@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

amcewen

@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk

Founder of https://social.mcqn.com/@MCQN_Ltd. Creator of Bubblino. Co-founder of https://does.social/@DoESLiverpool. Author of Designing the Internet Of Things. Tech at https://social.mcqn.com/@museuminabox. Ramblings on #IoT, #bikes, #urbanism and #Liverpool

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CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

It’s happening!

A picture of me standing next to a sign with my name and profile on it as a speaker at TEDxStaffordshireUniversity

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick ace! In bocca al lupo! (which is the Italian equivalent of "break a leg" 😄)

john, to random
@john@sauropods.win avatar

Does anybody know if there’s a traditional composite material that behaves something like fibreglass? As in fibre/fabric laid up in a binder of some sort to make a stiff material in arbitrary forms.

Paper mache is one but it’s too weak (I think, maybe there's a super version?). I'm considering things like cotton or flax in casein glue or pine resin... but I doubt it will work.

(And my last casein glue experiment stunk like rotten milk for weeks!)

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@john Surjan Singh did a bunch of experiments, and documented things as he went, into a linen and casein composite.

https://surjan.substack.com/p/38-finally-a-finale

That link is to the end of his experiments, but it's worth checking out a bunch of the earlier installments too

Floppy, to 3DPrinting
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Gonna grit my teeth and do some “marketing” tomorrow I think, see if I can get any content creators to check out @manyfold. I’m telling you lot so I have to do it and can’t procrastinate my way out of it.

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy @manyfold How's the marketing going?

(Feel free to ask how replying to the emails from potential customers is going, later on today in return)

jacqueline, to random
@jacqueline@chaos.social avatar

check this shit out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfUVvQnAvcI

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@jacqueline ooh! That's a step up from the heatshrink tape we tried out for marking our tools. Will have to look into whether our printer will take that tape.

amcewen, to random
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Reading the interview with @debcha in the latest Taubman College Urban Tech newsletter, and now I'm wondering when would be a good day for an International Infrastructure Thanks Day, and what route I could choose for an infrastructure cycle tour round Liverpool to celebrate it 😀

https://urbantechnology.substack.com/p/urban-technology-at-university-of-ae4

CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Now I've written this TEDx talk and am refactoring it, it's quite a cathartic one for me! I'm railing against how terrible the incentives for tech companies are and how these mean that bad tech gets built all the time, even if the people developing it think they're doing a good thing

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick is it going to be recorded and shared online?

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick lovely! Sounds like a good talk.

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick I feel your pain. My TEDx talk came in 8 minutes under time because my "this is how long a talk lasts" was all tuned to my usual "have a general idea of what you're going to say and then ad lib it" delivery 🤣

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick yeah. The organiser of mine was also keen on the traditional TED narrative arc, where I was supposed to have some sort of epiphany, or show how my childhood led to what I was doing later... which led to a weird forced bit at the start of the talk 😀

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick stalking is fine, and thanks for the heads-up! Looks like some sort of injection into the HTML, I think. Will sort it out.

In the meantime, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-98wA3Xg2o is the talk

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick yes. Seems something of a shame that it's ten years later and I'm /still/ working at building that Internet of Nice Things.

(P.S. tracked down the problem on my website, it was actually an iframe loading some third-party site, which was then hijacking the whole page. So not as tricky to unpick as I'd feared 🙂 )

amcewen, to art
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Nice to see the @DoESLiverpool takeover of the TATE has made the Double Negative culture diary

http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2024/04/culture-diary-wc-22-04-2024/

amcewen, to random
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

"Our new ‘Innovation Hub’ has an asinine three-word slogan: ‘Grow Ignite Disrupt’. It would make just as much sense to have ‘Paper Scissors Stone’ for a motto. And rather more to have ‘Smash Grab Run’."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/in-florida

I guess we could also swap in all of the Tories' Pithy Phrase Reliance.

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@penguin42 hehe, yes! Is that what will grow if I plant those magic beans you're looking to offload?

amcewen, to random
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

So Companies House have just emailed me to let me know that from now on "All companies need to confirm that the intended future activities of the company will be lawful."

I mean, was intending to break the law allowed before this year?

I'm failing to see what this is going to achieve, beyond some sense of "something needs to be done; this is something"? 🤷

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@penguin42 yeah, it does seem to be part of that. I think the changes are mostly a good idea, but this particular bit seems rather pointless.

(Unless the Tories need to get some needless bureaucracy in place to rail against in the future when they want to "cut red tape"?!?)

CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

I had to look up what the Papa Johns pizzas bought for 10,000 bitcoin were "worth" today. oof.

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick that reminds me of the tale I heard when I was at Microsoft: one of the early-ish employees had always wanted a nice desk, and cashed in some shares to buy one. Then later on added a graph on the wall of their office to show what the desk was now "worth"

Floppy, to random
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Attempting to get into a habit for @manyfold. Place your bets for how long I last.

https://manyfold.app/news/2024/04/15/weeknote-2024-w15.html

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy @manyfold I enjoyed reading that.

It's totally okay to have a checks the @MCQN_Ltd blog ooh, 52 week hiatus in weeknotes. Right? Right?

mdales, to guitar
@mdales@mastodon.me.uk avatar

A new post, wrapping up the build on my Delfinen guitar: it needed some final bits of surgery, but now it's complete!

https://electricflapjack.com/blog/2024/04/08/a-moment-of-time-in-the-shop/

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@mdales sounds lovely! I'm also thinking you need to start a variation on the NPR Tiny Desk concerts where you get folk to play in the workshop 🤣

CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

I've just been invited to join a discussion with a "music matching" AI company and to record a video for them discussing AI and music as "a voice of dissent". So I went and looked up the company and perused its website (mostly in Chinese) and found this. And I think this is the peak of everything basically. https://avmapping.co/ai-web3/ (No, I won't be doing it)

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick oh good, they've taken AI and added blockchain sigh

Floppy, to random
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

You know what, sod “tracking all the contributions and dependencies”, that way lies shit ideas like “blockchains for paying musician royalties”.

Let’s have a Universal Basic Donation system for open source maintainers. We donate to a central place, and any open source maintainer of a project that’s used by more than X other people/projects can sign up to get a share. Everyone gets the same.

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@DamonHD @Floppy @instantiator Maybe, but if the organisation running it didn't get to take a %age of each transaction they'd have more incentive to manage that sort of problem.

How do other fields solve that problem? PRS for example, or the Public Lending Right (like PRS but for books). If we're trying new approaches we could break with tech tradition and learn from non-techies 😁

amcewen, to coffee
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Ooh, the @DoESLiverpool coffee monitor has got a new, more compact font. Presumably @goatchurch has been fettling it.

Floppy, to random
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Attempting to navigate the etiquette of how to charge for expedited feature delivery on an open source project. Not something I thought I was going to have to work out this early, tbh.

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy nice problem to have though (I think?)

Extelec, to random
@Extelec@mstdn.social avatar

Cool the nuts and bolts I've ordered have arrived, although I think there may be a problem..

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Extelec ah, locking nuts. They're hard to get on but once you do they aren't coming off again

biglesp, to random
@biglesp@mastodon.social avatar

The atmospheric processors have made it rain. Welcome to LV426

amcewen,
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@biglesp waves from somewhere behind you

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