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Share Your Gadgets

Do you hit Gizmodo on an hourly basis? Subscribe to Engadget‘s feed? Feel envious of Phil Torrone on a daily basis?

If you’re into gadgets, bring them to the Share Your Gadgets session at BarCampMilwaukee.

Juicebox
Did you know you can use a kid’s toy as an MP3 player and photo viewer? You can… Got a cell phone that you think kicks ass? Bring it.

We’ll talk about the gadgets of today, and the gadgets of tomorrow… What’s good, what’s bad, the UI, the battery life, etc…

Besides cell phones, people have digital cameras, media players, PDAs, GPS receivers and on and on… What will you bring?





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Kiosk2

Just because I can’t participate in BarCampEarth, doesn’t mean I can’t participate in BarCampEarth…

A few months back, my pals at Z2 Marketing gave me an old Mac, so my challenge became “what can I do with it?” You might remember such projects as MacKiosk which was a photo kiosk built using an old Apple Workgroup Server 80. Well, this is Kiosk2 , which is built using an old PowerComputing PowerCenter 150. Ten years ago this was a killer workstation, featuring a 150 MHz PowerPC 604 processor. Nowadays it’s almost useless…

A little MacPerl magic, a copy of the always exellent JPEGView, and an AppleScript applet to kick things into gear, and we’ve got our kiosk!

Kiosk2

So what about BarCampEarth? Well, I built this thing to use at BarCampMilwaukee, the idea being we set it up and as people upload and tag photos with "barcampmilwaukee" they will appear on the screen. So since this weekend is BarCampEarth, we decided to test it all using the tag "barcampearth"

So far it’s working ok. There is a weird flicker when the images load, so I’ll have to work on that, and in earlier testing I’ve had the Mac lock-up on me, but a reboot fixes that problem. Old hardware put to good use… hooray!





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Mini-Mash Pit Milwaukee

So I thought, what can I do for a BarCamp session that would definitely overload my plate… A Mash Pit!

Mash Pit

At BarCampMilwaukee, we will have a session on what a mashup is, just going over the basics, showing some examples, talking about APIs, and brainstorming ideas, but for those who aren’t into sleep, we’ll start at 11 PM and see what we can crank out before the sun rises.

We are prefixing with “Mini” because it may only be a few hours or so, depending on whatever else is going on at BarCampMilwaukee. I’m still hoping a bunch of code monkeys I’ve emailed plan to come, because while just me sitting at a table doing this alone would still be very cool, and result in some killer app, I’m sure I could use the input and assistance of others… :)





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Ma.gnolia, at last…

I’ve been meaning to actually use Ma.gnolia for quite some time now, but being happy with del.icio.us, and the lack of a matching API was holding me back… well, no more…

The folks at Ma.gnolia have released The Mirrord API, which (like Scuttle) is the del.icio.us API, so now we should be able to easily more data between the two. (I guess it’s time to update delisync.)

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I Hear the Warning

I’m a fan of the “just works” concept (I mean, I use Mac OS X instead of Windows, right?) but A warning for the bazaar nails it.

I’m seeing it from a different perspective though, one of a media creator. Just yesterday I had to deal with the fact that people don’t care about their rights or freedoms, as long as it will work. We’ve had this discussion in the videoblogging community, where most are advocates of creators rights. What does this mean? It means we encourage people to put their video (audio, text, etc.) online where they can maintain their rights over it as the creator. Some people just don’t care about that. They just want what they create to get online in the quickest and simplest fashion possible. YouTube and MySpace are often the conduits for this “I want it now and I want it to work” mentaility. Neither give enough control over the content to those who created it.

It’s also been noted that often times the attitude of “I want it now and I want it to work” is taken by younger people, the under 30 crowd, who haven’t yet got a long term view, or a sense of history with the things they create. This may be true, I see it in other things as well, and I often am not sure how much of my view is shaped by the length of time I’ve been involved in the things I care about, versus just my strong opinions on certain subjects.