Top 10 Unique Game Controllers

Another article of mine is up at Bit-Tech – a top 10 list of ‘unique’ game controllers:

“There’s only so far you can go with a traditional gamepad. A few talented, brave and frankly bonkers designers have managed to convince and cajole their corporate paymasters into creating a special, unique add-on controller, solely for their game.”

You can have a read, here. As a writer, it was nice to do something more light-hearted after the politics piece last time, and it did well on Digg, too, which is great. Top 10s make for quick, fun reads, so I felt like the format suited the idea nicely.

New Blog: Treacle Down


  Lyle’s Black Treacle 
  Originally uploaded by Sifter.

Announcing Treacle Down (www.treacledown.co.uk), a brand new weblog of which I am a co-creator/co-writer/co-mad-scientist. It’s all about art, design, style and food in London. We started last weekend and things are going well, the first week’s posts covering:

* Tube Anagram map
* Flickr’s amazing geotagging, which basically gives you access to a pictorial A-to-Z of the capital
* Deadpan Evening Standard headlines
* A review of newly launched free paper, London Lite
* Bus-inspired designs from Becky Oldfield and her "Lost and Found" brand
* Bonfire of the Brands
* 100 Faces of the City, a very interesting photo-project

Enjoy – it’s not even on Google yet, so you can feel privileged about knowing about it 🙂 Let me know what you think!

Webreading 29th August

Two friends of mine, Phil and Josh, have started a videogames blog, and what a start: Phil has been playing the Battlefield 2142 beta, and it doesn’t sound like a particularly good recruit:

"Just a quick preview on this impending tug on the Battlefield cash cow’s udder. Expect more later when the vitriol has had time to stew…."

I’ve been having some troubles with my Mac’s wireless, so asked the crew at MacUser, a sister magazine to Custom PC. Chris, the news and features guy there, recommended me his clearly written tips pages, which you can find on his blog, here – I’ll see if it works later tonight….

Dream PCs

Custom PC Issue 37 is out, which features our annual ‘Dream PCs’ competition. We invite four top PC building companies to submit a no compromise PC – so there’s no budgetary constraints, we just want the most amazing computer going. This year, we asked four companies to enter – Scan, Vadim, Quiet PC (all UK based), and Voodoo PC (Canada). The standard was very high, and they were a lot of fun to test (although not to move to photography, as they were all massive!)

The full results are in the mag, but we also commissioned some videos from Dennis’ new in-house ‘video person’ (she’s so new I don’t know what her job title is!). You can check out the high-resolution versions on the CPC site, here, and there’s also some wallpapers to download. The videos are also on YouTube for ease of use – here’s the clip of the Voodoo, which is a stunning looking machine.

Web 2.0 and Bauhaus

If it’s as good as the US version, it will be worth keeping tabs on the Tech CrunchUK blog. As Sam Sethi writes in his first post there, which went up yesterday:

"Where are all of the UK start-ups? Besides the tenuous UK links to the success of Skype and the deservedly and often quoted rising star of the UK start-up scene LastFM; where indeed were all the other cool new UK start-ups to match Flickr, Delicious, Writely, Technorati, Six Apart etc?"

It will be interesting to see what he finds. Today’s post is all about Venture Capital, but I hope that as well as covering the biz side of UK Web 2.0, Tech Crunch UK focusses on the creative side as well. This might sound high-minded, but I remember a quote from Moholy-Nagy I saw stencilled on the wall at Tate Modern when they had their Albers / Moholy-Nagy Bauhaus show on a few months ago:

"Technical progress should never be the goal, only the means."

