If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed one of my favourite places to chill out is the Newcastle Clayton Street East branch of Caffè Nero. The coffee is nice there — though I like a latté, so perhaps I should say the coffee-flavoured warm milk is nice, though not always, as it can taste like a recently resurfaced road (this is barista specific so it is possible to avoid by walking straight back out the door on spying an offender) — but the main reason I return so often is the café’s situation in one of the few Georgian buildings in the town centre where the internal structure remains largely intact. There is abundant light, being as it is a corner building with multiple sash windows (original) reaching from a foot above the floor to ceiling height along two external walls, while comfy chairs litter the upper level. Music is compulsory and usually consists of Bossa Nova, bad jazz or Classical. The latter’s apparent three-plus generations of mp3 encoding makes for some particularly uncomfortable listening.

Like just about every other so-called “gourmet” coffee house, Caffè Nero has a loyalty card scheme. Such commercial sleight of hand would normally deter me from dealing with a company, being as it is IMHO deceptive and dishonest. Sticking with an establishment should be a matter of customer choice, inspired by good service and a high quality product at a competitive price, not by the promise of something for nothing after having first spent money on nine similar items. On the assumption companies do not give away anything for free, we could say that while the pretence here is one of being rewarded for continued custom, we can be reasonably certain the cost of the tenth coffee has been accounted for as a distributed loss across the prior nine coffees purchased. If that were the case, the customer would gain nothing in return for their loyalty. Let’s see how much a coffee would cost if the loyalty scheme was not in place.

Taking as an example the ordinary coffee-flavoured warm milk (these days I drink decaffeinated coffee, which is 10p extra):

1 latté = £2.55

The cost of the 10th latté distributed across the previous 9 is

£2.55 / 9 = £0.28 per latté

So the retail price without the loyalty scheme would be

£2.55 – £0.28 = £2.27

This is a very simplistic way of looking at it as in practice such dents in potential profit can be offset in a variety of ways, however it serves to illustrate the subterfuge. They get a regular customer, regular customer gets coffee that’s still too expensive.

So what to do? Well, my thoughts are I could either accept that I am essentially paying £2.27 for every latté I drink at Caffè Nero, which would be a lot easier if certain members of their staff didn’t sneer and look put out when they see you’re getting “a free one”, or I can buy coffee at an independent coffee shop where a latté costs less than £2.27, as I frequently do at the excellent Settle Down where the price is £1.90. Yes, look at me! I still have free will!

A third option, which I began thinking about after wondering why many Nero employees appear a bit down, grumpy or unable to engage in polite conversation of the type more easily found in independent cafés, is to accept that I was always willing to pay an extortionate amount for a drink and should therefore deposit the full price of the 10th latté into the tips cup, thus helping Caffè Nero redistribute some of their wealth to their overworked and underpaid baristas. If you’re a regular customer there, I strongly suggest you consider doing the same.

And if you double-stamp my card…

Who knows, I might become a complete convert. Already my little head is all a-swim with plans for development boards of my own design… V shaped control of your Hair Metal music making project, Flyingvino! Put your Gaggia on Twitter with the Cappuccino (ehhhh it’s nearly over). And for all(?) your minimalist music needs I present… the Brianino. That one’s got an aeroplane on it.

*sniff*

“no errors. Bye, bye …”

Wednesday the 14th saw me out and about and at 25sg (25 Stratford Grove) in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, for a workshop on making bioplastics in a domestic setting, led by Dr. Brian Degger (@drbrian). Also in attendance were the artists Carole Luby, Lauren Healey (@laurenkhealey), Paul Grimmer, and one half of Sonodrome, Jim (@Sonodrome). It had been so long since I’d sat amongst a group of people that I thought I might have difficulty communicating, however I was made to feel very welcome and quickly found our minds were all on or around the same wavelength. Words came easily, making it a great pleasure to listen to and talk with these insightful people.

We drank fragrant green tea.

We tried the following Shapeways recipe for bioplastic:

Combine 7 parts water, 1 part vinegar, 1/2 part glycerin, 1 1/2 parts starch for the basic recipe. You heat this in a pan for several minutes and presto you have bioplastic.

Ha. Okay. The first uncertainty arose when we looked at the glycerin and realised it was much more viscous than expected. Brian pointed out that the type readily available in shops is usually around 30% glycerin, whereas what we were looking at was probably around 90%. So the first batch we made contained only a 1/4 part glycerin. After mixing, heating then cooling for a while it began to look like we weren’t going to get a solid plastic from the first batch. There were also questions about the type of starch.

