Your friendly host for the evening will be Mr Tim Waters (aka Chippy) who will be facilitating a Geeky Quiz (QuizUp?)! There will be 3 rounds with 30 questions in total:

Round 1. General geekness
Round 2. Techy questions
Round 3. Internet memes

There’s been rumor of 20:20 presentations from The Hodge on “Search Like A Superstar” and Helen Harrop on “Creativity and Computing” if she can make it…

Which still means we’re looking for volunteers for presentations as they are not confirmed! Please get in touch if you’re interested in talking!

Rob and I unfortunately can’t make it as we’ve both committed to help out at the 20 x 20 Science Cafe at the Otley Science Festival where Rob will be predicting the Future of the Internet!!!!!

Big thanks to Tim for taking on GeekUp this month, I’m gutted to be missing the quiz!

Do tell us if you’re coming

Details:

• When: 6:00 PM Wednesday 19th November, 2008 (Talks start at 7:00PM)
• Where: The Lounge, St. Johns House, Merrion St, Leeds LS2 8JE
• Photo of the the Lounge
• GeekUp web site
• 20:20 presentation format

It’s that GeekUp time again so wander down to the Lounge on Wednesday night for your monthly dose of geeky beery fun. This month we have two 20:20 presentations lined up:

• Rahoul Baruah (aka Baz) on “Telling Stories with RSpec”
• Jonathan Powell (aka Squiggle) on “No Nonsense Development”

Do tell us if you’re coming

Details:

• When: 6:00 PM Wednesday 15th October, 2008 (Talks start at 7:00PM)
• Where: The Lounge, St. Johns House, Merrion St, Leeds LS2 8JE
• Photo of the the Lounge
• GeekUp web site
• 20:20 presentation format

This month at GeekUp we thought we’d borrow from Simon Wheatley’s idea that worked so well at BarCamp and invite GeekUpers to do a 20:20 on their last project.

Your last project could be a website, discovering Ruby Shoes, growing stuff #inthegarden, launching an affiliate network for a bathroom store, doing a web design 101 for a friend, running a celebrity gossip site, setting up your own home security camera network, singing articles from wikipedia accompanied by a ukelele, presenting your own radio show / podcast, setting up a business, joining a rowing club, learning how not to get into your own house, creative crafts, making a greenhouse watering system with an Arduino, PR 101… anything!

So if you’re interested in taking part, do let us know! We’re a friendly bunch and we’ll try not to heckle.

Big thanks to Simon for letting us nick his idea. It’s GPL’d by word of mouth

Do tell us if you’re coming

Details:

• When: 6:00 PM Wednesday 17th Sept, 2008 (Talks start at 7:00PM)
• Where: The Lounge, St. Johns House, Merrion St, Leeds LS2 8JE
• Photo of the the Lounge
• GeekUp web site
• 20:20 presentation format

We thought we’d have a nice chilled out GeekUp tonight in the name of BarCamp rehab! To help us relax, we going to have a bit of a wii night, so bring your wii sticks along if you fancy a game!

Do tell us if you’re coming

Details:

• When: 6:00 PM Wednesday 20th August, 2008
• Where: The Lounge, St. Johns House, Merrion St, Leeds LS2 8JE
• Photo of the the Lounge
• GeekUp web site

Going Solo is a one-day educational conference for freelancers and small business owners of the internet industry and beyond.

Schedule (lifted from the site):

8:00 Registration | coffee, tea, orange juice and some croissants
9:00 Stephanie Booth: Introduction
9:30 Laura Fitton: You Only Get What You Give (Marketing and taking care of one’s social capital)
10:15 Break
10:50 Dennis Howlett: The Joys of Tax and Finance
11:20 Panel moderated by Suw Charman: Setting Rates and Negotiating with
Clients (Martin Roell, Stowe Boyd, Dennis Howlett)
12:30 Lunch
14:30 Suw Charman: When Passion Becomes Profession (Balancing Work and Life)
15:20 Martin Roell: Self-Organisation for Effectiveness: Tools and Methods to Get Things Done
16:00 Break
16:30 Panel moderated by Stephanie Booth: Solo in a Networked World (Laura
Fitton, Linda Broughton, Stephanie Troeth)
17:20 Stowe Boyd: From The Far Side To The Dark Side: A Crash Course In
Business Realities For Soloists
18:00 end of Going Solo Conference

tinker.it

It’s GeekUp time already, so time to announce the happenings at next Wednesday’s GeekUp.

We have a bit of a one-off special this month with Rob Lee of Rattle Research speaking about “Hardware Hacking for Software People”.

