Here’s a little animation we did to occupy ourselves on New Year’s Day.

I couldn’t help noticing that a vertical garden is being grown at Bullring in Birmingham. These are nothing new Patric Blanc has been growing them for fifty years, and his latest creation has just been unveiled in Singapore. There are many other vertical gardens.

Boy, oh boy. Some Sundays I set out with great plans and not much happens, then I feel sorry for myself that nothing has happened. Not so today. Since this morning, I’ve been to church, where I played guitar for the first time. I scooted off in the bus to a friend’s after lunch to knock out a fireplace wall. Then back onto the bus back to church for a Taizé service. Phew, but that’s not all, next up was a dinner party with a Dutch theatre artist telling us about a project around rural communities in Wales, where someone brought a beautiful resonator guitar to play for us.

Traditional theatre keeps actors a safe distance away, preferably on a stage. Barring a serious mishap, nothing is expected to go wrong, and the realms of possibility remain confined. Even better, one may watch a play which was written a few hundred years ago, well ingrained in the public consciousness. This will restrict the number of surprises.

Tin Box Theatre Company take a different tack. They invite the theatregoer to a derelict coffin factory at night with no electricity. They lead them through the eerie vacant space by torchlight, gather them in close, and tell them stories of a dead woman.

The show used a range of theatrical tools to tell the story, stimulating all the senses, from the olfactory assault of the dusty old factory, to snatches of physical theatre, close-up storytelling, and audio overlaid with headphones. It was a really great show from a young company, and not creepy as it might have been, for a show in a coffin factory.

I spent the afternoon sitting behind a desk in mac distributing instructions for Katie’s iPhone app geo-located bandstand experience. In a prominent position in the foyer, I saw all sorts, like the these guys, queuing for a ticket…

The Bandstand show seemed to go well, people downloaded their apps, pointed their cameras at the QR code, and bing, the experience downloaded and ran on their phone. As they walked up to the bandstand in Cannon Hill Park, the audio track started playing automatically, and they were invited to live through a post-war romance.

Bandstand was just part of the First Bite theatre event run by China Plate Theatre. There was quite a mixture of old and new companies performing stuff. The stand out performances that I saw were Theatre Absolute/Naomi Said – “The Wedge”, a one woman show, with great on-stage charisma that drew you in, Little Earthquake – “It’s Only A Paper Moon”, a seamless blending of stories about the moon, and Untied Artists – “For Their Own Good”.

Cool, Google Maps now shows the weather.

Kindle Theatre have been running a summer school, and tonight was the one and only performance of the show they’ve been producing. The cast was mainly young, eclectic, with high energy, some sharp dance moves and loads of emotion. For a “community theatre” performance it was pretty experimental with a strong conceptual take on the Greek Myth and a good use of the open spaces and indoor and outdoor theatre spaces. There were some slight pacing issues but these were soon forgotten after a crashing finale where we were all forced to confront the monster inside us, because of course, We Are The Minotaur.

2011-08-06

I’ve had my new HTC Wildfire S for a few days now. So how does Android compare to iOS (I’ve got an iPad and iPod Touch)?

The Phone

The phone is definitely at the “entry level” end of the market, but the camera is usable, the screen sometimes correctly detects where I’ve poked my finger and is quite bright. The battery life is dire, it’s brand new and hardly makes it through the day – I would guess this is a combination of Android’s architecture and the phone itself, but who really knows. The build quality isn’t great – I’ve already got a tiny chip out of the casing from just leaving it in my bag, and there’s barely a mark on my two year old iPod Touch.

The winning quality is really the price. On Talk Mobile, I get 1Gb of data 200 mins, 200 txts for 12 quid: stunning. That’s just £288 which can’t be much more than the phone cost to produce.

Android

I’m a big fan of iOS, but I’m not a real fanboy of any platform – I use Windows, OS-X and Linux, and like them all. In the premiership, I want all the teams to win – at least until Saints get back into the league. I’ve voted for most of the main political parties and will probably complete a full house next time around. So where Android lacks the fancy animations of iOS and doesn’t feel as squidgey, it takes a more holistic approach. Thus, when it finds two contacts with the same name, it asks you to associate them. You click a link in one app, and it takes you seamlessly to another. You log into Google from a completely new app, and it doesn’t ask for your password. You end up in some strange app, press the back button and you’re back in the previous app. This integration seems to go pretty deep, hinting at fathoms of API coverage. I really want to get into programming Android; I suspect the learning curve will be significant.

So in summary, another good OS to choose from.

I just bought my first mobile! I’ve had a couple of other pay-as-you-go mobiles for emergencies, but they rarely get switched on. This is a proper smartphone, with a real contract and no need to learn predictive texting (I bet successfully on never having to learn that horrible technology). This one has the benefit of being only £12 a month, and because Android can be used as a mobile wi-fi hotspot, I can use it with my iPad. I love it when you can kill several winged animals with a single projectile. Now, on with the hacking.

Computer security is a bit like climate change. Everyone knows it’s a problem, but it doesn’t affect them. I just did an online training course today about what not to do with your computer. One question was so dumbfoundingly out-of-date that it is worth repeating. It asked what I should do if a black dot appeared on my screen, a clear indication that I had received a “computer virus”. Now, I don’t know if most people realise this, but if your computer gets infected with malware nowadays, it is most likely to financially motivated, and not at all in the malware author’s interest to notify you via a “black dot”. My company should have been warning me about social network based attacks, such as this one.

Also, Apple has convinced many mac users that they are more secure than Windows users. This is not entirely accurate. Now, back in the ’90s just after I installed Windows XP, I got a worm within 5 seconds. I knew exactly what I’d done wrong – I’d plugged the network cable into the modem directly and not into the router – had I been more careful and plugged it into the router, I’d have had firewall protection, which Windows XP lacked. Guess what, OS X ships with a very powerful firewall, but it’s disabled by default. One interesting titbit from the article:

The UNIX design came from a time when security was less of an issue and not taken as seriously as it did, and so does the job adequately. Windows NT (and later OSes) were actually designed with security in mind and this shows. Windows was not such a target for malware because of its poor security design; it is because the security functionality was never used.

I don’t mind which platform I use, they’re all pretty insecure. The weakest link is the human being.