Miss Geeky Elsewhere

• Meet The Disrupt Europe London Hackathon Judges: Yep, I’m one of the judges at this weekend’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. I’m looking forward to see what hacks people will come up with!
• For Ada Lovelace Day: the women who inspire us at FutureLearn: It was Ada Lovelace Day yesterday! I coordinated this post on the FutureLearn blog and wrote my own section about Paula Clerkin, who’s organising the upcoming Women In Tech conference at the University of Nottingham.
• 6 reasons we love our home at the British Library: I wrote this post 2 months back for the FutureLearn blog, but realised I had never shared it here. I love working form the British Library.
• TweetTracks: I attended and spoke at Hackference a few weeks back: a Friday conference followed up by a hackday in the weekend. I built TweetTracks, a Spotify playlist generated from your tweets, and it won the Best Contextual Experience Using the DataTXT APIs prize! More about that in a future post.
• WeddingLy.st: I created this hack at BattleHack last weekend together with Lily,
  Kevin and Ian. It was so much fun working with them and although we didn’t win anything, I really love our idea.
• My DDD: Disney Driven Development slides:

Interesting Links

• The Bézier Game: I’ve never gotten the hang of the Bézier tool in Photoshop; this game attempts to help you master it.
• IamA underwater archaeologist: Awesome reddit Q&A thread with underwater archaeologist Peter Campbell. After reading that, I wish I had his job.
• As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters: “It didn’t always used to be this way. I used to only have sons. Things sure were different then. How merrily I used to drive down country lanes in my old Ford, periodically dodging off-road to mow down female pedestrians (you must remember I had no daughters then). Was what I did wrong? How was I to know? I had no daughters to think of.”
• Toothless by alicexz: Adorable painting of my favourite dragon:

• Cast as thou wilt: A look at who to cast for a potential Kushiel’s Legacy TV Show. I love the books, and it’s interesting seeing how other people imagine the characters.
• Tiny PMS Match: Fun Tumblr matching small everyday objects to their Pantone colours.
• Tampon Club: I was planning on doing something like this when I worked in a proper office, but can’t really at the British Library since we share our toilets with the public.
• Junior Designers vs Senior Designers: Interesting set of visuals to show the difference between the two.
• It Took Two Years To Make Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar In Minecraft: Woah. I’ve never wanted to play Minecraft before this, but woah. Here’s one of the screenshots:

• 2014 Ig Noble Prize Winners: my favourite has to be the “Response Behaviors of Reindeer towards Humans Disguised as Polar Bears”.
• 11 Must-See Agents of SHIELD Episodes You Have To Watch Before Starting Season 2: Want to start watching Agents of SHIELD, but don’t want to go through the entire (somewhat) boring first season? Here’s a list of which eps to check out.
• Collaborative User Testing: Less Bias, Better Research: Awesome post by my colleague Alla about the biases in user testing and how we deal with them.
• What It’s Like to Carry Your Nobel Prize through Airport Security: “And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’ ‘The King of Sweden.’”

Miss Geeky Elsewhere:

• Interview at FutureBook Hack: I was a judge and mentor at FutureBook Hack and got interviewed about hackdays!
• Running the British 10K: This Sunday I’ll be running the British 10K! I’m kind of dreading it by now. I’m running better than I did last year, but I still haven’t managed to hit 10k yet (I did 5k last weekend… just). We’re raising money for Computer Aid, a great charity that refurbishes old computers for non-profits and schools.
• Why run an internal hackday: I wrote my first post on the FutureLearn blog about how and why we ran our first internal hackday.
• My slides from Ladies Who Code: A couple weeks back I gave a talk at Ladies Who Code about my win at #AgileHack. Here are the slides:

Interesting links

• Programming Sucks: read this.
• The Loneliness of the Female Coder: What’s it really like to be the lone woman in a software team? Two women chart their secret emotional lives in tech.
• How a password changed my life: The following events occurred between ☹ and ☺.
• Stich and Toothless: I still haven’t seen How To Train Your Dragon 2, but Stich and Toothless are adorable together:

• Why Your Startup’s Culture Is Secretly Awful: Interesting interview with Shanley Kane about startup culture.
• Artist’s Notebook – Ramsey Nasser: how would an Arabic programming language look like?
• Responsive Icons: This is such a cute idea.
• A Maintainable Style Guide: Good post explaining some of the issues with style guides

• Distance to Mars: if the Earth were 100 pixels wide…
• The Economics of a Hit TV Show: A good analysis and history of the economics of cable TV shows, like Breaking Bad.
• Deliberate Git: How to write and organize your Git commits better.
• The Very Hungry Zombie: I so want this book:

• Why does HTML think ‘chucknorris’ is a color? I’m a bit disappointed that ‘missgeeky’ turns out blue.
  