We’ll have some Arduino boards for people to play with, kindly donated by tinker.it. So if you feel like having a go, bring your laptop along and Rob will show you how to take your first steps into the world of hardware hacking.

There’s still time to squeeze in a 20:20 - if anyone’s up for the challenge (this month, or indeed another month), please do get in touch!

Do tell us if you’re coming

Details:

• When: 6:00 PM Wednesday 16th July, 2008 (Talks start at 7:00PM)
• Where: The Lounge, St. Johns House, Merrion St, Leeds LS2 8JE
• Photo of the the Lounge
• GeekUp web site
• 20:20 presentation format

GeekUp Leeds celebrates it’s 1st birthday tomorrow and you’re all invited along to help celebrate! There’s been much talk of cake-baking (which we seem to be calling “CakeUp”), so if you fancy joining in the fun, please bring the geekiest cake you can bake with you!

We also have two 20:20 talks lined up for you:

• Colin May on “Scaling your site - things to consider now and in the future that’ll make your life a lot easier when your site takes off”
• Tim Waters on “Alternate Reality Games”. Sign up for some extracurricular Labyrinth Training here

There’s just about time for another ad-hoc 20:20 if anyone feels the need!

Do tell us if you’re coming

Details:

• When: 6:00 PM Wednesday 18th June, 2008 (Talks start at 7:00PM)
• Where: The Lounge, St. Johns House, Merrion St, Leeds LS2 8JE
• Photo of the the Lounge
• GeekUp web site
• 20:20 presentation format

Information you need to get off the person calling you so you can make a TPS complaint:
Company Name, Name of the person who spoke to you, Company telephone number, Company address, Company postcode, County, Email.

Companies ringing from abroad on behalf of a UK company must comply with TPS:
From the web site “Companies based abroad who call into the UK and who are making calls on behalf of a UK based company, must comply with UK regulations and screen their call lists against TPS before making an unsolicited sales and marketing call to a UK telephone number.”

Market research calls are not prevented by TPS:
“Market research calls are not covered in the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 therefore companies conducting these types of calls are still allowed to call a TPS registered number. If you do not want to receive such calls, inform the caller to remove your details from their call lists.”

It’s GeekUp Leeds no 12 tomorrow, and to help us celebrate being nearly one, we have two fabulous 20:20 talks scheduled:

• Linda Broughton on ‘Coworking at Old Broadcasting House‘ - the talk will introduce the community at Old Broadcasting House and look at how people are using the space six months after the opening, feedback from members and from the coworking slot at the Going Solo conference in Lausanne.
• Jeff R. Allen on ‘Entuura, an embedded Linux device targeted at the edge of the network in the developing world’. Jeff is visiting from Portland, USA and is looking to move to Leeds in the near future, am sure we all have lots of insider local info we can share with him!

There’s just about time for another ad-hoc 20:20 if anyone feels the need!

Do tell us if you’re coming

Details:

• When: 6:00 PM Wednesday 21st May, 2008 (Talks start at 7:00PM)
• Where: The Lounge, St. Johns House, Merrion St, Leeds LS2 8JE
• Photo of the the Lounge
• GeekUp web site
• 20:20 presentation format

I wanted to say a big thanks to all who took part, your friendly gong-wielding hosts Mike Smith & Rob Lee included and the XTech crowd for providing us with 12 fantastic speakers which we managed to squeeze into 90 minutes.

For those not familiar with the 20:20 lightning talk format, speakers present a fast-paced 20 slides, with 20 seconds per slide (with the exception of Ian Forrester who managed a bumper 72 slides in 6 minutes 40!)

We had an astonishing line-up, feature-rich with internet peeps:

2D barcodes, connecting the real to the virtual
Brian Suda

Gaming and Mashups for Your Mom
Martha Rotter (Microsoft)

HTML 5
Anne van Kesteren (Opera)

The 5 minute guide to RDFa…in only 6 minutes and 40 seconds
Mark Birbeck (webBackplane)

HTML5 Parsing
Henri Sivonen (independent)

Data Portability
Ian Forrester (BBC)

ODFDOM - the new opensourced multi-tiered API for the ISO OpenDocument Format
Svante Schubert (Sun Microsystems)

A review of Device APIs on mobile devices
Kai Hendry (Aplix Corporation)

Opera dragonfly
Charles McCathieNevile (Opera)

W3C Widgets - the simplest way to build client side web apps
Marcos Caceres (W3C Web Application Formats Working Group)

CHIP project @ Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (Cultural Heritage Information Personalization)
Natalia Stash (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam)

Flickr up your presentation with FlickrUp
Nico Verwer (Be Value)