like your brother, or a cauliflower, or a carrot.

Peppers don’t work very well. Bananas and Carrots are great. Toast only works when it’s got some butter and marmalade on it. People work ok too.

A great way to have fun with electricity, demistify electronics, and get to play games on a saturday morning.

• Cauliflower: accelerator / jump button / fly button
• Tortilla arrows: Left and Right
• Banana: brake

This blog now runs on Statamic – a fine CMS which takes a nodb approach to storage.

It’s a young CMS, so unlike #eecms or #wordpress there aren’t a whole sea of extensions out there. You have to scratch your own itch a lot. That’s part of the fun. At the moment (October 2012) there isn’t any developer documentation for add ons to speak of, so it’s a case of scouring github for examples and working from there to figure out the shape a plugin takes.

I came across my first need to build an addon tonight while playing with the template for this site. I needed an avatar. So I needed a gravatar. So I needed to calculate an md5 from an email address. So I needed an add on. A quick Google for ‘gravatar statamic’ found nothing.

About 15 minutes later and bingo, this little snippet…

{ { gravatamatic:quicky email="{ { contact_email }}" }}

… is producing a perfect gravatar:

" }}

It’s a trivially simple addon – but it shows the simplicity of the Statamic approach that you can go from zero to working implementation in just a few minutes. Relatively little scaffolding nonsense to contend with, and intuitive structure, straight to the point.

The source is up on github, along with the docs if you might find it handy.

ScotlandJS was, I think, the first JavaScript conference in Scotland. It took place on Tuesday 26th July, and was a good day. So one of my usual run throughs. Links are a mix of the speakers twitter, own website, and links they mentioned in the talk.

Peter Cooper

Travelling down on the morning, I missed most of the opening keynote. Peter did a history of the language, and I caught the last ten minutes. Will have to track down the video.

twitter.com/peterc

peterc.org

Philip Roberts

Philip told the story of Shakey – a realtime multiplayer game based on an XML version of Macbeth. The live demo of the game worked pretty well.

It was really interesting to see how using Pusher forced an event driven design process. This focused everyone on the messages being transported from an early point. this approach seems particularly accessible for non technical participants in a project – which I need to test soon!

For the Refresh Aberdeen crowd, Shakey is like a massive ‘zone button challenge’ which cheats and has two buttons. But only two, showing the fun that can be had with a minimal interface.

twitter.com/philip_roberts

blog.latentflip.com

Ryan Sandor Richards

This was a good talk – plenty coverage of an area that I’ve never really looked into unless things got disastrously slow / unresponsive.

A lot of the stack we often work in is outwith our direct control by the time we pull in a stack of libraries – so implementing a lot of this might be tough without some decent refactoring – but this is probably the talk that I’ve spoken about most since Tuesday.

twitter.com/rsandor

fastly.com

Tane Piper

Dnode is something I’ve had a tiny look at in the past and tane’s talk really helped make sense of what we can do with it. I personally find the ‘jump feom keynote to the editor to show the code’ approach to presentation can make it difficult to follow the detail – but Tane did a good job of verbally keeping you hooked into the code. I have a couple of projects in mind for dnode now.

I also love any talk that starts with “this stuff isn’t my job, I just do it for fun”.

twitter.com/tanepiper

tanepiper.com

Leonardo Lanese

RWD, Mobile First and Progressive Enhancement in one talk. Leo gave a good talk. This is the day to day for me, but if you didn’t have a good background on this it gave a good outline of the issues, and a consistent point of view.

twitter.com/leolaneseltd

leolaneseltd.com

James Newbery

Testing JavaScript. This was a good talk, highlighting a couple of new options for testing in JS. Discussing headless browsers, browser less testing etc… Some interesting discussion of BDD and TDD.

twitter.com/froots101

tinnedfruit.com

busterjs.org

Jim Weirich

I could listen to Jim Weirich all day long. Brain the size of a planet. More enthusiastic than Johnny Ball. I’m not even going to try to describe how he made lambda calculus in JavaScript fun (and funny) but track down the video when it appears.

twitter.com/jimweirich

onestepback.org

One more thing…

Aberdeen Javascript Meetup

Off the back of Scotland JS some twitter chat suggested there might be need for Meetup groups in Scotland focussing on JavaScript.

So if you are a JavaScript dev working in Aberdeen / ‘shire get in touch with @refreshaberdeen and we’ll get something sorted out. And we’re talking the full spectrum of JS users – from ‘I use jquery sometimes’ through to ‘my whole back end is in node.js’.

I gave a wee talk on the raspberry pi at techmeetup Aberdeen last night. Thanks to Bruce, James and the sponsors for having me.

My talk very much focussed on the implications of introducing ‘proper’ computers to young people, and giving them access to simple computing from an early age.

My eldest son, Dugald, will be 4 on Sunday. I’m sure that’s well below the target age for the Pi. We’ve had the Pi a few weeks and he can already log on to a linux box. He still gets N and H mixed up sometimes, but he can log onto a linux box.

