 Rai, dyna'r wahanol yw'r cyffredinol i'w MF Camp. Rwyf am y lech Aesol yn ddefnyddio'r ym MF, ac mae'n bwynt i fynd yn eu gweld yn gweld yn iawn i'n gweithio. Rwy'n gwybod i ddim yn ddiogel. Mae'n gweithio'r cyffredinol gweithio, mae'n gweithio'r awrwyr yn gweithio'r cyffredinol i gyflwygofynu ym Ysgol Ffynedd Ysgol. Nid, nid ar ymdweud hwnnw'n ddweud wrth gyd yn gweithio'r gwirionedd. wrth dod i chi, maen nhw'n gweld gwelio ychydig o holl gweithio. Rwy'n fynd i'n mynd i ganddorol,ions o'r pas yn amser, ac maexplodio'n cael y llod. Rhef,'r iawn i'r Pwedeithiaid yng Nghymru. Rwy'n ei cerddoedd i un plio mewn perlweddol i fod i ganddorol, refallwydd yn e These background. Rwy'r haf sydd gennym o yng Nghymgr yng Nghymru. Rwy'n rwy'n credu i weld am yr Unedlau. Rwy'n ymddydd ysgrifyddau, fwy rhanen i'r bys yn chymdeithas yw'n mynd i'n gweithio. Mae'r crew yn gyntaf yn ddim yn allu'r bys yn cael mynd. Mae gwybod bod yn alu'r bys yn ymgyrchon. Mae'n tyn, mae'n mynd i'n gweithio, yn i'r newid y llwydig, mae'r hyn yn dweud hynny olf, mae'n hynny'n digwydd llawer yn gweithio. Mae'n fyddw i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n gweithio hefyd allwch gafi'n mynd i'n gwneud, ond y swyddi'n gwneud, is that we need to preserve things that we don't think are going to go away. So many technologies are here and then suddenly they're just gone. And there's no mention of them anywhere. It googling and searches are an absolutely essential life skill. I've spent 30 odd years honing my skills at finding things and not giving up until I find them. Archive.org is your friend. If you've never heard of it, it's absolutely fantastic at finding old websites and retrieving things for technologies, firmwares, updates, instructions, everything. Talk to people and ask them for help because you'd be surprised at how often people will come and help you out. I have a great debt of gratitude to David Merrill, Mika Scott, Eric Niall and a whole load of other people who've helped me with this journey of trying to resurrect the things I'm going to point out in a minute. So, one R-CyftioCube. Has anyone here heard of a CyftioCube? Couple of people, that's why you chose this talk, isn't it? Do you actually have any? Are they still running? Oh, a couple of... Yes, well done to you. I'm hoping it's either because you got them really early and you kept all the software or you've been to my website. OK, fantastic. So basically what they are, I'm going to shift if I may to... Image, image, image there. Oh, here we go. Sorry, I'm just going to pull up this. Hopefully this will show on screen. OK, so this is the first generation. There's sort of four generations of CyftioCubes, if you've never heard of them. They're basically lovely little internet of things. I think you can see that. Let me just put that down and then kind of focus on it. These are... Oh, other way up. I just realised I'm playing to the audience when actually I should be playing to... Where are we? Auto soon? So the little internet of things, they're basically repurpose Bluetooth keyboard processes. Inside your lovely little wireless keyboard is a little processor that basically has Bluetooth to connect to a computer or a dongle. And they repurpose them to basically make them self-contain little computers with sensors, touch sensors, motion sensors, a little screen on them. And you can play games with them. Well, you could until the company were bought out by 3D Robotics and then the website disappeared. And if you got them second hand off the internet or you were very lucky to get hold of them in a charity shop or whatever, you then started up the software that if you could find it and then it said, create an account on the non-existent website. So a lot of my talk is about how we can overcame that back to our slide presentation. So that's what CyddeoCubes are. And I said there were four generations. The very first generation is shown here. And I'm going to kind of jump ahead a little bit. I meant it into a handful of tiny screens scattered across the table top. This is the very first prototype by David Merrill, who was working at MIT Media Lab at the time. And he wanted to make intelligent tiles, tangible things that could be interact with. This is about 2008. He did the TED talk in 2009 about this. And I saw that and I thought this is just amazing. This is never going to see the light of death. And then a few years later, I was watching a lovely YouTube video. And they're called siftables at that point, by the way. Next slide. Where's my mouse? There we go. And this is him at this TED talk. I won't go into that now. And I thought that was an amazing idea, but I didn't kind of see anything about that was going to come of this. It's just one of many cool demos that you see. And then I found out that actually had become a product called SIFTO in 2011. So a couple of years after his TED talk. And unfortunately, I only found out about that in 2015. So not only had there been two generations of the SIFTO cube, the version one that's here and the version two that's in the box. I'll show you in a minute. But the website had come and gone and didn't exist anymore. So all the software was gone as well. And I found out about this on an extra credits video of interesting games you might not have played. And there was. And I thought, that's the same thing I saw back in 2008, 2009. What? It's a product. And I started searching and I obviously read it in various other places. And I started to get kind of a sinking feeling when I saw the it's been made open sourced. Oh dear. And all the games that you used to be able to buy are now free on the website. Oh, this is really bad, isn't it? Because that's the kind of those are the things that give you the message that it's probably a dead product. Anyway, I managed to get a couple of in fact this very set of the wonderful eBay. And I thought, you know, I can get hold of these things. I, you know, they'll