Codemonkey get up, get coffee...

So its been ages since I posted here but I have been uber busy. I figured I best update with all I have been up to.

The Mythical Catflap


First off, the twice tried and never finished revenge short I wrote is almost ready to go into production for the third time.We have @thefredmk1 playing the male lead. I was very impressed with Fred (as was my production assistant @jethrobelman) when he came to the auditions last Saturday: After all this time I think I have found the perfect person to fill that role. All we need now is his 'Wife' and 'Girlfriend' (*hint* if you know anyone you know where to find me!).

Scoring goals

Second up, after two years of trying I am finally getting published in Ole, the office and lifestyle magazine. Its only a 350 word article on life in the office but I feel I have achieved one of my goals I set when I first started blogging 18 months ago, to get bloody published! I will keep you posted once it goes live (end of this month).

And if anyone else needs me to write anything you know where to find me.

The Soulman

The Soulman is looking to be one of my most epic projects yet in all ways: Lots of people to cast, realistic effects to be figured out, locations to be sourced etc etc. But its all a big challenge and progressing slowly but very well. All being well the first episode will be available for your PMP/iPod/iTampon in early 2011.

Epic Bike Ride

OK this project I am really really looking forward to. A friend of mine wants to ride his bike from Lands End to John O'Groats this summer in the name of char-i-dee. He has done this before but on his own. This time around he wants a support team and someone to blog/film it all for him. That'd be me and @jethrobelman then!

Film Night

You may or may not remember me trying to organise a local indie film night. To be honest I was never really happy with the venue (it being a pub) and I am looking at other places but with the budget of free this is proving hard. I am in discussions with various people on this and will keep you updated. I am also looking at setting up a small aggregating website to support the film night pulling together any content and linking out to indie producers websites etc.

There is a myriad of other news but for now I must keep stum. I will update you  as and when the time comes.

Stay tidy peeps.

-Pip

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eMbRaCe ThE gEeK!

Tech: Discussing Chrome OS with William Wright

Once again, William Wright has allowed me on his drive time show on BBC Radio Lincolnshire (listen here), this time to talk about the new open source operating system from Google, Chrome OS. At this stage it is meant mostly for netbooks, but Google are saying there will be eventual support for laptops and desktops too. Now when I say OS, that's not really meant in the traditional sense of the word(s): everything Chrome OS does is 'in browser'. In fact that's all Chrome OS is, a browser, in particular, the rather nippy Chrome browser. So how does that work? Take a look at the screen shot below:

As you can see, any traditional desktop type software is replaced by a web application. Your photos are stored with Picasa, your documents with Google Documents. There are no on board applications, everything is server side. This 'thin client' style of computing means that your computer will be uber-nippy. From switch on to editing documents/surfing the web should take you no more than 10 seconds. You sign in with your Google account and everything flows from there, much like the Android OS for smartphones.

As we all know, Google have been pushing for a while now for you to store all of your information in 'the cloud', in particular their cloud (Gmail, Google Documents, Picasa etc). This of course has benefits for us all: no need for personal hard drives, backups, photos and documents are universal and easy to access from any computer & of course, no duplicate files because everything is stored centrally, on one far away computer. Unfortunately this has its downfalls also. Internet connections can be shaky & unreliable. As much as I hate to say it, but we don't have 3G/WiFi coverage everywhere we go, leaving you with a very shiny, nice looking, but useless brick if your running Chrome OS and have no connection. Having said this you will still be able to access the applications in offline mode thanks to the genius of Google Gears and the advent of HTML 5 but of course without being able to send anything over the tubes.

Ultimately, Chrome OS is a fantastic idea: a light, fast & simple OS meant for secondary use to your main machine, mainly for browsing, web video & photo/document editing. In my opinion cloud computing is also a brilliant idea, but there needs to be some sort of balance. I would rather have the option to back up the information locally as well as in the cloud, just in case. I would also like the option to install my own applications on there. Having said that its still early days yet and I'm pretty sure most users feel the same. Hopefully the big 'G' will open up to the users needs and wants and build these functionalities in. Watch the video below for the official run down of Chrome OS.

eMbRaCe ThE gEeK!

Tech: Discussing Google Wave with William Wright on Radio Lincolnshire

So once again William Wright has been kind enough to have me on his Drive-time show on Radio Lincolnshire (It's on now (or 94.9FM on the actual wireless), why are you reading this and not listening?!) to talk about the much hyped Google Wave. I have spoken about this before on this blog and rather than repeat that article I thought I would update you with a couple of links I have found useful since and I will be talking about on the show.

1. Diana Adams Bit Rebels article, Lost inside Google Wave?

5 waves to make your life easier, these are all made for the community by the community and therefore low on jargon, high on easy to grasp knowledge. From community based wave support groups to a suggestion box for wave its all very useful indeed.

2. The Lifehacker guides to Google Wave

Written by Lifehackers Gina Trapani and Adam Pash the Complete Guide to Google Wave will always be free. Absolutely invaluble and full of useful info for the beginner right through to the advanced user.

