Spent the last couple of evenings playing games in the sun and the rain with Interesting Games Lab: snakes and ladders with a pantone twist in a multistorey car park, searching for lovers and dancers and hiding behind pillars around Harbourside, training human dolphins to do tricks using only applause, playing werewolf and standing in the square playing Geometry Wars on the side of a building. Fun fun fun.

The Comfort of Strangers game is playing at the Come Out and Play festival in NYC in a couple of weeks: I’m hoping they’ll bring it along to Hide and Seek in London at the end of June. There was something kind of magical about weaving a team together from nothing more than proximity, and playing a game outside gives you new eyes for a familiar landscape: in the end, though, I think I just like running around and hiding.

My first Flickr spam has taken the considerate step of warning me about dodgy mails:

SIMULATED USERS ON FLICKR: CAUTION!!!

Dear friends

I’m be menaced and importunaded per “users” – newly arrived on FLICKR – because a picture by me uploaded in 27JAN2008. See the photo, one of menaces and my reply in farm3.static.flickr.com/2280/2223613619_4ac516968d_o.jpg
They used the Flickr-Mail principaly to irritate me…
What I do in this case?
Sincerily,

MATEUS27_24&25

Riding through fields on the way to London, with the sun still low in a hazy sky, the shadows of trees leaving their frost behind in the sun and behind it all the pale mass of hills standing sentinel. I love this train journey, and if I was of a more literary turn I might have been inspired to a haiku of some sort

places not reserved
scenery outside not seen
these people are vile

But instead I’m going to write down how I sorted out bluetooth on my laptop, because I tend to forget these things. I’m running Xubuntu, which is super, and using Synaptic had installed everything bluetooth that I could see, with the result that a bluetooth icon appeared on my panel with the title “Ready for Bluetooth file transfer”. Such enthusiasm, such breathless devotion to the movement of my data in a conveniently wire-free fashion, was entirely undermined by the absence of the promised right-click “Send to” bluetooth option that ought, according to all authorities, have been present.

Running hcitool dev showed an absence of bluetooth devices. I knew I had a device in there, but where? Cutting a long story short, it turned out that I had to turn it on. Always the way. Easy when you know. Having checked I had toshset installed, using synaptic, I used this Toshiba settings utility to turn bluetooth on: sudo toshset -bluetooth on. Done! hcitool dev showed that I had an internal bluetooth thing, ready to go.

This probably works best for Toshiba laptops, I would have thought, and not the more modern ones either. Mine is ancient, rescued from an illicit midnight dig at a local hillfort known to be the haunt of druids. If it doesn’t boot I have to hit it three times with a rowan twig.

So now I could transfer files from my machine to my mobile (mobile to laptop, I ought to have said, was straightforward and tickety-boo). All I had to do was look for my mobile (hcitool scan) and, using the MAC address this revealed, send files using the straightforward and convenient gnome-obex-send -d [MAC address] [file straining to flee the confines of a flint-powered laptop and roam the world in my pocket]. What could be more straightforward or convenient?

Well, having some kind of right-click option would be marginally more effificient. I found the docs for the xfce file manager Thunar, which helpfully told me exactly what to do: create a file ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto/gnome-obex-send-generic.desktop and fill it with this:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=[my phone]
Icon=internet-mail
Exec=/usr/bin/gnome-obex-send -d xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx %f


and hurrah and three cheers, instantly – instantly – I was able to right-click on files and push them unceremoniously into a tiny cramped mobile disk. Nothing to it. Can’t understand why people say Ubuntu isn’t ready for the desktop.

So there we are, recorded for next time I need it. Coming into London now. I’m going to the British Museum for lunch and a talk about the future, surrounded by history and school field trips. Next writing should be about something less techy.

Countries that are in my µtorrent peers list

• USA
• Singapore
• Italy
• Finland
• Canada
• USA again (there’s lots of them)
• Germany
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Belgium
• Ireland

I feel like a CB radio ham in the early days of radio, looking for faint signs of people from far away and wanting to contact them just to say “hey you’re there! I’m here!”. I can’t talk to them — the only way I can signal them is to disconnect, and that goes to all of them at once, which is a bit blunt. But I feel like we’re connected. Well, we are. I mean obviously we are. I was thinking of the kind of connection I was taken taken to the Commonwealth Centre as a schoolchild to experience, the kind of connection that sounds cheesy and Hallmarkish, too utopian even for early Rheingold.

I guess we’ve all got at least two things in common, which is that we like Heroes, and we’d like there to be more of us. I wanted to be able to right-click on the Singapore IP and send them a message about having a singtel address and how slow their broadband is. Social objects again.

Check me out!

I’m going to Hack Day!

So I guess I should start planning now. Anyone else going?