work. They'll be brilliant. They'll be fantastic. And I sort of like managed to find the software, you know, looking around on the internet. And I thought, oh, here we go. Fantastic. Now it's the Mac version I had. I'm a Mac and there's a reason why I'm talking about the Mac now. Because I thought, oh, fantastic. Got my cubes, got my software installed. Great. This is what I saw and I clicked getting started. And it took me through a really nice set of install the cubes, put the dongle in the computer and all this stuff. And then I didn't get this, which is what I should have got. I got this. And I thought, oh, OK, well, I'll create an account. And then, of course, it went to a dead website. And I clicked on the help. And fortunately for the Mac version of this software, it glitched after I quit the help, it logged me into this view. And you can see at the top there, it says, nobody at Cyftio.com. It's a generated that someone in the code for the Mac version had generated a default set of IDs for a user. And that allowed me to then go through my Mac and search through a whole load of app data and eventually found that there was a folder that was created that had some stuff in it and that's where it was storing this. Or if you can say that you click on these two things and it will actually allow you to create a new game. But so that was my first thing. I managed to glitch it and then I kind of went online. I went to the website for Cyftio.com and this is what we got. So long. Thank you. We're still here. We're now a subsidiary of 3D robotics. That was the website. So I went to archive.org as you do. And I kind of trawled back through. Is everyone here familiar with archive.org? Yeah, a couple of people are. A lot of people aren't. It's absolutely fantastic. And you can talk to me afterwards if you like and I'll kind of take you through the wonderfulness that is archive.org. But I managed to start to piece together the location of software and so on. And I got hold of David Merrill, the guy in the TED talk in the MIT. And I said to him, hey, I got these cubes, but they're no use to me. And he went, yeah, no. Unfortunately, that company doesn't exist anymore. So sorry. I was like, oh, but surely. And I kind of posted everywhere because it was open source. It's on GitHub and I kind of posted there and said, look, we must be away for us to kind of get this working again. And fortunately, Eric Lau sent me a dump of his regedit for his windows install. And this isn't his data. It's data I kind of created. But I managed to be able to manually create a regedit for our windows. And then this token was the big problem. I just brute-forced it. I kind of randomly generated tokens until one worked. It took quite a long time, but I was lucky. And once I did that and actually then compare it and hash it with Eric Lau's and I kind of worked out the way that they were generating these hash codes. What was weird is that I could do this without accessing the internet. And the tokens are, so once they're valid, they don't care. There's no time to use a name or anything like that. So once I'd got one, I was OK to use it. So that was actually quite reassuring. And also terrible security. And also you may notice that there's points. Points are the way in which you bought software on the server. And I could generate any number of points I liked. So, yeah. That wasn't true for the second version, version two of the cubes. That idea of points didn't exist anymore. And I put 666 in because you do these things. You think people are not always nice on the internet. I'm going to put some specific data in to these things so that if anyone comes back, I can prove that I was the one who generated this. And also I'm the one that's responsible if anyone wants to come back. If somebody else has got this and then they get into trouble, they can track it back to me and I'll go, yes, it was me. I did get permission from David and the people at siftio.com as was to upload all of the games that were available for both versions of the cubes. I have permission to do that and I make it very clear. You're not allowed to just put these up any way you like. They are owned still, but I've been given permission to make them freely available. Not open source. The games are still owned and proprietary. And this is what you get when you have all the software. There were about 25, 26 games that were released officially through siftio.com. And these are the games that you get to see. And I don't think I'm going to have time to demonstrate them, but I'll very quickly, if I can, do that in a minute. So, but this is what you get. You get you get a kind of this is to get started, a kind of tutorial app for running siftio cubes and you plug it in and you will see something like something like hang on a second like this. So I want to just very quickly hit play on it. The thing is these are effectively peripherals to the computer for the version one. They'll run on, they'll run the software on here, but it will then use these as kind of intelligent peripherals. This tutorial has spoken instructions. So you can hear the sound on your computer and the sift runner to make sure you can hear these instructions. Can you, I don't know if you can see that. Congratulations. You've started playing with your siftio cubes. Oh, because I picked it up and realised. This tutorial will show you some of the ways you can use your cubes to get the most out of your games. Most siftio games will use all of your cubes, but this tutorial will only use three of them. If a cube does not have a smiley face on it, set it aside for the moment. When you buy it, you get three and then you can add more to it. It's a lot of money. You can flip a cube so that the screen lies face down. Can you see it? Try turning one of your cubes face down now. OK, now flip it back up again so that you can see the screen. Good job. Now flip another cube over. I'm going to stop that now. It