Light Night in Leeds is a great event and I'm really looking forward to this year. Partly because I'm a little bit involved, but also because some of my friends are doing really exciting stuff there this year. The talented Andy Sykes (aka ‘Hexjibber' for some reason) will be using FriiSpray at Ha Ha Bar to create audience generated animations that will get shown on the Big Screen in Millennium Square. I will be there helping him set up FriiSpray Virtual Graffiti and if possible taking most of the credit for all his hard work. We're going to be inviting passers by to paint using a …

I love Brighton and I loved dConstruct last year when I came for the first time. So it was hugely exciting to get an unexpected email inviting the Jam Jar Collective to come and show off FriiSpray. The Jam Jar Collective are a group of geeks and artists interested in making interactive stuff and FriiSpray is an interactive graffiti wall that we made. The rest of them couldn't make it down, so my good friend Dave is helping me instead.

I always like to see behind the scenes, but when I arrived today with my suitcase full of projectors and laptops all the doors at the Brighton Dome …

When I started blogging I wrote my own blogging engine as a way to improve my ASP.NET skills. It was a nice project, but as other blogging engines became more advanced I didn't have time to keep up. So I've wanted to move my blog to another engine for a while. There really is no point in reinventing the wheel and I have more exciting projects now.

I heard about Oxite while I was looking into ASP.NET MVC. MVC is way of structuring applications and has been around for ages, but ASP.NET MVC is a new thing and a thing that I'm quite excited about. Oxite started life as an MVC example and isn't a …

This isn't a very exciting post, but it took me ages to figure it out, so I wanted to write it down somewhere.

I wanted to use a one line ImageMagick command to:

Take four pictures

Resize, centre and crop them to be square thumbnails

Arrange them in a 2 by 2 grid

Here is the command for ImageMagick on Windows:

convert -size 300x300 xc:transparent

-page 150x150 ( "image1.jpg" -gravity center -resize 150x150^^ -extent 150x150 )

-page 150x150 ( "image2.jpg" -gravity center -resize 150x150^^ -extent 150x150 -repage +0+150 )

-page 150x150 ( "image3.jpg" -gravity center -resize 150x150^^ - …

Firstly I'd like to introduce The Jam Jar Collective. I started working with Dave Lynch and Stuart Childs on FriiSpray and it sparked so many new ideas that we decided we wanted to do more stuff together. When you create things together you need a collective name, so we became the Jam Jar Collective.

When you've got a name, it turns out you also need business cards, so that people won't forget your name after you've met them. I get really excited about playing with the idea of business cards to make them a bit different and more memorable. I came up with the idea of using real jars of jam. …

I've been working on an exciting project recently with the wonderful Deb Urbanwide Bassett. We launched recently, but I've been too busy to blog about it. The idea started when my back started to hurt. I'd gone freelance and was using my laptop far more than I ever had before. I was using it at client offices, at home and at the coworking space in Old Broadcasting House. Using my laptop so much was making my back hurt.

The great thing about working in a coworking space, rather than working by yourself is that you can complain discuss the issues you're having. It turned out that my back …

I created Font Picker to solve a problem I had and released it in September 2008 hoping that other people would find it helpful. Since then 15,000 people have downloaded it and its page has had 57,000 unique views. That makes it by far my most successful personal project so far.

Font Picker is a simple AIR app that helps you choose a suitable typeface for a project. It's down to word of mouth and the wonders of the Internet that so many people have found it. I got my first peak in traffic when it was mentioned in a Boag World podcast. I'm really greatful for that as it the break that lead to …

A few of us at Old Broadcasting House have been working on FriiSpray for a while in our spare time. It's a virtual graffiti screen that uses a WiiRemote and a spray can with a infra red LED in it. It's been a fun project and a great example of the opportunities and ideas that sometimes come your way in a co-working space.

We've been doing some testing this week and I've been ironing out some bugs in the Flash graffiti paint interface. It all had to be ready for Ignite UK North when we finally going to show it off and let people play with it. We had a slight problem with stray infra red …

Joshua Porter talked about the various biases that people have and how being aware of them can make our sites more effective. You might want to encourage more people to sign up to your site, or to incourage people to behave constructively in a forum. Understanding our natural social biases can help you do this and it's not evil as long as you've got good intentions.

He opened by showing us a video of a lift experiment where a test subject copies what the other people in the lift are doing. This starts with the direction he's facing in the lift and ends with him taking his hat off, and even …

If you know me then you may have been lucky enough to know my friend Peter Bamford. Pete died a few weeks ago shortly after having a heart operation. I’ve wanted to write something about him for a while, but it’s taken me a while till I felt like I could, and I know that I can’t write anything that will do him justice.

Pete was the most enthusiastic person I have every met and he threw himself into everything he did. Ever a geek, he overflowed with project ideas, and although he could never do all of them he had a bloody good go. Never satisfied with just doing one, he always had countless …