Our dedicated disk cloning machine at work, deploying disk images for the Centre upgrade for The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.
We used a LiveCD Debian environment via CloneZilla.
Rowland Emett was a cartoonist for Punch magazine, artist, inventor and builder of whimsical, mechanical machine in the ’50s and ’60s. Some of his more famous work to younger generations are the car and inventions that appeared in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But to older generations his ‘Emettland’, ‘Much Baking Halt’, ‘Featherstone Kite’ and many other weird and wonderful mechanical devices stick in the memory.
With a few exceptions like the Emett Clock in the Victoria Shopping Centre, Nottingham and another clock in Basildon, there is little of his work on permanent display in the UK. Exhibitions of his machines can be seen in the US and Canada in both permanent and seasonal exhibitions but much in the UK is in private collections only rarely being seen in public.
For the first time in decades, many are now on display at the Birmingham Museum of Art in a special exhibition from 12th May until 26th September before being exhibited in other museums including the Science Museum in London. Birmingham, as Emett’s birthplace was chosen for the first showing.
In preparing this exhibition, and work by the Emett Society in their restoration, it was found that most of the electrical control systems that controlled working sections were either missing or simply beyond repair to bring in to operation. In particular, his’ grand piece de resistance’, “A quiet afternoon in cuckoo valley” which was his latest and largest sculpture had not been seen in public since the great exhibition of 1951.
To bring these back to life for the exhibition, DirectionForward were commissioned to develop a modern computerised control system, originally for the ‘A quiet afternoon…’, but later for all the machines on display, and thereafter to also control the individual musical accompaniments for each.
We developed bespoke software written in Visual C that drives a USB controller board connected to a laptop PC that in turn is connected to various components of the automata. This is highly flexible and adaptable and is easily monitored and controlled by museum staff.
Rather unusual, but Evernote will experience some downtime today. 10pm-1am BST.
Hi,
To make your Evernote experience faster and more reliable, we will be upgrading servers between 2pm and 5pm PT on Thursday, May 8th. We expect this process to take about 30 minutes. You may not be able to use some Evernote features during this time.
In particular, you might not be able to sync, use Evernote Web or the Web Clipper, or access some of your notes on mobile devices. The desktop versions of Evernote should continue to function without syncing. If you need to use Evernote during this period, we recommend that you sync your notes prior to 2pm. Premium users may consider downloading important notebooks to their phones or tablets.
As always, you can check the status of the Evernote servers and read about planned maintenance at http://status.evernote.com.
The Evernote Team
We are pleased to announce the fully integrated small office setup at Metrostarmedia, including discreetly hidden cabling via trunking and ports/sockets. We successfully installed secure branded Wi-Fi along with everything needed for the desktop.
We hope they will be very happy with their new fibre optic internet connection and networked multi-function printer scanner too.
See the full article on Endgaget here.
In a security alert released on Saturday, Microsoft reports that there’s a serious vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 through 11 that could allow hackers to take over your computer remotely if you happen to visit a malicious website. According to security firm FireEye, it has already found evidence of an attack that targets IE 9 through 11 that uses a well-known Flash exploitation technique to gain access to your computer’s memory.
See our Newsletter here for advice on which passwords to change following this week’s announcement of the Heartbleed bug.
The Advertising Creative Circle Awards and Ball 2014 took place on 13th March, at the Roundhouse. Steve and Mal were in attendance for the wonderful night.
DirectionForward help the Circle with their website, online presence, e-newsletters and marketing throughout the year. We also curate the database on the HTML5 website which presents all shortlisted entries to the Awards, showcasing searchable images, radio clips and videos.
The results for the 2014 Awards will be live at creativecircle.co.uk on Monday.
We are enjoying working hard at the Stephen Lawrence Centre to continue upgrading their existing hardware with the latest software.
Successfully we have upgraded 41 PCs from 1GB to 8GB of RAM for only circa £100 per machine, and are now ready to upgrade all their systems to the 64bit Windows Operating Systems.
We are currently upgrading The Stephen Lawrence Centre in SE London. With our innovative plan we were able to maximise use of their existing hardware; having assessed and audited the current setup, this includes maximum capacity RAM upgrades, moving to 64bit Windows Operating Systems, and the latest software packages such as Office 2013 and Autodesk 2014.
This way, in the advent of Windows XP’s End of Life on 8th April this year, the Centre does not need to immediately invest in an entirely new hardware purchase and fit. The existing systems have been given a further 18 months of working life. And the Centre can plan and fundraise for new hardware during this time.
The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion. We all use visual cues to navigate and understand the world around us; often subconsciously we learn objects positions almost effortlessly.
This awareness of space and motion is fundamental to the way we interact with our environment and each other. We are physical beings that live in a 3D world; Johnny Lee and the ATAP-Project Tango Team have worked hard to achieve this for our mobile devices.
Click here to view the video and read more: http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/.
Although this does all remind us of something from The Dark Knight Rises…