ran on the computer, which is great, which is fine. It was a little limited, obviously, as I'm sure you can appreciate. But I managed to glitch it in to get it working, and then I managed to reverse engineer it, create a generic account for it, and off we went. So I've done the live demo. OK, so there we came to generation two of the siftio cubes. There's a lot of feedback from it. Very expensive, tied to the computer, not much fun. About a year after the first one to release, they released version two, which use... These are the newest ones, which I'll come back to in a second. It uses a standalone... I'm tolling you about it on here, I'm not showing you, sorry. OK, it uses a base station. So these things that you can download software to this, it then runs on its own, it has a sound output on it. Pretty much the same thing with these. This is the joys cube version, which up until fairly recently was the only way to get hold of them. And sadly, their website's starting to look a little bit suspect. It's security, HTTPS has gone. So, yeah. And they've stopped shipping them because of Covid and various other alarm bells are starting to ring. They reverse engineered the version two. This is it open if you want to have a look. By the way, never leave batteries inside things because the acid destroys them. This is version two of the official safety o cubes. And here is the official base station for it. So it's not that dissimilar. I think much better quality, but once it went open sourced and the company stopped producing them, it's third party in China. They actually contacted me and said, do you have the specs for this? Do you have all the plans? And I was like, no, but I know that you can talk to these people. And then they went really quiet and then suddenly there was these things on Kickstarter, which was quite interesting. And they'd ripped off my software, which is what the 666 and the token and everything in. So I did contact them and I said, yeah, I took a lot of effort to reverse underneath this to get them working again. And you just looked shoved up there as your software. So they very kindly sent me a set to say thank you for all that work and it sort of ended happily in the end, but there's a few interesting backwards and forwards messages from them. So and this is the Kickstarter video. What they have done is they added extra functionality to it. Each individual thing is a Bluetooth controller now, so it can be used with a PC as an input peripheral, as well as being a safety o cube and is compatible with all the software. So if you do want to get hold of these things, this is the best way to do it. They're fairly new. They've got slightly more functionality and, you know, in that respect, I think that it's good to support them so long as they actually do start shipping them again. And that's sort of it unless you want to see some more demos. One of the things I was interested with, with the version one version of the cubes mentioned at the very beginning, we have this creativity kit. What's really nice about this was that it actually allowed you to create your own kits. So here is my here is my pastely created demo because it plays inside the computer. I'm going to pull up the can you see? See this? Zoom in a bit. There we go. So I can I can select which game I want to play by putting them together. It's not working. Oh, is it working? No, it's not working. I'm sorry. The thing about live demos, one of the things that I haven't gone into. Oh, here we go. Oh, gosh, look, we can hang this. Is there a fourth cube here? Yeah, we go. We can create our own data. So gosh, there's a puzzle. How do we put these together? Oh, gosh. How do you put these together to make a well-known thing? This took me seconds of programming. So EMF camp. In case you haven't got that. And then there's one that's only needs three. So doctor Mike. Oh, hello. Ready. Principle fellow of the power education. OK, OK. So you can create your own. You can create your own software very simply with these things, which was one of the really nice features of the first one. And it disappeared. Let me go back to the presentation. It disappeared for the version two. So this is the version two kind of software interface. It's a lot flashier. The version two software and you can see all the games that were that were produced for it. Including, where was it just then? I came a teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. So remember, this has to download onto the base stations. But once you've downloaded, there's a limited amount, but once you've downloaded, you play the games without using the computer because it produces the audio there. And what's nice about this is it's much more polished. So you actually could get information about the games and you can sort of install game, CD, Tails. Teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. Now this was actually one of the hardest things for me to do because I got the software, but a lot of the background data that is on the computer for these different tutorials was missing from the copy of the games I got. I don't know if it's corrupted for whatever reason. I actually kind of reproduced some of these and I've got a blog post on my blog about this. I actually had to go into archive.org and look for all the sites that have reviewed the games to then capture the images, to then recreate them. And all these icons down the bottom here, there were several of those that were missing and I had to recreate, I can see here, missing launcher icon. And I had lots of gaps in this. This is not the kind of finished version you can see here. This is what you get if you just downloaded the software from my site. There is another file you can then download that adds back these extra graphics, some of which I had to recreate, some of which I managed to very fortunately steal of archive.org. If you know archive.org, not all images are recorded. A lot of the text