• I Don’t Think You’re Ready For This, Jelly: Interesting article about experimenting with jellyfish in space
• Analyzing the Armor of Margaery Tyrell: I love Margaery’s costumes in Game of Thrones and this essay on them show just how much detail goes into designing them.
• What Each Country Leads The World In?: Cool infographic:

• Out of Skin: A creepy comic by Emily Carroll
• The Pixar Story: What if every Pixar movie was connected and part of the same universe?
• Forms in Nature: Cool lighting designs in the shape of trees.
• Disney Character Magazine Covers: What if Disney characters got their own magazine covers?

• Engineering the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony: It’s interesting to see a behind-the-scenes of the tech used during the opening ceremony.
• Mercator Puzzle: Simple browser game where you need to drag and drop the countries to their right spot.
• The Jane Austen Word List: Historical fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal wanted to get her vocabulary for the “Jane Austen” era right, so you created a spellcheck dictionary based on all the works of Jane Austen.
• Why I Play Violent Video Games: Interesting post by Maddy Myers about how she got into games. I came across the post through the awesome image “Gamer Girl” featured below.

• Presenting the Tron Basketball Court: My future mansion needs one of these. It’s a Tron-esque glass floor with embedded lighting elements. It looks awesome.
• The Panasonic Toughpad Press Conference: A hungover not-a-tech-journalist covers a tech press conference.
• The Cabin In The Woods Title Sequence: Interview with director Drew Goddard and main title designers Jarik van Sluijs and Pamela B. Green. There’s so much detail in this title sequence and it’s great hearing about how it evolved.
• Catcase: Is it bad that I want one of these? It’s a bookcase with internal cat shelves:

• 50 Amazing Photos from Cat Heaven Island: Continuing with cats, these photos are adorable.
• Birds on Twitter: Cool project where someone hooked up an old keyboard-turned-birdfeeder to a twitter account.
• A Pickpocket’s Tale: The spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins.
• PokeNoir: I so want this to continue.

• James Bond: Cars, catchphrases and kisses – Cool infographic on the BBC showing for each Bond movie the number of woman kissed, the number of times he says “Bond, James Bond” and the number of villains killed.
• Batman – The Tailor: where do all the supervillains from comics get their customes from?
• Incredibly Charismatic Animal Portraits by Tim Flach: Gorgeous photos.
• Hello Again, Halley’s Comet: simple, but quite moving:

• “Why Here?”: Great post from Sizemore about the first four minutes of SE7EN.
• Superhero Bodies and What Real Athletes Look Like: The Olympics showed just how varied the body shapes of athletes can be; more varied than the characters in most comics. How should specific super heroes look like and what athletic body type would suit them?
• The Mu Folding Plug: I hate how big and lumpy the UK plug is, this design would be so handy!
• Tim Burton’s Pokemon:

• Extraordinary Travel Destinations Off The Beaten Path: Wow, all these places are gorgeous!
• Science World – We Can Explain: This campaign from Vancouver’s science museum is so fun! They placed interesting ads (some of them interactive) all over Vancouver.
• Distribution of Colours in Movie Posters Between 1914 and 2012: This guy took 35000 movie posters and analyzed their colour distribution.
• 5 Brands That Understand Marketing On Instagram: I’ve only just started using Instagram, but it’s interesting to see how different companies can use it for marketing.

