Her Wonderland blog is on lots of people list of gaming blogs worth reading. Her work at the BBC and Channel 4 showing how gaming can be used by a traditional broadcaster both for entertainment and education, all long before the current gamification buzz.

In between all this she also created the avatar service stortroopers, which is still online. Her current project MakieLab, a startup developing customisable, 3D-printed, game-enabled toys, sounds very interesting so far. I can’t wait to see the results.

Skud also deserve a special mention for her tireless work and thoughtful comments in the nymwars.

Previously 2009 and 2010.

So the orginal Three MiFi did sound quite useful but the lack of display and being a little fiddlyly to use put me off. So when I heard about the new version having seemed to address most of these problems, that reingnited my interest with two very positive reviews from Hayles and Ian Betteridge.

Delivery
I ordered online one evening going though quidco for some cashback (£12 currently on pay as you go) thinking I would put it towards some data allowance. The one minor annoyance I has with Three was only being able to dellivery to the registered address of the credit card used, monday to Friday 8am to 9pm, so I would normally be at work for most of that time. As it happened someone else in my flats was around, so I had the package waiting for me when I got back from Work.

Setup
This was painless, the unit is well packaged in a small box about the size of 6 CDs. Inside you get all the normal guide and manuals and the SIM Card plus some very nice little cards explaining how to fit the SIM and battery and charge the device. The charging is over micro USB like many of the latest phones with a short and long cable provided alongside a single port USB power plug.

I had a pleasant surprise ass the unit connected straight away, a quick look at the nicely laided out web console showed the SIM came with 1GB of data to get me started, a nice touch. Changing the SSID and password are all straight toward as was checking the blaance on my three account. Another nice touch is the signal strength and connection icons replicated on the web console.

Battery life
The OLED display switches off quite quickly with only the power buttons green glow to tell you the unit is active.

Coverage
At home, I get a nice strong HSPCA signal with about 256K download, so more than enough for twitter,email, rss feeds, even in the evening the speed seemed fine and left troubled with congestion than my main ADSL connection.

On Train, Derby to Nottingham was great, a decent signal all the way, so i was happily browsing a way. Brimingham new street to derby was a little more patchy. Bristol parkway to New Street was mostly no signal except in the main stations along the route. I’m not sure if the train moving quickly upsets the cell hand overs or if they just don’t have very good 3G coverage on that route. As a sidenote, I’d be happy to pay for on Train relible internet access but neither cross country (for Nottingham) or First Great western (for that London) offer this currently. Hopefully this will change soon.

At other times I’ve always got a decent signal, at lunchtimes at work, Bathcamp the other month or just out and about. Having a portable connection has proved very useful, recommended.

The term Fractal was coined by this man:

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924 – 2010)

He’s most famous for a simple equation:

f(z) = z² + c

where z and c are complex numbers

But we are much more used to seeing the equation like this

A definition of a Fractal:

A rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole

The fractal geometry of nature

Examples exist in natural, such as Romanesco broccoli:

One of the strange properties of Fractals is their dimension

Lines are one dimensional,

Boxes are two dimensional,

While a Fractal (In this case a Koch Curve) is one and a bit

So some other famous fractals:

Julia sets

This use the same equation as Mandelbrot Sets but instead of varying c for a fixed z, keeps c constant and varies z.

Lindenmayer systems

These follow a grammar, so are great at generating plants and trees.

Mandelbrot sets can also be extended into 3D to create a Mandelbulb

Also Julia Sets can be similarly extend into 4D space producing Quaternion Julia Sets, which can be raytraced on a modern GPU.

Menger sponge is another type of space filling curve like the Koch Curve above.

This video is of the 128 byte demo called Spongy by TBC, which has also been ported to a 512 byte Javascript version.

After the Mandelbrot set, other famous use of fractals is in generating terrain. An early example is Peak from 1980. They are also used in the genesis sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Fractals have not just found use in generating pretty pictures. The Space filling curves mentioned earlier have found a use in creating compact aerials in mobile devices. Iterated function systems like the previously mentioned Lindenmayer systems have been used for image compression but due to some early patents work has slowed because of the legal risks. Modelling financial markets is another application, originally proposed by Benoît Mandelbrot , which over the last few years has been enjoying renewed interest.

Rendering of fractal landscapes has also not stood still, with the power of modern hardware, much more realistic terrain can now be rendered in real time instead of to a film recorder as in the past, producing result like, Elevated by RGBA & TBC, a 4 kilobyte demo running on a normal PC.

For any technical people, one of the programmers gave a presentation on how the terrain is generated and rendered (PDF) if you are interested.

I have more links on the fractals tag on delicious is you want to explore some more.