The second batch contained the 1/2 part glycerin as per the recipe and was coloured with saffron. Posh plastic indeed! As you might expect, the colour was a vibrant yellow and the consistency seemed much closer to what we expected. However there were still doubts over cooking time, which had been extended for this batch, and the suitability of the corn starch.

Bioplastic was poured into various molds and onto flat surfaces to make sheets. Pouring directly onto baking parchment is not a good idea as the plastic permeates it. Pouring onto foil doesn’t work so well either as the two materials stick.

More tea and more discussion later, we left the lab with much to think about, bioplastic curing in the background all the while.

I had intended to return to 25sg on Sunday for further discussions, Bioplastic II and Brian’s presentation and summary of his residency. Alas I couldn’t make it but from Sonodrome’s images it seems to have been even more successful, fun and productive than phase one.

Apparently potato starch works much better than corn.

Thank you to everyone involved for making this a very interesting and enjoyable experience.

You know, half way up the lane leading to 25sg there is a bicycle on a brick wall.

At first I tried connecting directly to the television. As I hoped, once the PW output signal voltage had reached a certain level* – sorry I don’t know at this point what that level was as I wasn’t monitoring during this impromptu experiment – flashing bars, then some very complex and interesting patterns began flickering on the screen. The size, brightness and scanning of the screen made this almost unwatchable so I switched to laptop + video capture device.

The video below shows the results, with audio captured from the direct out of a SONY ICF-S22 FM/AM radio (set to AM), which when tuned just right picks up the EM interference of the Postcard Weevil circuitry. In this recording the radio tuning enables the PW EM signal to modulate BBC Radio 3.

For those missing a strong audiovisual stomach, the really good stuff starts to happen around 1:06, with some very nice PW+radio+video combos beginning at 1:35.

Next, I will hack this into a PW + 320×240 LCD screen, backlit with an 8×8 RGB LED PWM matrix, complete with micro camera on bendy arm to pipe the LCD image to a projector for VJ-ing. This idea is open to implementation and improvement so please have a go and let me know how you get on.

* update: since writing it has become clearer to me that the point beyond which patterns are rendered on the display device is not defined by voltage threshold alone. A composite video signal contains precise timing pulses to mark both the start of each scan line and the point at which the rendering device (originally a cathode ray tube) must return to the top left of the display area to begin rendering the next frame. It is by coincidence that part of the Postcard Weevil audio signal output can be interpreted by a composite video renderer as a manageable signal. More on this – and taming the beast – in a future post.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence

Ever since I’ve been waiting for this Street View data to go live. Today I saw it for the first time and while it was an interesting experience, I couldn’t help but be horrified by my disheveled appearance! Did I really dress like that? I remember at the time placing little importance on the way I looked, simultaneously wondering why each time I visited the city centre or the mall, security followed me everywhere I went.

Vain as it may be, I’m happy to have since been roused from my apparent apathy and it does feel good to be engaged to a woman who will readily tell me when my jeans are rubbish.

My hair is short now, and I don’t wear skate pants.

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Just a quick thought on the old Google vs. Privacy issue. While I find the above imagery makes me uncomfortable, it would be wrong to complain, as others have done, claiming this is an invasion of privacy. The others are confused. In a public place one does not have the right to privacy. As with the W3, if you don’t want the public to be able to see you or something you’ve done, don’t do it in a public place. One does, however, have the right to anonymity, and it is this Google attempts to preserve with its face clouds. That’s not to say that I entirely agree with the methods behind the Street View implementation. The alignment of ad subject to viewport content is questionable to say the least and I intend to post something here about this at some point. I have a few examples of unfortunate ad/content juxtaposition but I need to gather a few more before I can say with certainty that they represent more than just creepy coincidence.

Over the past year or so, largely through involvement in the “blogosphere” (how did that happen?) as a technical assistant to my fiancé, I have been thinking about starting a blog to record all the things I can’t say within 140 characters on Twitter. I’ve looked at many blog systems, written a basic one of my own, gone off the idea, gone back to the idea and finally decided it’s something I want to do and — as the majority of you already know and perhaps have known for a long time — found WordPress is probably the best of the out-of-the-box blogging platforms around. Geeklog is also very impressive but for a few reasons I won’t go into here, WP holds my attention a little better, not to mention the major plus of finding a ready made layout design I am happy to use without modification.

“You cen beleef iht!”

I hope at some point you find something of interest here. Please feel free to leave comments or send email if you’d like to get in touch with questions, ideas, revelations or hare-brained schemes of any kind.