Yesterday we attended the invaluable Wired Sussex Media Jobs and Skills Fair. Rather than telling you what it's about, I'll allow the good folks at Wired Sussex to do it for me: "As well as recruiting companies there were also media course providers exhibiting; and in addition to the exhibitors there were separate sessions for students and recent graduates, for freelancers, and for more senior candidates.". We ourselves weren't actually there recruiting for any positions in  particular, rather we were just in the Made in Brighton section to chat to attendees and support Wired Sussex and local students.
 
We took along the hideous face munging software to attract the curious to our stall. This sparked a broad spectrum of emotions, ranging from a horrified student who (understandably) couldn't cope with having my face, to a very impressed charismatic man who was poking his tongue out at the screen and making odd noises. Andy had the fortune of munging his face with the Mayoress, which I don't think many people can lay claim to.

The results are in folks - the first ever Brighton Munge-off (patent pending) has come and gone and the winners have been announced.

You may want this explained a bit - which is fair enough. We recently took our in-house developed Facemunger application on its first outing to Glug Brighton 2 (a designers' networking event held by Crush and Agency Rush). Here willing gluggers (or glugites? Glugians?) were encouraged to snap photos of themselves with their friends and let the application work its magic to swap their faces. The results were... interesting. The application, created by our Head of New Technology Joe Baskerville, proved to be extremely popular, and with almost 400 images captured that evening alone, going through them to find the ones to share was a tough job (on both the decision-making faculties and, much more prominently, the eyes). But here they are - the best of the best of the Facemunges from Glug Brighton 2.

Last Friday I attended a CSS3 Wizardry Workshop run by local front-end web development company Clearleft. The workshop aimed to "blow our minds" with a day long set of lectures and exercises teaching myself and a few other front-end web developers the powerful new additions to the latest iteration of CSS.

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is the language used to determine the presentation of a HTML page. If you've ever viewed a website with CSS disabled then you'll know just how integral this language has become in laying out modern webpages. Browsers today support CSS2 across the board (though ask a developer about IE6's CSS support and you'll be met with a groan and a grimace), but it's the very latest browser releases that support CSS3 that are pushing the limits of how we can design and display webpages. To put this in context, have a look at Chris's personal website with CSS enabled, and then without it, below:

We started off with a look at the new selectors that can be used to grab any section of the HTML markup. Previously restricted to relatively simple selectors forcing us to target elements by their IDs and class names, we can now use these new selectors to attach styles to (naming but a few here) siblings, children and adjacent elements. These additions will allow developers to produce cleaner HTML without as many classes and ID names cluttering up every div, p and span declaration.

Howdy Pardners,

Much like the county fair, all good things must come to an end. So it is with Codeo, our coding competition aimed at local students.

Originally started way back in '08, Codeo involved us posting regular programming challenges on our blog, for which entrants would submit their creations in hopes of winning a prize. Initially started as a way for students to engage with the local digital industry and show professionals their skills, Codeo also gave them a creative outlet for the material they studied in their courses (as challenges were devised to complement what students were studying in their syllabuses).

A year ago, I attended the launch of the Brighton Robotics group, run by Emily Troop, and yesterday I went along to its first birthday party. The group has been pretty active over the past year, with projects to create a host of swam-bots, as well as organising regular talks and hack nights.

The party, organised by Nicola B consisted of around 20 robot enthusiasts turning up at the Skiff coworking space, and constructing drawbots with the aid of excellent kits and instructions created by Steve Pinter.

2010 is billed to be the year of many things: the tablet (if Wired and PC World are correct), the smartphone (going by some analysts and journalists), 3D TV (according to some) and of course, the Tiger (no relation to Apple's OS though I'm afraid). However, with all the hype and speculation, one trend that will be making its public debut in 2010 that has so far been missed by critics and foreseers alike is the new art of facemunging.

Before you recoil in horror trying to dream up the possibilities of what this might be, allow me to elaborate a little. But, in line with the old adage that 'a picture paints a thousand words', allow me to do it with an image. It's not a pretty image by any stretch of the imagination, and for those of you who know Ben or Eleanor personally, this will bear an extra, far more disturbing weight than usual. However, it displays perfectly the power of facemunging. Be warned; what follows is not for the faint of heart.

Ready? This is your last chance to turn back now.

Okay, here goes (but don't say I didn't warn you):

... that's how I like my coffee. If you do too, then you could do much worse than keep an eye on the calendar of science enthusiasts Café Scientifique.

Last Tuesday, Josh and I headed down to Brighton's Latest Music Bar, which was playing host to a talk hosted by the local branch of said science aficionados. Café Scientifique Brighton are a voluntary group united by nothing more than a love of science and a thirst for knowledge. They meet on the third Tuesday of every month (from now on, the third Thursday of every month) and listen to talks they've arranged from guest speakers on, well, anything and everything scientific. Each talk is given on a different scientific topic by a different guest speaker, and while this happened to be my freshman outing amongst their ranks, I am assured by other regular attendees that the talks are always informative, entertaining, well presented and lively. The small cohort of organisers are joined by a large crowd of attendees (much larger than I - as a Scientifique first timer - was expecting I must admit); anyone and everyone is welcome and you don't even have to buy a ticket.

If you're one of the nation's 5 million BBC iPlayer users (or perhaps, for our US friends, one of 40 million Hulu users) the murky boundaries between 'using the internet' and 'watching TV' will be familiar. From enjoying shows online to - in the near future - reading news and catching up on e-mails on our plasma TVs, the magical process of 'convergence' is charging its way into the new decade. When you can sit on the bus and watch live TV with the rather spiffing TVCatchup, you know the days of bluntly differentiating between computing devices and TVs are numbered.

Technology firms hoping to catch such disruptive waves of change meet annually at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, boasting the wares they hope will enter our homes in coming years. It's a veritable trend-seekers paradise, and one particular trend at this year's event leapt out (almost literally). 3D TVs, capable of showing the new breed of 3D films like James Cameron's Avatar in all their splendour, will eventually find their way into our living rooms. That alone is revelatory, but in parallel with the convergence stampede presents one huge floating 3D question mark for interface design.

Experiments with 3D interfaces are not new, but have begun gaining traction with the emergence of gesture-based devices, particularly multi-touch devices like the all-conquering iPhone and Microsoft's Surface. One approach I've been watching with interest is BumpTop, revealed with an eye-opening TED talk (listen to the oohs and aahs) and now available to the public.

According to the legend that is Mr. Shakin' Stevens, 'Snow is falling all around me'. Not wanting to disappoint Shakin' (as - I have it on good authority - he's known to his friends) we've once again decided to extend this statement to the digital realm with the relaunch of the Infinite Snowflake!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the Infinite Snowflake is our way of spreading season's greetings through the ether. Have a look at the page here to design your own flake through our own in-house developed flake-maker. Just draw a pattern you like in the triangle, and our flake-maker will use it to create a beautiful (... or not so beautiful) flake of your own devising. Once it's ready, generate your newly made piece of digital drift and it will get added to the ever-expanding uber-flake, compiled from all the flakes created thus far. You'll also get the chance to add a message of season's greetings should you so wish, and send the flake on for other people to enjoy too.

I've just seen a video that made me quite excited; it's a film about the making of a book called 'The Complex of All of These' by a printmaker called Abigail Uhteg. I thought I'd share it here as it links in nicely with my recent Pech-app Cake-cha, called 'Hands'. I spoke about why using your hands to do stuff is good. And look - here's proof.

This video is made up of about 3000 photographs, taken over the course of 2 months - the time it took Abigal to illustrate, print and bind 35 copies of her book (all by hand).