For those who have not been following the games development, APB is an MMO created by Realtime Worlds, set in the near future where vigilantism have been legalised, so a big game of cops and robbers in an urban setting. You can play as ether an Enforcer or as a Criminal, with Clans and Parties, all normal MMO features. Dave Jones (creator of GTA) is one of the main people behind the game and Realtime Worlds, and off the back of Crackdown it has been much anticipated. It use a different payment model to most MMOs, playtime can be purchased per hour or 30 day unlimited (GameSetWatch has a nice article on the Psychology of this.)

All this is all based on the Keys to the City event, so only on ten hours or so game time, also this is the first MMO, I’ve experience apart from a little tour of Everquest by my brother in-law, so I may be a little off on common MMO features.

Stability
My PC is AMD Athlon X2 6400, 2gb ram, ATi 3800 512mb, so I’m at the lower end of the specification, especially for RAM, so your mileage may vary.

My stability has been poor, of the 12 or so time I’ve fired up the game, around half of them caused a reboot, which getting the latest hotfix drivers from ATi seemed to fix, most of the other had the game showing an error dialog and crash reporter, which in most cases I could not alt tab to. This seemed to happen when a larger number of players were close by, so I’m guessing this is the game running out of memory ( my task manager was
showing 2.16 gb used). One or two time I managed to play for as long as I wanted and leave the game normally. I was expecting the game to be more polished than this given its length of development and how long its been in beta.

Performance
Having said all that most of the time, my performance was fine (after I’d dropped the graphics level down a little), but I did hit some time where the lag made the game unplayable, trying to drive a car at high speed and not mow down people is very hard at two frame per second, the low frame rate also can make the fire fight less fun.

Visuals and Design
APB is pretty, the districts are nicely varied, with lots of areas to explore but still contained enough to be able to find your way around. You can see lots of nice little touches that create a believable city. The stunt ramps from GTA are also in evidence. I did see a number of graphical glitches, character appearing as the default model and then a few second later switch to the correct model. Animations also seem to be missing, with objects you carry
disappearing when you do certain actions, very alpha level.

Characters
As many other have said the character customisation is fantastic, the level of control, and the number of options is great. You also have the same level of control over your car, but that’s not something I really played yet.

Controls
As I’ve already said I’m not a big MMO player, more Battlefield and Left 4 Dead, so having to stop before switching weapon or performing an action seem to break the flow of the game for me, and meaning you need to plan action a little ahead of time. As for defusing bomb or checking a crime scene, most of the time you just need to press the action key (f by default) and waiting for the progress meter to fill up.

Driving
Some people have voiced their dislike of the car physics, but I found the arcade style fitted the game well. framerate and lag issues excepted, driving worked as I thought it should, getting a car onto two wheel seemed
to be in keeping with the whole Starsky & Hutch knockabout theme, weaving in and out of traffic was easy to pickup but could maybe do with being less springy.

Combat
Again setting aside the framerate issues. I did not like the combat, you only seem to have a single hitbox, so no headshots. It all feel far from fluid, even couching was clunky and a lot of the time it turned into just standing and pumping lead into each other.

Missions
The number of different mission is limited (also I only played as an Enforcer, so I have no idea what the CRiminal missions are like): Photograph a crime scene, Collect some stolen cars, Protect a location, Stop a criminal from escaping. So I could see them becoming boring quickly. Hopefully Realtime World’s have deeper missions as you progress in the game.

One particular pain, is they seem to promote camping at the final objective which can be very annoying With many the arenas for the final fights having design that allow the first player to arrive to control most of the area from high ground. Hopefully an update will address this giving a more tactical dimension to arenas.

Did I just waste 30 quid?
I really did want to like this game but it does not make it easy. I must say on my first play I was disappointed.

Crashes, lag, lacklustre combat. As a former game developer, I have some sympathy about the crashes, and Realtime Worlds do seem to be proactive having already put out one new build which did improve things. On the memory use side of things I have not seem anything that seem to warrant the amount of memory they use but I have not look in any great detail plus would not class this as a deal breaker. Performance and lag are being addressed and according to people from the closed beta only showed themselves after a previous update, which is already being looked at.

Customisation is one area they have got right, adding all those touches to your character is fun in itself and the auctions should see lots of cool add-ons.

Final Thoughts
Combat for me is biggest stand out problem, if it could be made less random and more fluid, that would help thing no end. Hopefully the small number of missions is something that will be less of issue as you get deeper into the game. I was expecting something like Multi Theft Auto with a little more structure , missions and progression, perhaps I was misguided but in its current form APB does not deliver.

The current build does not seem to offer much over multiplayer GTA as a quick pickup and play game while you have a little free time with the repetitive mission coming to the forefront on longer play session. At a number of points over the weekend I came close to uninstalling the game.

So I don’t think its a great game as it stands but the problems are fixable and I still want to see it grow and be a success but the actions of Realtime World banning reviews does not bode well.

Europe didn’t have the cheap local phone calls, so BBS‘s took longer to be come popular (which are documented in Jason Scott‘s great series) but I would say the demoscene and the cracker culture it grew out of was our starting point. Lots of (especially) game developers got their start in the scene and provided that same focus mostly around the Amiga. Giving european hackers culture a different style and shape.

