London is a fantastic place to be, with one huge downside - there are far too many interesting things to do and places to be than you could ever manage. One skill becomes particularly handy - ability to balance work, hobbies, family and friends. This balance seems essential to enjoy life. Let’s see how I did last week.

Events

We did two events with Red Badger. First was React London meetup, part of Digital Shoreditch fest. Unlike previous few events that were hosted at Facebook Euston offices, this one was at Cargo club in the heart of Shoreditch. The place was practically under the railroad, and each time a train would pass on top of the club, you’d get a true underground feeling. It seems that many attendees thought the same, and despite some AV related hiccups we got a nice praise for the event.

Couple of talks to watch:

• BabelJS by author himself Sebastian McKenzie
• React & WebGL - Peter O’Shaughnessy talks on his experiences integrating ThreeJS with React

Another event was hosted at Red Badger HQ. Again part of DS, this one was titled Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Check out recording of the live broadcast with brilliant presentations by our UX director Joe Dollar-Smirnov, head of design Sari Griffiths and developer Dominik Piatek.

Film

My Helsinki Timescapes film is now available on Vimeo in its full HD glory. Took me about one year to complete, mainly because it was filmed and processed in native stereoscopic 3D. A unique project for Helsinki, was premiered in Germany as part of Beyond 3D fest in autumn 2013. This year they are once again accepting entries, and my goal is to get back - this time with London Timescapes short film, currently in post production. Might as well release HD 2D version on Vimeo once the moment is right.

Another idea we discussed with Dominik Piatek, who is currently composing music for London Timescapes film, is to make a virtual reality experience out of the film. Desperately need to get my paws onto some VR goggles - there are lots of teases but currently nothing actually available in shops. Maybe next year.

Podcast

Last Friday me, Robbie and Roisi recorded 17th episode of Radio Badger podcast. Expect it out this week - probably Friday. Talking about recent trips to California, Estonian e-residenship, Apple Watch, Bitcoin pizza day, as well as getting live first impressions on Firefox OS phone.

Meanwhile episode 16 is available for listening.

Hardware corner

Received a reference phone with Firefox OS onboard. The phone is codenamed Flame, features 2 SIM card slots, 2 cameras, dual core CPU, 1Gb of RAM, and in general very nice looking for an entry level phone. Also it features quite a few controversial ideas, now implemented and ready to be probed. Firefox OS runs all of the UI on top of Gecko rendering engine - in other words, everything you see on the screen is run inside Firefox browser. I’m still getting my way around it, yesterday flashed latest nightly build of Firefox OS 3.0, and going to use it as my main phone for a week. Expect lots of intimate details in a blog.

Writing

Got published in Red Badger blog with my recap on O’Reilly Fluent conference in San Francisco. Trends on web dev, Internet and how it all looks like from sunny California.

Chemicals

Successfully finished second roll of 35mm film, and ordered kit of Kodak T-Max chemicals for developing. If all goes well, will book some lab time at the local dark room. Yeah, assuming that nothing goes wrong with films during development. There are at least two shops in London where you can get everything you need for analog film printing (that I know of) - Silver Print at Elephant and Castle, and West End Cameras in Euston. Latter is just 10 min on bike from our office, and I was buying my fibre based photo paper there last time. Convenient.

This week

Podcast editing, Firefox OS instead of iPhone, monthly company day, and a hackathon with a chance of winning tickets to Mombasa. Should be fun.