If you’re still using Office 2004 on OSX and receive .pptx files from colleagues, you won’t we able to open them directly. Instead, download the (snappily titled) Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter and you’ll have a drag/drop interface for converting these, and other of the new office file formats.

I was going through some old files today and found some 3D plots I’d made of acceleration data recorded from gestures as part of my PhD work. I used gnuplot to create a series of plots from lots of different angles so I could join them together into a movie that would show the cloud of data rotating in space. Unfortunately, the movies didn’t work very well on my computer when I tried to open them today. Quicktime complained about requiring additional components to watch them, but then gave me no clue as to _which _component I needed.

I was a little disappointed until I realized that I could take the series of original image files and replicate the effect fairly simply in JavaScript and even add some interactivity (I’ve only tested it in Firefox).

I don’t really know what the use of these plots is, but they’re somehow intriguing. If I can find the original image files for the other gestures I recorded, I’ll put some of them up too. It’s very interesting to see how the gestures have different patterns of acceleration.

We had some interesting visitors recently, Salu Ylirisku and Jussi Mikkonen from the School of Design at The University of Art and Design in Finland. Salu and Jussi are currently building a new curriculum on Interaction Design and are planning on employing the Arduino platform in the education. I’m currently teaching a course here at MCI called User Experience Design with a similar emphasis on prototyping. It was nice to share experiences and ideas.

I was especially interested to hear about Salu and Jussi’s recent trip to visit the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Tom Igoe teaches a really interesting sounding physical computing course there. Salu and Jussi had lots of inspiring pictures and stories about the workspace and culture. I was especially impressed with what seemed like a very collaborative, performative approach to teaching programming and the use of tools such as wikis to collect, share and improve code snippets.

I was happy to find out about this project called OpencCycleMap today. It maps cycle tracks as well as other features such as places for parking your bike (key here). The maps are based on data from the OpenStreetMap project, which is an free and editable map of the whole world; kind of like wikipedia for maps

I was really surprised at how detailed the map for Sønderborg is and also surprised that it marks the location of public recycling bins. Do cyclists have a special need for this information?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an easy way to embed the map in this blog post other than resorting to using an iframe (which would require a word-press plugin such as embed-iframe). It’s a bit of a heavy-handed approach, especially when the embedded page is not optimized for viewing at 450x350 pixels (those boxes of links at the bottom really get in the way and it would probably be better if scroll-zooming were disabled).

Therefore, I switched to a screen-shot of the site. Click the image to go to the live map.

Here’s the blog for the OpenGeoData project.

We talked about this for so many years. Finally, someone has found the courage. Awesome.

Via sciencenow