Loosely Assembled

Can a hand written note find its own way to a specific person by crowd surfing through 400 geeks at the Emerging Communications conference?

I didn’t know where @caseorganic was sitting, I just scrawled this note and handed it off to the person on my right, nudging them to do the same. Watching down the aisle I noticed the passing included more verbal interaction than I had suspected (it would be nice if it caused a little less disruption (friction)). The horizontal passage was an artifact of the physical setup, much easier to pass to the person beside you, unless there was a significant gap (in which case i’d suspect people would hand it to someone behind them).

Five minutes later, voila, the note found her.

I actually was a little shocked, turns out she was sitting in the front right, while i was in the far left. The act of passing a note forward seems pretty disruptive, and i’m surprised that enough people reached forward, tapped a stranger’s shoulder, and handed them a note, that this little experiment actually worked.

A few questions linger:
How many people peeked inside the note as it passed by?
Why didn’t anyone augment the note? Add their own postmark?
Was the first test a success because it was headed to someone with 6,000 followers? (two subsequent tests fail whaled).
What percentage of handlers used knowledge of the recipient’s position to inform their actions?
What kinds of incentives might lead to a higher success rate? or structural changes? or test mechanisms?
Is there any connection to self organizing principles here?
Is this a subtle form of emergence?

During the Portland satellite version of iPhoneDevCamp this weekend, I was able to put together, with the help of a few actual coders, an app that Tracy Rolling and I have been dreaming about for over a year.

The app simply initiates a series of randomly scheduled noises to be played from your phone. You have no control over what the noises are (although i have to concede that we are not interested in “gross” noises) or when they will (or will not) happen. The sounds happen regardless of what app you are in, or even if the phone is asleep. It really brings a little bit of that “out of control” feeling into your life.

One of the best parts is something that we realized while building this, is that all random noises, since they are coordinated from a central server, will be synchronized! So imaging you are in the cheese aisle and your phone sneezes, but you also hear another person’s phone (or pocket, or purse) sneeze also. You are in a cafe, and you hear the sound of a modem coming from 5 different people. Etc.

Since it was a hack, there wasn’t a lot of time to really choose the best sound clips, I settled for about 20 pretty mediocre samples, but now that I have it actually working, I’d love to find a high quality selection of sounds that are really conceptually more interesting, and I know that asking for submissions will also bring out a wider range of ideas than I would ever have on my own. So I’d like to formally invite everyone to submit some sound files for this app. They should be less than 5 seconds long (although i may now be flexible on this limitation), in the aif or wav format, and free from any kind of copyright. Send them to fekaylius at the domain of this blog for consideration. I’m really hoping for some mind blowing stuff, from super high frequency (only teens can hear it) stuff, to bizarre juxtapositions of sounds that would normally not be heard together, and beyond. Selected sounds will receive credit and thanks and praise.

people who helped get the app up and running at the dev camp were

• carl sheppard
• justin miller
• greg stromire

thanks to dean for running the pdx satellite!!!

thanks for urban airship for being the pushers

Update: check out http://0009.org/bzzt for all the new version of these apps

Ok, you ended up with iMovie 09 somehow, but need to get your movie onto a miniDV tape. How will you do this? 09 seems to have dispensed with the “export/save to camera” option that older versions had.

After a bunch of trial and error, here’s how I was able to get the job done.

1. Export your movie as a DV Stream (your_movie.dv)
2. Move that .dv file to a Mac that has a different version of iMovie (HD is what my friend had)
3. Create a new iMovie project that is compatible with the camera you plan to export to (I think iMovie HD was defaulting to an HD format, which my (borrowed) camera didn’t support, so I had to do this twice).
4. Import your_movie.dv into the new project, and make sure it’s in the timeline. (this step was much slower than I expected, for a 1 minute video, it took ~ 7 minutes, so anything significant might be painful)
5. Save/Export to camera…

Always double check that the tape has the video, and that it’s formatted properly, audio, aspect ration, etc.

For some reason, my jailbroken iPhone has never played nice with iPhoto or iView Media Pro for downloading photos from the camera, I have just relied on command line scp or finder based afp sharing to get the images off my phone, and to delete them.

But today, I crossed a new threshold, I have shot more than 1000 photos with my iPhone, so a new directory appeared in my /var/mobile/Media/DCIM/ directory, it is 101APPLE/ which just starts the IMG_0001.jpg counting over again. I didn’t want the camera to become confused, so I deleted both 100APPLE & 101APPLE hoping the phone would just create a new directory. Well, it wasn’t so smooth, a new directory didn’t appear, and adding my own, and doing some chmod experiments also failed (new photos simply went off into space, not saved, not accessible).

I was almost ready to freak out. Then success!: just rm -r the whole DCIM/ directory, the phone will then handle the creation of a new structure just fine. phew!

also, just look at this cute thing:

Was chatting with Jake about some broken Frappr stuff (that we fixed!) during a gnarly thunder and lightning storm that was huge enough to share flashes from Highland to South Tabor, my lights all blink out, then his too, and i see the OTR crypto die right during his mini power outage (although his account never goes offline).

So, lesson to be learned, “don’t have sensitive conversations over IM during a thunderstorm”.

FireFlyMediaServer on the iPhone is one of the best things about a jailbreak, but with the 1.1.3 firmware, and all the root vs mobile user data and perms being jumbled around, I couldn’t even find an example online of how to get the thing up and running properly, it would install and show up in the uictl list, but spat out an error about a script not being able to complete. I think in retrospect that error has something to do with scanning the iTunes library.

I’m no expert at all, but here is the path i took to making it work:

1. Make sure Uictl shows org.fireflymediaserver.mt-daapd.plist in black, if it’s red, tap it, and select load -w.

2. In a browser on a wifi enabled compy, go to http://[the_ip_address_of_your_iphone]:3689 – use root/dottie – this is not connected to your phone’s ssh pw. (you can also hit 127.0.0.1:3689 in the phone’s browser, but it’s pretty small, and the screen isn’t designed for the small layout)

3. In the configuration section, edit the path to your music, it seems to assume root (from the early days) but needs to be updated to /mobile/

4. Go back to the server status and start a new full scan of your music files, this might take a minute or ten.

5. Now, if you had iTunes open already, and saw the empty device in the shared section, you can just eject it, and reconnect to see the updated content!

I also found that your music will simply be listed by song, so using the server’s own playlist creation tool is suggested, especially if you’ll be browsing this music in anything other than iTunes. (I’m thinking about putting a roku in the car, so I can stream songs from the iPhone to the car stereo over wifi. I’ll post that story once it actually happens.)

tuaw just ran an article exactly at the time i needed it.
Instant Jailbreak for iPhone and iPod touch, i did it, and it works like a charm, just point your device’s browser to jailbreakme.com and hit the button, done in a flash!

A quick little TM command module for one of the most frustrating limitations of the otherwise stellar TextMate

Data Noise: TextMate and Quick Searches