Flagons Den

I have had the CatCam since the 11th of December and unfortunately it stoppped working on the 12th of December.  I have been playing email tennis with a jeurgen perthold from North Carolina USA, the proprietor since then trying to get a replacement camera or controller chip to remedy the fault.  I have so far only recieved assurances that he will send one - but when is a mystery.

So since the fault - I have been waiting to start the project properly as I have only taken one mornings footage with the camera.  I will have to wait and see.

subversion

For the Critical Context show we are currently looking at the concept of unbranding - to raise critical awareness of consumerism and the role of corporations within society. We will hopefully create a free from trade zone - as an antithesis to free trade zones created by corporations to outsource cheap factory production of branded goods. Each person on the module has to create their own project and then as a group we need to create a public exhibition of the outcomes - thematically linked.

I will pursue my Apathist Cookbook idea - with the addition of podcasts for easy consumption of the consumerist message.

I went to HMC today to look at their stash of goodies to see if I could borrow some kit for my presentation - they have an RFID reader and some touchscreens, an infrared scanning light and some tracking cameras, so if I need anything they very generously offered me any of the above.  However while describing my project idea, it became apparent that i could also use existing student ID cards, and so would only need a barcode reader.

UoP ID card

I checked online and I could get one for about £25 - I also need to find out what the barcode actually would display once read - if it is the student ID number I could use that in the same way I would have used an RFID tag number.   Also, as this is a conceptual model and not a working database of all students I could also pre-populate the info to be displayed based on what I can gather from the net and from uni info, for say everyone on my course - if I cant work out a search algorithm to find it on tap.  It may be worth asking the university what info is on the cards as is - to see what I could harvest from a single swipe.