Still little known outside graphics geeks and old 16bit people, as hacker culture has become more global, overshadowed by the current billion dollar Silicon Valley startup’s, the demoscene is still healthy and producing some wonderful art.

I know I have already contacted you about the Digital Economy Bill on the 19th of March. I am writing now that Harriet Harman MP has announced that the Bill is definitely going to receive a second reading on Tuesday April 6, widely expected to be the day an election is called.

Giving only 90 minutes to scrutinise a 24,000 word bill seems far from adequate, despite concerns being raised by members from both sides of the House. The debate in the unelected Lords is welcome but a Bill that all sides see as so important merits debate by elected representatives.

Over 17,000 letters have been sent to MPs in the last week. Showing people are concerned about this issue. I ask that you do everything you can to raise this issue with party managers to make sure that a proper debate and scrutiny take place on this bill in a new Parliament.

@Z303

• Robert Mills’ talk about some of the project Limor has produced.
• Tim O’Reilly‘s post ‘At the Forefront of the Next Industrial Revolution‘, does a much better job than mine of explaining why what Limor’s doing is so interesting.
• Ken’s post as a happy customer and some more of Limor’s projects.
• Julian Richardson’s talking about a Arduino kit he made, designed by Limor.
• James’ post about his daughter meeting Limor.

Limor has made some great contributions to Open source hardware and has a good set of tutorials for the Ardunio, which were useful when I was first looking at playing with them.

Formerly she was at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center but now is a successful entrepreneur at Adafruit Industries which has been profiled on make, lifehacker and interviewed by Streampunk Workshop for last years Ada Lovelace Day.

Electronics like VLSI is one of those area that is seen as the dirtier end of technology all workbenches and soldering iron but women are making contribution and running successful businesses in these areas, so don’t be put off, get involved.

Honourable Mentions: Jane McGonigal for her great TED talk on why we need gamers, Gina Trapani for lots of cool productivity tips, Pippa Buchanan for the great DIY Masters.

I am writing to you in your role as Leader of the House of Commons. Please allow the Digital Economy Bill to have the debate, and genuine, line by line scrutiny such an important piece of legislation deserves. I have been on-line since 1993 and have been earning my living as part of the digital economy since 1997 but I see much that troubles me in this bill.

We are told the Bill will reduce copyright infringement on the Internet but with encryption services such as IPredator and HideMyAss, and products like the Pogoplug, even non-technical user can simple bypass any monitoring.

Web blocking also deserves thorough debate while again can be bypass using encryption services, removing access to sections of the internet is not an action that should be taken without careful consideration of all the consequences.

The danger to free WiFi access offered by small businesses is also something that needed careful consideration, making owners liable for infringement is making owners much less likely to offer this useful service in the future.

Given Monday’s announcements by the Prime Minster on giving every citizen access to personalised services via the internet, disconnection is a restriction on allowing those people access to government services, not to mention limiting their freedom of expression, education and work, all because of the actions of another household member.

This Bill has been the subject of heavy lobbying. With the BPI crafted the original amendment introducing Clause 18. There have been suggestions that one Lord who tabled such amendments had undeclared interests. The effect of this lobbying needs to be examined – which can only happen through full democratic scrutiny. In the wake of recent revelations about abuse of lobbying, we feel it is even more vital to have full scrutiny of this legislation.

Over 12,000 individuals have written to MPs asking for debate. I therefore ask you to consider making sure that clauses 11-18 of the Digital Economy Bill are given serious consideration, and are not rushed through during the ‘wash-up’ process.

Thank you
@Z303

Other people ‘s letter are starting to make a difference, so write your own letter it only take a few minutes and Join the Open Rights Group.

My letter is below if you need some ideas:

Dear Mr Williams,

I’m think it is important to voice my concern about the Governments plans to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate.

The damage to schools, businesses and innocent people who rely on the internet because of the Governments plan to disconnect people it suspects of copyright infringement. Looking locally would Bristol wireless still be able to continue their
fantastic work under a three strike regime?

Industry experts, internet service providers and internet companies even the security services are opposed to the bill, yet the Government seems intent on forcing it through without a real debate.

The plans to disconnect from the internet people who have been accused of copyright infringement are troubling and rightly getting much of the attention but other sections of the bill will bring large changes: The functions of the Office of Communications, changes to how Internet domain registries are regulated, how Channel Four Television is regulated, alongside the more general regulation of television, radio services and uses of the electromagnetic spectrum, The Video Recordings Act 1984 and Public lending right in relation to electronic publications.

Such a wide ranging and controversial Bill deserves proper scrutiny so we have best possible foundations for a digital Britain. As a constituent I am writing to you today to ask you to do all you can to ensure the Government doesn’t just rush the bill through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate.

Best regards,
@Z303