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CRITgroup Blog

Monday, April 30th, 2012

Six months since the seminal meeting, MadLab felt very much like ‘home’ for the fourth group meeting. Five of us came along this month and there were plenty of varied projects to cover with some interesting debates being generated in many cases.

James Pashley started by sharing the exciting news that he has now confirmed an offer of employment working as a teaching assistant in Japan! He will be working as part of a cultural exchange programme to support English teaching beginning in late July or early August. While his insights and contributions will be missed in meetings, we are all looking forward to seeing his new website, which we briefly discussed, and to hearing updates on his experiences via his new blog. Meanwhile I am wondering if this means we can now label CRITgroup as an international art collective…! (more…)

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The Boot Strapping Startup Show and Tell Night

Friday, March 16th, 2012

Last week Josh and I “launched” Northology at the very friendly Social Media Cafe. Friendly until I mentioned that we weren’t really going to be covering web design and social media companies but concentrating on Technology Startups. The crowd turned against us and I only just escaped with my life!

Tonight I’m at Manchester MadLab for the Boot Strap Business Club “Show and Tell” event which is all about tech companies who are making new products and services which are able to pay for them selves from day one. Here’s the “live” blog. Please comment below or email me nathan@nathanrae.co.uk with any comments or corrections I need to make. (more…)

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Doodler – Instant Interaction Experiment

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Here at LOVE Labs we’ve been experimenting with bringing physical spaces to digital life.
We wanted to make installations that anyone with a smartphone can interact with over 3G or WiFi, without downloading an app. And we did it.

With the help of Socket.IO and node.js we wrote a server application (we like to call this “Mo”) that bridges the gap between smartphone web browsers and real-time, multi-user experiences.

Doodlr is our first idea built using Mo. It’s a collaborative drawing game that was projected onto a shop window*. Each image drawn was captured and posted to our Flickr Gallery.

There’s plenty Mo to come, so keep an eye out for other examples that are currently in development. But in the meantime, check out these happy (and slightly tipsy) Doodlrs making their mark in the heart of Manchester.

* Thanks to MadLab for the shop window!

*The post was written by the team at LOVE (lovecreative.com)

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Event Review: Coding Intro with Codeacademy

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

Last week, Manchester Girl Geeks held their “Intro to Coding Workshop” hosted by Kat Reeve (@BinaryKitten). We dove right in, first with a bit of history and background to where coding came from, then we got hands-on with our laptops and iPads. The level of concentration was intense and you could hear the synapses firing as we set our keyboards ablaze with all the tapping and typing we did with Codeacademy.

Codeacademy is a new interactive way to learn programming by completing guided exercises online. It is a great initiative but sometimes it can still be a bit daunting to get started. The Manchester Girl Geeks workshop helped pool people together to provide an encouraging atmosphere to get on it. With an army of volunteers milling about the top floor of MadLab to our 30+ participants, everyone felt confident that they would have help when they needed it. We learned about confirming/denying, variables, numbers and strings, editor and arrays and creating “what if” statements. Fuelled with tea and cake, there were not any challenges we couldn’t overcome!

Check out our storify to hear what others had to say and to see the kind impact we made with our new coding comrades both at and beyond our event!

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OpenPCR at DIYBIOMCR

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

DIYBIOMCR February was a team building workshop, putting together an OpenPCR. We had about 20 attendees from various backgrounds (even one from Birmingham!) interested in DIYBio. Here is Dan Hett’s summary of what happened.

Last week’s DIYBio was a special event, to get stuck into building a couple of PCR machines. In addition to our home-made one, we also got our hands on what we think is the first OpenPCR machine in the UK.

Getting a bit ahead of myself though. What is PCR?

PCR is a relatively simple and inexpensive tool that you can use to focus in on a segment of DNA and copy it billions of times over. So, even with a small DNA sample, such as from spitting in a tube, or tearing off a piece of a leaf of lettuce, PCR allows to you make a bunch of copies of the DNA so you have enough to analyze. PCR is used every day to diagnose diseases, identify bacteria and viruses, match criminals to crime scenes, and in many other ways.

(more…)

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