3. My Waves

As I spoke about, I have waves embeded in all three of my websites as chatrooms/messageboards/contribution areas. To visit those click on any of the following links;

Avin A Giraffe Wave

The Cocknose Wave

Pip Wilsons Wave

4. Business implementation of Wave

For anyone that is really interested, here is the link to the article on SAPs implementation of Google Wave. Its not that interesting but gives a very good example of how Wave can be used in the business world.

Thanks for listening all and thanks once again thanks to William and Tom for letting me on. Any questions we didn't answer please drop me a line, either in one of the waves, on twitter or via the contact box in the navigation bar above.

-Pip

eMbRaCe ThE gEeK!

Geek: Project Wave Pt III complete, mission accomplished!

Just a quick one to say, Google Wave is now live on The Cocknose. Click on Contact/Wave in the Nav bar for instant access to the page. As with www.PipWilson.org and www.AvinAGiraffe.com the wave will add itself to your inbox IF you have access to Google Wave. Please use it to send us any stories, pictures or information you think we should be looking at, cheers.

eMbRaCe ThE gEeK!

Geek: Project Wave Pt II complete

Ok, so Project Wave Part II is now complete. We have a wave up and running over at 'Avin' A Giraffe, acting as a live chat room, submissions/commenting box and a general layabout area. Please feel free (if you have access to Google Wave of course) to use the wave pretty much as you please within those guidelines. Of course this does not replace the usual channels of twitter/email etc(yet anyway), merely compliments them. Drop me a line at the usual channels if you have any problems. Embrace, engage and enjoy..

eMbRaC3 Th3 g33K!

Geek: *Waves* We are LIVE in The Lounge

Ok, so this is something I have been experimenting with over the past couple of days; using the now infamous Google Wave, embedded in a page, as a live chat room/message/info exchange/general lay about area. And guess what peeps, we are LIVE LIVE LIVE. Those of you with access to Wave should see The Lounge appear in your inbox as soon as you hit up the page. One of the best bits is you can edit/add to the wave directly from The Lounge. Cool, huh? I'm hoping to implement waves in both Avin A Giraffe as well as The Cocknose in the coming days, stay tuned...

Film: Local Independent Film Night at The Jolly Brewer

So after a successful meeting with the Landlady at The Jolly Brewer last night, I have been asked to organise (under the banner of thegrainsilo) an independent film night to be held at the pub (this is not to be confused with the horror film night that I am also organising, more details to follow on this soon). At this stage I am looking to raise interest from local (Lincoln and surrounds) independent film makers who would like some good exposure for their films. It does not matter if you’re a student or working and making films on the side and it does not matter if its abstract or story/character based; if you have some good content (preferably between 5-30 minutes long) then you are more than welcome to join the fun. If you are interested in such then contact me on twitter (@PipWilson) or via email (sayhello (at) pipwilson (dot) org) with a link to your content so it can be considered. Please send all emails with the subject matter Indie Film Night at the Brewer. Films will need to be on DVD, external hard drive or memory stick.

-Pip

Tech: Some thoughts on Google Wave

So having had my wave account for a couple of weeks now, I figured it was time to get down a few thoughts about the service. And before anyone asks I don't have any invites left at this stage; I gave my last one away on Twitter on Saturday night.
As we all know, there has been a lot of hype regarding the wave. To me this is typical of Google. It is exactly what they did with Gmail and to some extent what they did with Android; make it available to the select few, put a couple of videos and screenshots on select sites on the internet and let the hype build in an organic fashion. So is it worth the hype? Well yes and no. Any claims that it is the future of communication online are a little far fetched to me at this stage. It takes a lot of getting used to and Lifehackers guide to wave has proved invaluable to me. Having said that and as one of my mates tweeted, if you need an instruction book then something’s rotten in Denmark. Did you read an instruction book on how to email back in the day? Or to SMS? Or even to Twitter?

It is however very cool that you can drag and drop documents and files from any folder on your hard drive directly into the wave. The live typing feature, if a little weird at first, is also very cool. Adding various bots to the waves themselves is also a very useful feature. These include a Twitter bot so you can tweet from directly within, Amazon so any keywords found in your wave will then be searched through the Amazon website and you are fed back the latest deals and prices and Wikipedia so again any keywords that crop up are searched and fed back to you to you. Also according to an article on Engadget yesterday Google themselves are getting ready to set up an app store (is that the buzz phrase of the last year or what?) for wave. This will mean that anyone that can see a particular use and has the coding knowledge will be able to write their own apps for the service.

Now obviously these bots/apps are useful in their own right, but what about an actual use for wave? Well the best two I can see so far are as a collaboration tool and as a live Evernote style notebook. As a collaboration tool it is genius. I am currently working on a film project with an old college friend of mine and the ability to post location pictures, script updates and casting notes is invaluable, especially when you consider he is over 30 miles away. And of course it’s all totally live and editable. I am also involved in the Lincoln Tweetup (#FridayDrinks/@FridayDrinks) and we have just started using wave to organise dates, food etc for the meet ups.