• The “Western” Godfather: Great interview with Kurt Russell about his role in Tombstone.
• Scientists discover new cave spider species… with claws!: Meet the Trogloraptor, a new family, genus and species in the world of spiders. It’s amazing how it’s been around for so long and hadn’t been discovered before now; makes you wonder what else is out there that we don’t know about yet.
• The Emotions of the Olympics, in real-time: cool visualization of sentiment analysis during the Olympics.
• The 50 Best Images of the London 2012 Olympic Games: Awesome photos.

• Out of Step: “Female gymnasts used to be fantastic dancers. How did the floor exercise get so graceless?”
• Disney develops “face cloning” technique for animatronics: Cool post about how Disney is researching techniques to combine 3D digital scanning and silicone skins to give animatronic robots more realistic facial expressions.
• 6 Terrible Decisions That Gave Us Great Movie Moments: Wow, I knew about the Star Wars one, but not about the other movies.
• Uncharted Teaser Poster: Photoshopped, but I’d so love to see Nathan Fillion in this role!

• Let’s Take A Closer Look At Marvel’s New ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’: I haven’t read any of the comics, so it was interesting to read about the different characters we can expect in this new Marvel movie.
• Why, Yes, Websites Can Be Turned Into Lovely Dresses: I want a YouTube or Google dress!
• Why are Americans so…?: Great visualization of the answers that Google Autocomplete suggest when typing in “Why is [state] so…”
• Vintage objects make for a stunning steampunk NYC home: Love the parachute ceiling in the bedroom.

Upcoming Events:

• July Sandpit – Movement and Spectacle (Sunday 15th July): Come along to Holland Park (in the Orangery, between Kensington High Street and Notting Hill) from 2:00-5:30pm on Sunday 15 July, for a free afternoon of games around the themes of movement and spectacle. I love the Sandpit events, I’m hoping it will be good weather!
• Geeks of London Movie Club (Monday 16th July): We’re organizing the first GoL Movie club meetup! The idea is to meetup at Wagamama’s near the O2 for some dinner first and then to see The Amazing Spiderman at the Cineworld’s Skyscreen.
• London Web – Sidestep and Twist: Interesting looking meetup with James Gardner, author of the book Sidestep and Twist. I met James a few years ago when he spoke about innovation at Lloyds (where he worked at the time) at a GeekDinner I had helped organize.
• The Genius of Hitchcock (August – September): The BFI Southbank are showing all Hitchcock’s movies. Now I’ve only seen Psycho and Rear Window… *waits for people to get outraged*… Calmed down again? Which movies would you suggest I have to see?

Links:

• Summer School for Geeks – 11 New Sci-fi and Fantasy Books: Great list of books coming out this summer. I’ve already finished one of those and two are on my wish list, but I’ll have to check out the other ones.
• Video Games, I’ve Let You Down: Interesting post on explaining games to non-gamers.
• How Movie Theatres Should Be Laid Out: Harsh, but a part of me wishes that this was true.
• Interview with Text From Dog: I love Text From Dog! Some of his texts are brilliantly hilarious, and this interview with him gives us a better understanding of his psyche.

• Reddit Unlocks the Secret of Cryptic Subway Code: A homeless looking man hands a cryptic looking note and a $50 bill to a Reddit user, who then tries to figure out what the hell the code means.
• My #1 Cause of Back Problems: As usual, Cat vs Human is so spot on!
• Cosmo’s 44 Most Ridiculous Sex Tips: Made me laugh.
• Martin’s BarCamp Berkshire Photos: Martin always takes great photos and we asked him if he could take photos of all the crew during the weekend. The photos turned out great!

• Moneyball 2.0: How Missile Tracking Cameras Are Remaking the NBA: Great read on how analytics are changing basketball. Data mining FTW!
• Science Museum’s Codebreaker Challenge: Cute code breaking game to promote the exhibition about Alan Turing at the Science Museum.
• Paper Birds and Wildlife: Pretty birds and other animals made from only paper.
• A Geek Venn Diagram: I wasn’t expecting that:

Here are some cool and interesting links I’ve came across the past week:

• Whatever Happened To The Original Cast of ‘Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers’?: I knew what Amy Jo Johnson went on to do, but it’s interesting to see what happened to the others.
• Space Archaeology’s Prometheus Review: I totally agree with this; a lot of what was wrong with Prometheus comes from having stupid scientists.
• What If Things Had Ended… Differently? FED by Mira Grant: Mira Grant gives us a glimpse of what could have been the ending of Feed. I’m glad she didn’t go this way though; I much prefer the actual ending.
• Pocket Princesses: Awesome comic series from Amy Mebberson featuring the Disney princesses living together. It’s currently on hiatus, but they’re so funny, I hope it returns soon!

