Sometimes, the Library on-site at Hursley needs to clear the shelves for new additions. Here are some long-lost gems from the recent clear-out.
You can also browse the set at Flickr.
It’s like a glimpse into the computing past. I’m a particular fan of the futuristic “Mind Appliance” (looked and sounded great, but turned out to [...]

As a festive entry on eightbar this year, let’s talk about Christmas lights. Twitter-controlled ones! :-)
Andy Stanford-Clark hooked up a set of lights to Twitter. As reported in Computer Weekly:
Using some clever IBM middeware, The microcontroller sets the illumination colour based on a signal from the internet or via SMS over a GSM network – [...]

Two weekends ago, I, with the rest of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast team and the Linux Outlaws podcast team, was in Wolverhampton to run a new one-day open source community unconference called OggCamp.
A few people have asked “why Wolverhampton?”. Which is a fair question considering that four of the organisers live in Hampshire, one in the [...]

Hursley is a culturally as well as a technically diverse place, so we’ve got some great opportunities to learn from each other. This lunchtime I popped along to one of the events organised by the lab’s Chinese Connect team, which was all about Understanding the Chinese Calendar (the title of the post refers to a [...]

[thanks to the brilliant Laura Cowen, producer of the Ubuntu UK Podcast and uber UX god at Hursley, for writing up this event – it’s a shame I wasn’t able to make it!]
As is usually the case when I’m attending a HantsLUG (Hampshire Linux User Group) meeting, it was a lovely sunny day on Saturday. [...]

[A guest post by Hursley’s Ben Fletcher. This was originally written as an internal blog post – Ben recently received the award for External Honours at the IBM Corporate Technical Recognition Event. Here, he reflects on his experiences]
I believe it is important to leave it entirely up to the individual to recognise the positives [...]

Yesterday lunchtime the auditorium in Hursley House became the venue of an internal “unconference” of sorts – a very relaxed session with a bunch of short, snappy 5 minute presentations by folks from around the lab who related their experiences from different tech conferences.
Dale Lane spoke about Hackdays and Barcamps; Alex Hutter talked about last [...]

What is eightbar? As the About page for this blog states:
We’re a group of techie/creative people working in and around IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the UK. We have regular technical community meetings, well more like a cup of tea and a chat really, about all kinds of cool stuff.
That’s all still true. That’s who [...]

Posted on behalf of Bharat Bedi…
The TEDGlobal Conference was an amazing week of learning, taking inspiration from and connecting with 700 of the world’s thinkers and doers. The speakers at TED gave excellent talks on subjects ranging from how humans might have evolved from aquatic apes to jumping from the edge of space.

IBM’s smart [...]

I’ve just done a sweep through the eightbar blogroll and links. From the look of what was there, I reckon we hadn’t checked it in a while, as a few of the links were dead or pointing at blogs which have long since relocated. I also updated a few of the About pages to reflect [...]