The second way I use the service is as a live notebook. The editability of the wave proves extra useful here as anything I delete or edit is highlighted within the document, providing a very useful workaround to the good idea/bad idea/good idea again jitters that I am sure any creative person will appreciate.

Overall I find the service very useful but in my own way. I cannot give you a blanket use for the service because there doesn’t appear to be one. Make of it what you will I think is the general consensus. Wave is very good at many different things and it’s pulling these things together in the right way that make it for me. If you are using wave in your own way let me know in the comments below. Also if you want to connect with me I’m wilsonpip@googlewave.com as well as my production companys account thegrainsilo@googlewave.com.

-Pip

Tech - The rise of Netbooks

A contenscious issue, netbooks. Either you love 'em or you hate 'em. Me personally? Well I'm a lover. I own a Dell mini 9 running the Linux distro Ubuntu 9.04 and for me it works. One of the first questions people ALWAYS ask me when they see I have a netbook is, "How powerful is it?" (1.6GHz N270 Intel Atom Processor, 1GB DDR2 533MHz, Intel GMA 950 Integrated Graphics seeing as you asked). Alright I'm not about to render the title sequence for my latest film project on it but thats not the point. The point is mobility and not having to hulk a breezeblock about the place. I can throw it in my bag and run and with the SSD drive I don't have to worry about damaging hard drive platters. I can edit documents and blog posts such as this one. I can use GIMP to edit photos and have even used it to design logos for thegrainsilo.com, lifeinthecloud.co.uk and avinagiraffe.com. And with the use of its onboard HSDPA modem, I can even post remotely with full control of my blogs dashboard.

Cramped

One of the main issues with a netbook is its keyboard. There are a lot of complaints about the size and how cramped it is. Whilst I admit it was not ideal at first, with a little practice, it is something I have gotten used to. I think mainly on this, people have become used to the wide keyboard standard. Scale this down in anyway and it seems to throw most people. Having said that when I'm at home I do have an external keyboard which I plugin but this is simply because the netbook itself is up on a stand and I would probably do myself an injury reaching up and across my desk on a sustained basis.

Stream that media

Bringing me nicely to my next point. When I am in my home network and in front of my main computer I use the netbook to stream Spotify and any other media/media services I may be watching/listening to on the side. This serves two uses; 1. It saves on processing power when I'm using memory hungry software like Photoshop or Dreamweaver on my main box. 2. I don't have to flick between screens to change songs or media and therefore it's less of a distraction to my main work.

Sticking with the streaming media, I also use my mini box of wonder to stream, either directly from my home server or from Boxee, films, webcasts and other media direct to my TV. Whilst there were teething tech problems in the initial setup of this (mainly soundtracks falling out of sync with the video and stuttering video files) which I have now sorted, overall it does run smoothly. With the use of the Boxqueue bookmarklet I can save any internet video file directly to my Boxee queue for viewing on the TV at a later time. And used in conjunction with the GMote application on my G1 I can access the file server from the phone and not even have to get up from my seat to change media!

Playing with the 'Bu

In terms of OS I use the Canonical Linux distro Ubuntu (9.04). When I first got the machine it was running XP but I wanted to try something new. This has worked out very well. The distro itself is open source and free and pretty much anything that I ran in Windows can either be run under Wine (Windows Emulator) or there is a viable alternative available within the Open Source community somewhere. The ability to switch desktops is very cool, especially on a small screen and with the Compiz settings manager you can do it in extreme style. Another bonus of using Ubuntu is that with the use of the Google mobile OS Androids SDK you can run Android apps on your netbook (See my Top 5 Android Apps). This works very well with apps like Gmote, Shazam or even the recently released Qik and also means I can integrate my phone even further with my computer.

Support not replace

Overall I would say netbooks are not meant to be a replacement for your main PC. However as a secondary device working in conjuction with your main box/network they work and they work well. According to recent research from NPD 58% of the people who buy netbooks are satisfied with their purchase compared to 70% of regular laptop buyers. This I believe, is down to a misunderstanding of what these micro machines can actually do. There has to be some sacrifice for the size and mobility of the machines themselves. Having said that, the advancing of processor technologies and the development of smaller solid state drives these machines will only get faster and better in the future.

-Pip

Music - SomewhereBetweenACliche AndAMonkey 2 track ep reviewed

So @luke_morton over at Music on the Mind has been kind enough to do a review of my electronica outfit, SomewhereBetweenAClicheAndAMonkey in his latest Unsigned Review post. Whilst not a glowing review I am rather pleased of course that we are getting some coverage. Just to let you know new material is being worked on as we speak. Whats that Luke, heavier bass? It's all in hand mate, along with a deeper, heavier sound overall. I will keep you posted.

"..Some bands [though] are good at what they do, one such band are Somewherebetweenaclicheandamonkey who have created a much slower/toned-down version of electronic music similar to that of Squarepusher or early Sabrepulse...(Cont.)"

-Pip