• Joss Whedon’s Interview with Rutherford D. Actualperson: Awesome letter from Joss to his fans about The Avengers.
• The 22 Rules of Storytelling According to Pixar: Storyboard artist Emma Coats tweeted a list of storytelling rules that’s she learnt while at Pixar.
• The Git Rap: “I won’t git merge your branch if the code is bad, your pull request has no tests and you know that’s sad”
• Paramount Celebrates 100 Years of Glory on Cool Gallery 1988 Poster: Awesome poster with 104 movies. How many movies can you recognize? Here’s just 9 of them:

• Hangman – You’ve Probably Been Playing It Wrong!: What order of letters should you use while playing hangman? This post actually looks at the frequencies of letters in words from a dictionary and shows how you should play.
• Valve’s Handbook For New Employees: Valve looks like such an amazing place to work!
• Toy Adword Wordclouds: Visualization of the words used in ads for toys. Guess which one is for boys an which for girls. It’s from more than a year ago, but still interesting to see (and I predict there wouldn’t have been any drastic changes in the past year for it to be massively different now).

• The Floppy Disk Means Save and 14 Other Old People Icons That Don’t Make Sense Anymore: I don’t agree with all the examples he gives, but there are definitely some icons which might seem a bit strange nowadays.
• Museum of Endangered Sounds: Cool idea, but I’m kind of disappointed that the dial-up sound of modems isn’t among them.
• Why I Write “Strong Female Characters”: Good post from comic book writer Greg Rucka.

I’ve been quite quiet the past couple of months, mainly because of a combination of working hard and being sick (I bumped my head pretty bad 4 weeks ago, but I’m fine now). I’m trying to get back into the habit of blogging, but it’s so much trickier now that I a “proper” job. Still I’ll try to post at least once a week.

Now on to the cool stuff! Here is a roundup of interesting things I’ve come across:

• Hackathon Survival Guide: I got interviewed 2 weeks ago by the awesome Jamillah Knowles about surviving hackdays. The article turned out great!
• Fictional Character Birthday Calendar: With which fictional character do you share your birthday with? I share mine with Dana Scully!
• Wear Sherlock: A blog about the fashion and props used in Sherlock. I so want Irene Adler’s white dress:

• Spice Effect: For all you Garrus fans out there.
• The Indoctrination Theory (Mass Effect 3): I still want to believe that this theory is true, but that it backfired on Bioware completely. Even if it turns out to be right, I think the fan backlash would be awful. I’d rather believe that it was a plan that went wrong, rather then it being a really crappy written ending.
• The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores In The World: Library porn. Drool.
• My Little Geek ABC Book: Awesome idea!

• Cheese or Font?: Trickier than you’d think!
• Pokemon or Startup?: I have to admit this was pretty easy for me, but only because I could pick out the pokemons…
• An Extra Life On… Martin Scorsese’s Hugo: Cool post about what it is to be an extra.
• Map of Italy: This is such a cool way to prettify your walls:

Interesting stuff I’ve come across this week:

• Cat vs Human: spot on. Most mornings at around 6am the cats will start being annoying. Well, it’s mainly just one of them (Casey), but he’ll start knocking off stuff from my bedside table or the table in our living room. The best way to get them quiet again is to give a bit of food, but sometimes even that won’t help. Btw, if you’re based in San Francisco, Cat vs Human will have a book signing there on November the 9th!
• Star Trek Quiet Book: Aw, this is just too cute!
• Why Cleavage Is Bad For Crime Fighting: I completely agree. Some outfits would just be so unpractical!
• The Prestige of Being a Web Developer: Great presentation/blog post from Christian Heilmann on how the three acts of magic tricks can be applied to web development.
• The Surprising Science Behind Smiles: Interesting Wired interview about smiles (I used a lot of the same theory in my research).