It’s interesting to compare Bauhaus to Web 2.0, actually, as I feel there are a certain number of
similarities, as both are design movements that address social issuesin a very conscious, practical way. Ideas of efficiency are prevalent in both, as is the goal of removing the traditional, hierarchical view of the content producer/artist and the audience. Instead of having the artist being the active one, ministering to a passive audience, a crucial component of Web 2.0 apps is designers giving control to users – allowing them to produce blogs, or tag objects etc. As the Tate curator wrote:

"Moholy experimented with ideas of style and authorship, and he even assigned the execution of some of his paintings – such as Telephone Picture EM1 (1922) – to a sign painter… It was around this time that he began to title works with a combination of letters and numbers akin to a scientific formula, reflecting his desire to purge the artist’s touch from his work and create instead a pure order from impersonal compositional elements.

"Similarly, Albers explored semi-industrial techniques to create a fiercely objective art. Appropriating a method devised for engraving headstones, he embarked on a series of abstract compositions created by sandblasting sheets of coloured glass. Made by experienced craftsmen using stencils designed by the artist, such works could be serially produced, bringing art into line with other industrially manufactured goods."


László Moholy-Nagy
A 19 1927
Oil on canvas, 830 x 990 mm 
Collection Hattula Moholy-Nagy

Webreading 25th August

Today….

* Sucks if you’re a Plutonian, you don’t have a home planet any more, you’re home is just a ‘small, icy "Trans-Neptunian’. BBC News.
* But you can buy lovely Rez t-shirts from Way Of The Rodent [via Waxy]
* And you can add your own reaseon why civilization is doomed to 10,000 Reasons.
* You can also follow DoveGreyReader, a blogger who’s reading her way through the Booker longlist  in a really readable manner herself.

Politics and technology

My latest piece for Bit-Tech is up there now – well, actually it’s been up there a few days, I’ve just not had time to post it here. It’s all about the influence of politicians on technology, or rather, their lack of influence:

“Senator Stevens isn’t the only one who is, to put in bluntly, a n00b – here in the UK, Tony Blair getting his own e-mail account was regarded as an event so momentous that it deserved a report from the BBC Politicians are famous for not getting it – whether ‘it’ is popular music, video games, iPods, the menace posed by hooded jumpers and rappers – but when it comes to computer technology this ignorance has got to be seen as increasingly untenable. It’s time we made our elected representatives realise that they need to understand the technology and those issues in particular which are brought into focus by the internet, because it’s becoming increasingly integral to the way we live.”

The full article is online here.

Shoot London

It’s near the end of the month, so that means I’m broke and prone to moaning about money. It is an unpleasant habit I’ll admit – though I think it’s better than, say, public nose-picking – and it’s a habit made all the worse by living in London. It’s all to easy to use the money thing as an excuse for not getting out, and so losing that sense of participation and ownership which really binds you to a place.

A couple of weekends ago, I managed to snag some free tickets to Shoot Experience‘s ‘Shoot London’ event, something which was fun, and also really made me feel more connected and involved with London as a city, providing a neat antidote to my moape-ing tendencies.

Shoot Experience is a photographic treasure hunt; working in teams of four, you’re given a sheet of clues (10 for our event), and have a set amount of time to solve them and take one photo for each. Seven of the clues were ‘fixed’, in that they referred to a specific item or place, and three were ‘open’, thematic clues that you were free to illustrate as you pleased. At the end of the day, you submit your camera’s memory card to the judges, and there are prizes for each clue – pretty good ones, too, like books, watches, iPods etc.

It was a lot of fun. The weather was brilliant, which obviously helped, but the concept itself is a great one; there’s just enough competition to give the day some urgency and make you want to take good photos, and obviously, you’re in a group with friends, too. But it was the pinging around London I most enjoyed; it was exciting, even a bit liberating, because instead of skating along the surface, taking the tube to work, or just going to a shop, you were digging at the city, looking at it, really interacting with the place.

All our team’s pics are up on Flickr, here, and if you do a search on Flickr for ‘shootexperience’, some of the other teams’ photos are there as well, and some coverage has appeared on other blogs. Shoot costs, but you do get prizes – there’s a Flickr group which does something similar for free (but without prizes).

My partner (hereafter the Jesteress!) was so impressed she’s even started working with Shoot Experience on their new website. A great day, and well worth a go – there’s plenty of future Shoot events coming up.