James Smith

I was lucky enough to be invited to talk at the Reboot Britain conference on Monday. It was a fascinating day, with lots of inspiring moments. It left me with a feeling that we can make the world a better place if we all get out there and make things. It's something I already believed, but it's great to have a recharge every now and again.

My session was on hacking energy data, kind of a Homecamp intro for the uninitiated. My slides are up on Slideshare, and embedded here for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully at some point I'll get to re-record the audio and add it in.

Well, Saturday was geeKyoto 08 in London, and I finally had to get round to writing my presentation. Had to finish it on the train on the way in, hoping I wouldn't run the laptop battery down too much in case I had to use it during the talk.

It was a great day though! The speakers were incredibly varied, from Alex Haw, an architect/artist who has more ideas in a second than I do in a year, to a great presentation by Gavin Starks about AMEE, to a design student who hung a swing in a bus stop (which got the day's most spontaneous round of applause). The whole thing was then rounded off by Ben Saunders, an arctic explorer who has really seen the ice melting up there. Add onto that a fascinating post-conference pub session, and you can't lose. The day left me so energised and full of ideas. Now I just need to decide which to attack first!

Hopefully my talk ("Can software save the world?" - pretentious title intentional) will be up online soon. For those of you who saw my talk but didn't get the links down, here they are again:

• The Carbon Diet
• Green Thing
• CO2 Updates on Twitter
• Green Web UK mailing list