is, but some of the images isn't. So I have managed to complete the set now for this. So we've got Joyce Cube, so we've got the fourth generation, the very first generation was a prototype made by Merrill created called Siftables, then Siftio version one, version two, and then the Joyce Cube, which you can still get. These are available on the internet. If you look on Amazon, you get them for sale for thousands of dollars. These are people who just shoved that up, you know, with that stupid price. They are not worth that. I get people saying to me, oh my God, I saw these for sale on Amazon for thousands of dollars. Do you want to buy them off me for several hundred? No, they're not worth that. You can get them for like 20, 30, 50 quid. You don't have to spend thousands on them. The only thing I'll say is the original cube. I'm very lucky, the original version one cubes, which come in their own charger box. None of the batteries have gone, but I am getting reports from other people who are saying that the internal batteries are starting to go. So touch wood. I never get that, but at some point I'm probably going to get one of these things dying on me and I'm going to have to do surgery and open it up and see if I can replace the battery. And obviously when I do that, I'll post it on my blog and then you can do the same thing. Version two, use batteries. Don't leave a battery in. Bad idea because the acid and I always took the batteries out of them when I was putting them into storage and kept them separate except one time, one I forgot and that's the one that's dead. Unfortunately, it just corroded through and I will try and fix it at some point. But there you go. So that's that. Let me just go back and finish off the slides. So so as I said, that's one thing that is nice about the joys cube. They've got an updated firmware. They've got Bluetooth functionality. They've got an API so long as the website stays there. I am making backups of all their software for when that site disappears because I think it's going too sadly. Unless people suddenly go out and buy loads of them, please do. I don't get any money from it, but I did get thank you and a set for myself. So I think that's reward enough for me. And you think, OK, what's next? You know that this is my last slide, but what's next from all this? Because have you heard of Scrabble Dash? Scrabble Dash, again, you can pick it up really cheap on eBay now. It was Scrabble, the company owned Scrabble. I can't remember the name of them now. They looked at Cyftio and said we want to do it for really cheap. So not a couple of hundred dollars for a set or even more, 20, 30 quid. Scrabble Dash is almost exactly the same thing, monochrome, but it can still tell when it's put next to each other and it produces letters. And you've got to rearrange letters to make words. And every time you do, you make more points. And a lot of us are actually playing its successor from that Scrabble Dash or Boggle Dash, it's known in the United States. And it's called Wordle. You know, you kind of trying to get five letter words, constructing them together. And just to finish off, because I know I've got like five minutes, there is another kind of inheritor of these and it's not a direct inheritor. But have any of you heard of WoW cubes? No one? OK, all you like this. WoW cubes. OK, so WoW cubes are a digital Rubik cube. Every block has got three screens and then contacts in the back. It's touch sensitive in that the whole thing, if you shake it, it will respond. It knows when it's connected to everything else. I found about this when it was a very early prototype that an 11-year-old Russian boy had created using lots of parts and 3D printed bits because he'd done a review of SIFTO cubes on his dad's YouTube channel. And I, because I was looking for SIFTO stuff and I found this. And that's amazing and I reached out and said hello to them and chatted and I've been following them ever since. And now you can pre-order this for about $250, $300. It's $50 off at the moment. It's stupidly expensive in some respects, but it's also unique in my opinion. And they've got cut the rope and various space invaders and a whole load of other kind of like softwares available for it. If you do pre-order it and get your $50 off, do tell them I sent you that way. Just because I wanted, and he's obviously not 11 anymore because it's a few years ago, but I wanted him to succeed with something. He was a kid who saw these SIFTO cubes and went, I know SIFTO cubes plus Rubik's cubes win. And it's an amazing thing. They've got a number of videos on the YouTube site now kind of showing you gameplay. And you can see in many respects it is the successor to the idea of SIFTO cubes. Really interesting kind of thing. The SDK is going to be made available for it. Actually, if you look on their website, these things will just unplug from each other because they can attach magnetically and they actually have an installation art made up about 30 or 40 of these things on a back framework of them so they can just push them in. And it's just the most amazing thing ever. And it's really nice to see that even if SIFTO cubes or Joys cubes or other things kind of die that there is a historical legacy and they move on to other things. But in the meantime, I've got my lovely sets, my three sets. It's my dream to own one of the original prototypes that David Merrill created for my MIT lab, but chances are that pretty slim in my opinion. But I would also like to again thank David Merrill because he sent me a set of the version twos and other people who've given me donations on my website for hosting all this software that would have otherwise gone away. And I know you don't normally have questions, so I'm going to be stood outside. And if you want to have a play with these things, we can probably get a table set up or something. And I hope you had a nice time and enjoy the rest of EMF camp. Thank you.