I was barely able to write a for loop at 14. He has 10 years on me. If he decides to pursue an interest in computing / code he has TEN years on me. By the age of 25 he could have TWENTY years coding under his belt. Get your 10,000 hours? Pah!

The discussion was lively, and I think one comment in particular, about dilbert being ‘diagnosed’ as an engineer, has huge implications.

If every child is given experience of computing, the ones who have an affinity with it will be able to explore, start early, and build an intuitive relationship with the computer. Those that don’t will move on to something else. It’s a nice thought that the Rasp Pi makes it more likely that these kids will experience Linux, Open Source, and the Maker ethic when first experiencing computers – rather than some closed down, dumbed down environment ‘for kids’. I’m looking at you VTech.

Here are my slides from the talk. If the video appears I’ll link it here later.

I’m reading the Geek Manifesto at the moment. It’s an important book, it presents a clear, concise case for the important role evidence based policy making should play in government, why evidence makes geeks happy, and why we should care about policy at all.

It also paints a depressing picture of the mix of backgrounds of the people that rule us, the lack of scientists, the lack of coders, and the general lack of understanding of the scientific method.

How you think is more important than what you think.

Evidence based policy seems simple to me. You try things out, measure results, and do more of the things that work well, less of the things that work less well. Be honest about your objectives, and honest about your assumptions. Be confident in your motives, and accept your ‘mistakes’ as sources of evidence.

It’s what I did in the lab when I studied chemistry, and it’s what I largely do in client work now when delivering web solutions. Learn from your results – both good and bad.

This leads to a direct link between what we do and why we do it.

Without a science background some of this may be inintuitive – but I think the book does a good job of covering the basics of scientific method, evidence first approaches, and the broader scientific / geek attitude to lifes problems.

There are so many important issues where irrationality, religion, knee jerk press and general dogma drive failing policies. A broader belief in an evidence based approach could help solve real problems.

Twitter brought to my attention a project to get a copy of the Geek Manifesto into the hands of every westminster MP. So I signed up and sent a copy off to Malcolm Bruce MP. I really do hope he reads it.

I’m a huge Kickstarter fan, despite the fact that my Rasp Pi looks like it will arrive before the Twine that I backed back in 1987 (actually, I think it was November last year, just feels like it was ‘87).

The Makey Makey looks great fun – we already make stuff with the arduino that the wee lads play with (mainly by scrunching bits of tinfoil into other bits of tinfoil to make things light up / buzz) but this makes the hookup to the screen much easier. And it looks cool. And it has crocodile clips. And look – pacman!

You still have plenty time to back it aswell.

This months Techmeetup was fun – no speakerlist – just a call to the audience to give brief talks about their work, side projects, and general 'stuff'.

Varied topics touching on dynamic typing in C#, personal data, mindblowing bitstring processing and web optimisation.

I gave an introduction to an idea I've been kicking around with a few others, most notably Kevin, to come up with a 'web retreat' inspired by Code Retreat, but taking a broader approach to involve everyone you would expect to find in a web shop / agency. I'll post more on that over the next couple of weeks.

So, now that the cat is out of the bag, if anyone would like to hear more, get involved, take part in our test runs, or just chat about it over coffee do get in touch. I'll be announcing test runs, and the real thing later in the year here, and on the Refresh Aberdeen mailng list. So get on the list to hear more.

And on the topic of techmeetup – it's every third wednesday of the month, announcements etc at Techmeetup.co.uk and on Facebook.

I just found out that the New Scientist has back issues available to read on Google Books – See the list here.

I'm delighted with the cover that was on the shelves when I was born. Delighted beyond belief.

Just to lock it in the blog – we’ve been playing with robots at work, and giving the robots things like twitter accounts and birthday muffins. Lately it’s all gone a bit photoshop. A fuller rolling gallery is available at http://twitter.com/#!/borkbot/media/grid

The eldest wee lad is almost 4. He loves the Octonauts. His favourite two phrases are “I want to do it all by myself” and “we could make one of those”. He likes to be in control.

He is learning his letters in a pretty unstructured, self learning way, where he asks questions about them when they interest him. He understands that letters give access to “stuff” on the iPad / phone / computer when you can’t find an icon or a thumbnail of what you are after.

He types ‘co’ to bring up the ‘octocompass’ on my iPhone because the icon is hard to find. The iPhone search rewards this with a wee icon of the compass. He clicks it. He wins.

The BBC iplayer search is terrible for him.

So yesterday, at the end of an episode, he copies what daddy does – and clicks in the search box. He then starts hunting for letters. He makes a couple of mistakes but he does ok.

This is how the iPlayer search rewards his search for OCTONOTS.

No results. Personally, I think he did pretty ok, I’d let him watch Peso and the crew for that effort. The iPlayer search is just being mean. Like witholding pudding unless he says please.

So please, iPlayer team, make the search a little more forgiving, especially for kids stuff..