Today a meeting was held at Ultralab for the planning of the Create at BETT feature stand at the BETT Show which is held at Olypia each January.

For the past five years Ultralab have collaborated with Apple Computer and other partners to create the most exciting stand for digital creativity.

This year we are excited about BBC Blast! who are joining in with us, Ultralab have worked together with BBC Blast in the past, Ultralab have worked with many departments and units across BBC Television, Radio and Online over the years.

‘Create at BETT’ will continue to be the only stand at the BETT show with actively involves children in demonstrating some of the creative potential of new and emerging software and hardware technologies.

Yesterday morning I had 9599 photographs on my Apple Mac being served up by the iPhoto application.

I love iPhoto, its a great application enabling me to be very creative over how I display share and manage my photographs….

….or is it?

iPhoto is rubbish on the ‘duplicate’ front, over the years since I’ve migrated from ‘Milhouse’ to ‘SuperTed’ and now ‘Elwood’ (at Ultralab, we name our Macs!) with some migrations from ‘Captain Birdseye’ and even ‘Jolly Roger’ more and more of my pictures have been duplicated and imported, so in some cases, I’ve got the same picture three, or even four times in my iPhoto library.

Most of the rogue images are from my phone camera’s, where iPhoto has imported them many many times, even when I ask iPhoto not to import duplicates.

Working through over 9500 images trying to identify the images which were duplicates would have been no easy task, in fact, I’ve been looking for a better solution for about two years, to tackle that massive library and identify and remove those rogue copies…

I started by manually removing ‘thumbs’ which, had for some bizarre reason, in all the upgrades and system migrations, become photographs in their own right.

I dared not go through the rest of the library, looking for those copies, so I went looking for a software solution, prepared to even pay if need be, but I found some freeware!

I finally found and managed to do the job and now have only 7750 images in my iPhoto library.

I downloaded and installed iPhoto Diet by Martin Fuhrer, iPhoto Diet is an freeware Applescript Studio application for use with Apple’s iPhoto.

iPhoto Diet is a utility that helps to slim down your iPhoto library by manipulating your photos in the following ways:

• eliminate duplicate photos created internally by iPhoto or imported by yourself
• remove iPhoto’s backups of rotated or modified photos
• strip the thumbnail icons of your photos
• remove thumbnail photos that have become mixed up with your high resolution photos
• identify photos which have not been added to albums
• weed out unnecessary folders and files from the library
• and more!

Great one Martin Fuhrer. I love the way iPhoto Diet works with iPhoto and I can visually seeing it dealing with each picture in iPhoto one at a time. I started the iPhoto diet at around 8pm, it had just finished by about 1am.

I strongly suggest everyone reads the instructions carefully before making any decisions as to photograph removal, as there is no going back once you’ve deleted them from the iPhoto trash bin!

Every now and again we have a bad experience with a company or organisation which we part money with, who then either don’t deliver on what they said they would, produce a product which does not do what it says on the tin, or operate a call centre which requires the pressing of button 2 then 3 then 2 again and *0 to talk to a human thirty minutes later (because your call is very important to them, hut-hum) followed by a brief chat with someone who then transfers you through to someone else, who transfers you to someone else, who cuts you off.

If you’ve ever had any of the above, welcome to Britian.

Anyway, my good University buddy and Colleague, Mr. Tom Stacey has started to blog bad customer service, bad initiatives and simply poor service from our nationals major corporations.

I had a moan about mobile telephone network o2 recently, 63 people have clicked the article and read the entire article it at this moment in time. We all have our gripes.

Take a look at what Tom has to say about discount telephone calls.

So why blog about it? Fact of the matter is that blogging has become the people’s voice, the real persons opportunity to say and write what they think, blogging has become the Watchdog of the Internet, real people, real experiences.

You only have to know that Hollywood is scared of this man because what he writes about films really has an impact on box offices globally, and he’s been blogging for years.

But life aint all bad, we should share great experiences with those that take our money too!

I love my Sony Ericsson K750i. The quality of the camera is awesome. The phone is very powerful. Prior to the K750i I had a K700i, which also had a camera, I found I’d take lots of pictures with it, having a camera phone allows you to take pictures you’d not usually take, due to lack of camera. What I’m finding with both the K700i and the K750i is the pictures I take are ‘real life’ pictures, pictures of everyday events, not just birthdays and christmas and the family holiday.

The advent of digital technology means I take more pictures, I don’t worry about the cost of development because I don’t print them unless I want to. I don’t worry about taking the shot, because I can retake and take again. With a camera phone I’m catching pictures which might not mean much when I take them, but will mean a lot when looking back in years to come, such as my young cousins on Witham’s River Walk, or my parents cleaning out their pond. Digital photography has made it easier and more cost effective to capture those moments, mobile phones with cameras has made it possible to capture those moments all the time, I always have my phone with me, I’m catching moments in time I’ll appreciate the chance to look back on in the future.

So my girlfriend is now snap happy with my old K700i, she takes loads of abstract pictures, mainly in black and white, she’s really artistic with it, far more than I was. So with Jus now shooting away with my old K700i, I now have an upgrade, the K750i, sent to me brand new for renewing my contract with my mobile telephone company. How excited was I to have a USB cable? An easy way of getting my pictures onto my Mac. I love it, I plug in my K750i by USB to my Mac, iPhoto opens, and it imports my latest pictures, fantastic.

Once imported, I dismount my K750i, and unplug it, and then something very rare happens, my Apple Mac running OSX Tiger (10.4) crashes. The Kernal Panics, it dies, I have to restart, machine frozen, no way out, oh bleep.

Not good.

Bleep bleep bleep.

