Expanding horizons: Handheld Conference 2013: port80 fringe event

Last year’s Handheld Conference was a great event, with several of the sessions winning awards as the best talks of the year.

This year, it’s got bigger and even comes with a fringe event the night before, in collaboration with Port80 events.

I’ll be blogging the main event sessions later, but here’s my notes from the Handheld mini/port80 event.

Graham Lee @secboffin

XML is like violence: if it doesn’t get you what you want, you’re not using enough of it
EULA: “we make no warranty that on this software” => this sh*t doesn’t work — and we’re not going to tell you until after you’ve bought it
we’re in an industry that wants to be grown-up — we get to choose the moral direction as well as the technical direction
we do have responsibility — raising awareness is the first step

Alyson Fielding @alysonf

what happens if you put technology into a physical book (without a screen)?
making an enchanted object
lilypad arduino works well with books: it uses needle & conductive thread rather than wire & solder so it’s gentler on the book
“the library of lost books”
- each rescued book is being sent to a different artist to be given a new lease of life
wanted to hide the technology so it feels like magic
triggering audio in a gesture controlled physical book
what happens if you get a book talking to a phone
- hide arduino in the spine
- zigbee to talk to phone (via Redpark cable)
- battery to power it (mainly zigbee…)
- accelerometer to detect position
initial story: book speaks what position it’s in
- can also tweet…
further stories: recognising more complex 3D gestures, e.g. a hug
connected with a story engine
- telling a story based on user interaction
- crucially: also respond when the user does something different

Barry Scott @bazscott

fixing things:
- easy bug reporting — value the people who report bugs
- prioritise fixes
crippled behaviour:
- flash, linkjacking, doorslams
- watch user behaviour — and listen to them
bastards:
- sample newspaper website: “the only way I can monetise the site is by getting people to download the app, so I don’t care about showing the content”…
- shortsighted, brand will wither, people won’t come back
- advertising cigarettes & gambling to kids (or any kind of advertising to 3 year olds…)
times higher education survey on link rot
- 99% of web pages change in a year
- 70% of links from 12 years of Harvard Legal are broken

Andrew Nesbitt @teabass

invented by Felix Geisendörfer in 2012
Parrot AR Drone 2.0
runs busybox linux
node.js module: npm install ar-drone
watch out for going out of range
- the drone will just continue going…
andrew created a node module to pick up serial input from xbox controller — used to control AR drone
then picked up front-facing camera and displayed on a web page
running both scripts at the same time allows you a first-person control of the drone
make it dance to dubstep:
- using dance.js to pick up drops in an mp3 from the HTML5 audio API
face detection from front-facing video
- using OpenCV on video from the video in the browser
lots of other examples on nodecopter.com
substack contributes a lot of stuff
- including virus-copter
- scans wifi for other drones — ssh’s to them
if you attach a phone you can theoretically control the drone from anywhere in the world
- but you come under the same laws as cruise missiles…
voxel-drone is a simulated drone inside voxel, a minecraft clone in javascript & webgl
- but it doesn’t have momentum…
- voxel-drone stops instantly
- the real drone takes about 2 metres to stop from full speed
why?
- teaching programming via engaging javascript
- did a coderdojo for 12-15 year old kids
- chasing parents around, ballet moves
- making controllers from tin foil and makeymakeys
upcoming events: probably one every month in the UK in the new year

Expanding horizons