This Wednesday I presented at Reading Geek Night 14, on the subject of “Hacking Kinect”. I’d like to thank everyone for their nice and constructive comments following the presentation, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it and it is a topic on which I am very enthusiastic.

As a brief follow-up, the code that I demoed is from two sources. The original Kinect hack is now part of the OpenKinect project; you can fork their code and the simple testing app “glview” from their github. The algorithm I showed for tracking a pointing arm is also available on my own github. This has since been successfully hooked up to the robot arm I mentioned during the talk, for a very successful demo just 2 days after I did the presentation. If you have any questions about the code or have ideas for projects regarding this, I am always very open to them so please feel free to get in touch by some method through the Connect tab at the top of the page.

I would like to take this opportunity to note a few of my thoughts regarding the Reading Geek Night event. Jim announced on Tuesday that he has secured Copa for the next 12 months, so over 50 local geeks will continue to be able to meet and socialise monthly under the banner. I think it goes without saying that everyone who has ever attended is glad of Jim’s commitment, enthusiasm and continued organisation of the events. However, according to Jim, I have now managed to hit nearly 50% presentation rate for the Geek Night events ever held; while I am flattered that the community continues to sit through my ramblings, it is time that I hang my hat before everyone is sick of me. Therefore, I will not be presenting at Reading Geek Night for the foreseeable future (think at least 6-9 months from now); I will continue to be a great fan of the event, and will show up as often as my schedule permits, and I will promote the event to everybody I know who may be interested so it can continue its brilliant growth.

It should be noted, finally (I promise!), that Reading Geek Night cannot continue without speakers. Had I not stepped in 2 days before hand, we would have been entertained by only one (suitably excellent) presentation on Cyborgs the last evening. So as I have promised not to do this any more, it is time for others of the community to come forward and entertain, inform, and thoroughly geek out their peers. For me, my 6+ Geek Night presentations have strengthened my confidence, provided a friendly playground in which to work on my public speaking, and challenged me to get out of my comfort zone and hopefully improve as a result of that. So if you have something you think the usual crowd would be interested in, or something new for them entirely, please jump in and get involved. A presentation need only be 5 minutes long, and it is an extremely rewarding experience. If you would like to talk to me about presenting itself (not the content specifically) I have got some tips I have acquired over the last 14 months I would be more than happy to share, if you buy me the tea to keep me talking

Until the next Geek Night.

Thanks to everyone who came along yesterday to #rdggeek 7, I know I had a great evening and really enjoyed the other presentations.

My 5-minute presentation ramble about SEO was hopefully useful in at least a little way to some people, and just in case you want more of my lolcat-infused musings then you can feel free to go grab the slides from below.

As I said on the night (or at least I think I did), please don’t take this as a magic potion to solve all your SEO woes overnight, because that will only end up with you unhappy, a lawsuit, expensive trials and me feeling the wrath of “SEO experts” all over the world…

Download Slides

Recently I’ve been to quite a few technology and geek-related events in London. It’s always been a very “cool” city so far as technology and events go, and in many ways represents the central hub for the UK when interacting with companies across Europe and into the US in this industry.

However, there is an often overlooked and rapidly growing technology community just 20 minutes from London, in Reading.

There has been a technology community in Reading for a long time, from the University’s strong Computer Science, Engineering and Cybernetics departments, the Microsoft, Oracle and other offices at Thames Valley Park, and numerous small companies dotted around the town. But in recent months the community has been growing in activity, and its events are often overlooked by those outside the area.

There is much more to Reading than large corporations and the extremely popular DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper events that frequent TVP. From the Reading Geek Night, a popular offshoot of the wildly successful Oxford Geek Night, to the Reading Tweetup, which was started as a regular meeting from the successful Twestival events held in the town, there is rarely a week go by without some kind of small meetup between friends in one of the many bars, coffee shops and venues in the town.

There is also a thriving small business and startup community, kick-started by schemes such as the University of Reading’s Small Business Centre providing cheap office space to small startup businesses, and I am constantly meeting new people from these small companies as they continue to thrive and grow.

The point of my post is this – Reading has the potential to be one of the coolest places to be for technology, small businesses, great events and awesome friends – let’s work together to create more awesome events, bring in more visitors, and turn this town into the cool hub that it has so much potential to be.

Today I resolved that I would not base my #Project365 picture on snow – as hard as that may be.

So I got rid of my urge to take snow pictures on my walk to work, and snapped these with my iPhone.

Fortunately the camera functions pretty well in the high-brightness light-bathed scenes in Reading today, so I think these came out pretty well.

It’s that time of year again!

Christmas is upon us and we are holding a Christmas Tweetup! It will be at 8pm on Tuesday the 22nd of December at Giraffe.

The cost is approximately £15.95 (for 2 courses) or £19.95 (for 3 courses) – we are looking to get a discount so hopefully it will be a bit cheaper.

Giraffe offers a modern twist on the traditional Christmas menu, giving us a great range to choose from – you can view the Christmas menu here.

If you are interested in coming please leave a comment below or on the original post with your Twitter details by 13:00 on 9th of December.

Each booking has to have a £10.00 deposit, payable by the end of the Reading Tweetup on the 9th of December. There are 2 payment methods:

1. BACS Payment, we will DM you the rdgtweetup bank account details
2. Cash on the 9th of December

We hope you can all make it! It’s shaping up to be a great event, a lot of fun, and a chance to celebrate Christmas with the fellow tweeters of Reading.

This post originally appeared on the RDGTweetup blog.