Various ‘Software Updates’ have come and gone, but still no fix from Apple to repair the damage, to make my K750i dismount from my Mac.

I’ve gone off and done some research, and its thanks to these guys that I found and installed K750iGrabber the fix I’ve been looking for.

I simply Download K750iGrabber and install it, I restart my Mac, and I now my K750i dismounts without crashing my machine.

Bingo, now I love my K750i even more, the movie quality for shooting film is also awesome.

I’m sure this blog post will excite Ultralab Director, Richard Millwood and Jonathan Furness who also are big fans of the K750i.

Right now I’m in Bangkok, in a big hotel, with wireless internet access, trouble is, we have to pay for that access, at 770 Baht per day.

Google Says that 770 Thai baht = 10.7550263 British pounds

That is a lot of money for 24 hours on the Internet. With the UK being six hours behind, Jonathan and I spend a lot of time emailing and dealing with UK work demands after we’ve done a day already in Thailand. Internet is our life blood to stay in touch and up to date with our organisation.

Jonathan and I are working for the British Council, Thailand on some Digital Creativity Workshops, and we’re in Bangkok to work out of the Thai Knowledge Park for the third week of the workshops, Jonathan heads out to New Zealand soon, I’ll be working the workshop with David from the British Council.

Contacting home has been a real challenge for us, and at Ultralab we love a challenge.

Ultralab is constantly looking for new ways of using technology in teaching and learning, and through this exploration we’ve experimented with some pretty cool software.

On Monday, in Phuket I joined a telephone conference hosted in Skype, the free telephone service for making voice calls over the Internet. In the conference were a project partner from Suffolk, a project partner from Wales, Director of Ultralab, Richard Millwood and myself in Phuket. The line was crystal clear and we were able to send and share files quickly and easily, even text chat as we held the conference, we were all very impressed.

The other cool thing experimented with Skype was a three way call between my girlfriend, myself and my parents. My parents were on a standard telephone, while Jus (using Skype too!, an avid Mac user) and I (using Skype in Phuket) were able to talk with crystal clear sound, and all of us could talk and hear each other like we were all in the same room. My parents both picked up a phone in the house, and joined in the chat.

So, big thumbs up to Skype and the SkypeOut service which allows Skype users to buy credit and call land based telephone lines (like my parents), as much of the call is routed through the Internet as possible, meaning when I call Jus or the Parents on a land line, I only pay the UK rate.

Was amazing to conduct a telephone call with two Skype users and a land line customer! Thanks Skype.

I’ve also fallen in love with GMail the free email service which is provided by Google (the search engine people).

GMail allows me to send emails with unlimited attachment sizes, and also has excellent spam filters and ways of sorting and stacking email.

One of the best features of GMail is that it does not add advertisements and links at the bottom of sent mail, and allows POP access in order to manage email through an email application such as Mail.

The coolest thing I’ve now discovered is that when I send an email from Mail using my GMail account GMail then stores a copy of the sent email within GMail on the Internet, within my online account. How cool is that? This therefore means that I am able to delete all the sent mail from my Apple computer, save space, and still know that messages are stored safely somewhere (not taking up my space) should I need to go and find them at a later date.

Loving GMail.

The other great thing about GMail is the attachment sizes is not restrictive. I’ve been able to send video home and to Jus without worrying that the video will not get through, both Andrew (my brother) and Jus have GMail accounts, so I know they are getting the pictures and video’s I’m sending.

The next great tool I’m going to rave about before going to bed today is iChat. Wow. Apart from some connectivity problems associated to the hotel I was staying in in Phuket, iChat Video rocks. Hopefully I’ll be able to use it from this hotel just fine.

Sorry I’ve been all quiet on the blog front, things have been busy over in Thailand where Ultralab’s Jonathan Furness and myself have been working on a digital creativity workshop project for the British Council Thailand.

We’ve been having an amazing time out here, based out of Phuket working with Children from the town of Pattani, a seven hour drive away. We arrived last Sunday, and are staying in a resort hotel, with lots of swimming pools and a really nice atmosphere.

Our objective is to give opportunity to young Muslim children who have no experience in the potential of digital media. We’re interested in how they will cope with a tough challenge, with no skills in the area of digital film technology. What we’ve discovered in the past week is that children with absolutely no experience with technology, fly with it.

Photographs of Matthew Eaves and Jonathan Furness of Ultralab in Phuket Thailand working with young people at a Digital Creativity Workshop for the British Council

The young people spent a day with us learning how to use Apple’s iMovie application, a free programme which allows users to make a movie very easily with an Apple computer and a digital video camera.

We set the young people (aged between 15 and 17) the challenge to make their first movie by the end of the day, a challenge which was well received and produced exceptionally high standard work (in comparison with previous Summer School projects).

The young people then went on to learn Garage Band (to make their own music) and iStopMotion (to make stop frame animations).

The Muslim Thai children who are working on the project have a real hunger to learn and are keen to push the technology. Rus, one of the female young people on the project commented: “I’ve been learning how to make movies, and I always wondered how Television was made, and now I know”.

We’ve had an amazing time so far, and week 2’s children are just as capable, and creative as week 1’s. The language barrier is not an issue, the children are extremely resourceful, and incredibly talented at demonstrating their potential.

I wonder what young people who’ve not ever touched computers for creative purpose, or even a video camera could do in a month, considering the outstanding ‘Points of View’ movies they created in just five days.

On a less serious note, Jonathan and myself have had a great time relaxing in the pool, on the beach, para-gliding and riding on an elephant.

We love Phuket! Many thanks to the British Council, I’ll write more research findings at the end of the project, consider the above a taster.

Now go look at the photo’s