Recently fizzPOP celebrated the two of its first birthday’s. On January 26th the mailing list was set up and on February 28th we had our first meeting. We count each one as our birthday, which, in theory, means more cake!
Leftovers from the last session. Photo by Nikki Pugh
I’m really quite proud of what myself and Nikki have achieved so far with fizzPOP. As I’ve stated in my manypresentations about hackerspaces and fizzPOP it was first set up to scratch an itch: I wanted to have a space outside of education to learn more about electronics and technology. Luckily Nikki had the same itch and we soon found ourselves working on the creating and running of fizzPOP.
I wont rattle on about the history of fizzPOP as we’re still creating it, and there’s little to gain from talking about the pitfalls we’ve had. The thing that I’m most proud of is that we can regularly get people from all over the west midlands (and occasionally reaching as far as Liverpool and London) in a room to do what they love most. I just wish we could do this more regularly, maybe even every day!
Photo by Nikki Pugh
What next for fizzPOP? I’m still recovering from fizzPOP workshop from the awesomeness that is Mitch Altman and Jimmie Rodgers, so have no brain space left to think about anything else! All I know is that I want to see more workshops like that and more people showing off their mad hacker skills.
From February 2th6 to 27th I was in London for dev8d. It describes itself as:
Dev8D is 4 days of 100% pure software developer heaven. It will be intense. It will be exhilarating. It will make you a better programmer.
• Learn to use unfamiliar languages (such as Python, Ruby and Clojure)
• Team up with other developers and build rapid development projects for tech prizes
• Take part in lightning session discussions with industry experts
• Swap skills and ideas with other developers
It was indeed like some kind of heaven! I arrived later in the week on Friday, but I still learnt quite a lot. I spent a lot of my time in the Expert Zone and at GB’s Arduino workshops.
Think of the Expert Zone as a more relaxed Pecha Kucha or Ignite. You get 15 minutes to talk about or promote whatever you want. I gave a short presentation on hackerspaces, with particular emphasis on fizzPOP, and why you should either form one or join one.
I’ve had an Arduino ever since the Howduino event last year but I’ve never really played around with it. Being around lots of people who are in the same position really helped me to make a move in learning it. In the end I got lots of LED’s flashing and a little buzzer to play some music. A small achievement to some, but a massive leap into the world of electronics!
Being at dev8d (and at the GNOME Hackfest, which I’ll write about another time) really taught me a lot about software development. It all starts with an idea, but taking that idea and turning it into a reality I feel is best achieved in a group setting with those who can contribute ideas and skills.
Congrats to the dev8d and devCSI team for putting on a very successful event. I’ll definitely be along next year!
I’ve been doing the layout for the Birmingham Friends of the Earth bi-monthly newsletter for awhile, but never actually mentioned it! The new issue is out now, and you can pick it up for free from the Birmingham Friends of The Earth building on Allison Street in Digbeth
The Very Public Person project is the brainchild of artist Ania Bas, and will see visitors to The Public meeting a variety of individuals who play a part in West Bromwich’s community.
The talks will celebrate the input of people who contribute to the life and culture of the area.
As an interviewer of a “Very Public Person” I just had to ask them about who they are, what they do… everything that makes that person who they are. It’s the sort of thing you see in interviews with celebrities where they talk about themselves for hours on end. Despite how self-indulgent that may be it does make the person feel special and unique
To me, this project is all about making the community feel important and making them feel like celebrities. Everyone in a community, not just West Bromwich, has a story to tell and in some way contributes to making that community unique. Why not celebrate this?
The “Very Public Person” that myself and another interviewer spoke with really embodied someone who was proud of their city and local community. He’s around 60 years old and has lived in West Bromwich most of his life. He’s seen businesses come and go and has witnessed many changes in society and in the landscape, including the building of The Public, which is where the interview took place. There has been quite a lot of criticism of the gallery, with some people feeling like it’s a big waste of space in the wrong city.
In some ways I can understand their concerns. Why build a new gallery in a city not widely known for its culture? I think that The Public may just be the kind of radical thinking that is needed to raise a city’s profile. Whether it works or not is down to the public (I know, bad pun!) and their reaction. The person I interviewed seemed quite enthusiastic about the building and the idea that a city should celebrate its history but also concentrate on building a more vibrant future that can eventually celebrate more, newer success stories.
There will be a book containing snippets and photos from the interviews and at some point you’ll be able to visit the gallery to hear the interviews. I’ll alert you when it’s ready.
Ever since I went down to an Openlab workshop last year I’ve been fascinated by live coding. From Wikipedia:
Live coding (sometimes known as ‘interactive programming’, ‘on-the-fly programming’, ‘just in time programming’) is the name given to the process of writing software in realtime as part of a performance.
I thought about doing live coding for myself ever since, so at fizzPOP’s latest hack session I thought I’d make use of massive screen and try a bit out for myself using a purpose-built program called Fluxus, which uses the Scheme programming language.
I had briefly looked at Fluxus before but had never actually built anything in it or even used Scheme before, so stuck to modifying one of the example scripts provided in the program. Here’s a video of my results:
You can see that an aspect of live coding is seeing how something is built, which could explain the decision to overlay the code over the visuals. I quite like it, some might not.
I’ll be attempting to do some more livecoding at the next fizzPOP hack session on March 3rd
I'm a software artist based online and in Birmingham, UK. The work that I do looks at interesting ways in which to interpret data, technology and how it relates to art and the creative sector. For more information look at the Projects page or found out more About Me
