My earliest experiences of computers were as them being tools of creativity, and that's framed my use of them ever since. The BBC Micro didn't really do much unless you gave it fairly comprehensive instructions. Sure, they could be used to play pre-bought games, but in the very early days the thing came with a … Continue reading The tools of mass creation
Category: Themes
There are a few scenes from the movies that have, unwittingly, become the archetypes for technologies of the "future", even though the movies themselves are decades old and the future is still to be equally distributed: Holographic video - the Princess Leah "Help us Obi Wan" projection at the beginning of Star Wars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIFJLMyUwrg Wave … Continue reading Cinematic Archetypes and achieving AI
And so after a fortnight in flip-flops, it's back to work. A few observations... It's increasingly disconcerting to live in a world without high-speed Internet. The villa where were spent our holiday had broadband glitches for some of the time we were there, and it really brought home how much we rely on reliable connectivity. … Continue reading The remarkably unglobal Internet
It's all change in Government technology circles. The various changes that have happened at the top of the Government Digital Service and elsewhere in recent days signify something, although I'm not entirely sure what. Derek du Preez makes a good stab of it here. All this change got me thinking. For a while now I've been … Continue reading Change leadership
After last week's tinkering with making an interactive digital world out of reality, this week I've had a bit of time looking at how to create 3D models that can be viewed using a Virtual Reality headset. To start off, I've got three potential target VR environments. The cheapest is the Google Cardboard viewer, a … Continue reading Further adventures in VR Land
360 degree photography is a thing these days. Increasingly you'll see photos on places like Facebook that enable you to pan and zoom around to explore. You can then combine these spherical photos to create clickable "walkthroughs". It's even then possible to view these walkthroughs in a 3D Virtual Reality headset like Google Cardboard or … Continue reading Creating immersive walkthroughs
It's a question I'm being asked a fair bit at the moment and for the legal-minded folk I'm working with a great deal at the moment, this is how I respond... Machine Learning is really interesting. It's being applied to all sorts of problems where traditional models of programming have fallen short. It's mostly based … Continue reading Where can I use machine learning?
There's a lot of hype in the world at the moment about how algorithms are taking over the world. "Algorithms" is a posh word for equations. There's a lot of hype in the world at the moment about how machine learning is taking over the world. "Machine learning" is one of those things that is … Continue reading Algorithms my arse
Throughout my career it's struck me that technology has provided two forms of service: the dull stuff and the fun stuff. The dull stuff are the information systems, the databases, the business process automations. Generally the things that treat humans as little more than data and processing modules from whom information is to be extracted … Continue reading The art of play
It's been a funny day. I'm not sure what to think. As I wrote recently, I regard myself as a Londoner and a European. This morning it felt as if a part of my identity was removed from me. Things will work out. They always do. But it doesn't feel to be a world that … Continue reading Weeknote 294: bereft
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