Nike plus iPod minus Nike
Have you seen the new doodad from Nike and Apple? The receiver that you hook onto the iPod nano and the transmitting pedometer that you put in your shoe? It looks perfect. It’ll track my runs (even indoors — take that, GPS!) and then synch it all online when I dock the iPod. Perfect.
Except, wait. I have to buy new shoes that fit the pedometer? And they have to be Nike running shoes? But I hate Nike running shoes. I think most people hate Nike running shoes. Well, this sucks. It’s like … Nike is locking people in to proprietary hardware just like … Apple. Hmm, making more sense now.
The Intertubes of course offer a few solutions to this. Some people are velcroing the pedometer under their laces. Others are just sticking it in a little lace-attached pouch.
All fine shoehacks, but I thought I could do one better. See, I have flat feet — Kansas flat feet — so I run with orthotic inserts. Turns out they are almost exactly the right depth to fit the little pedometer, if properly cored out. Note that this might work with the regular inserts in shoes. Orthotic inserts are not that much deeper than the factory inserts. Try it.
Remove the insert.
Grab a power tool for shaving off the hard plastic. Make the hole a little smaller than you need.
Pop it in.
Behold your new cyborg shoe.
Building a virtual world one tourist photo at a time
The phrase “Hey, wanna see my vacation photos?” has stricken fear into the hearts of co-workers and family members since photography was invented. But the combined mass of pics could help build virtual worlds of, well, of the whole photographed world. The University of Washington and Microsoft (believe it or not) have created a jawdropping demo of stitching together disparate photos of the same place into a textured navigable world.
The site is called Photo Tourism, but that doesn’t do justice to what these people have done. Only the videos convey the concept.
Soon enough this will be integrated with Google Earth and its ilk. A virtually navigable earth at all levels of detail can’t be that far off.
Of course, most tourist photos contain people in them. But that appears not to be such a problem either. Witness Tourist Remover. (Oh, to have this in real life.)
Ohm sweet monome
I’ve had the extraordinary luck* to get my hands on a monome, the amazing USB controller that’ll do just about anything you want it to. The monome is an 8×8 grid of sturdy backlit buttons. And that’s really about it, functionally. It interfaces with a slew of music apps that turn it into a keyboard, a sequencer, a ribbon slide, or just about any tactile way you can imagine to control sound. And the design! If it weren’t so sturdy I’d call it cute. Form and function, as one.
I spent a great evening playing with the monome last night.
[*] Luck being a friend who has loaned it to me for the month while he gets married and honeymoons, presumably because he was forbidden from taking it with him. The first sign of doomed marriage, if you ask me.
Demolishin’
Almost exactly two years ago I had a true bonding experience with my son watching a garbage truck in front of our house dump its whole load on the street to try to figure out what piece of trash inside it was on fire. Garbage men, policemen, firefighters, and a bulldozer: does it get any better than that?
Well, apparently it does. I have just learned that the small town in northwestern Illinois where my parents have a home is host to — wait for it — a demolition derby using farm combines. Let me apply some formatting to that: a demolition derby using farm combines. And not just any combines but decrepit, rusty-blade-whirling junkers ready to be auctioned off as scrap. Forget summer in the city. I want to see this rural answer to robot wars. Can you imagine the carnage? How onlookers don’t get pierced with shrapnel I have no idea. I am willing to risk it.
Hack your children
Yesterday Parent Hacks featured my post on how to create a LEGO mosaic manually (or mostly manually). Asha Dornfest has created a really wondeful site applying the hacker mentality to parenting. The site has exploded in popularity, presumably because geeks can reproduce and even take an interest in what they spawn.
Parenting as a community of interest on the Internet has grown immensely in recent years (or maybe I am just paying better attention). Federated Media just created a metablog that combines parenting-related posts from many of their major properties.
In addition to straight tips and tricks, Baby Roadies and The Sneeze provide some hilarious dad perspectives on the parenting arts.
Birthin’, surfin’ … a perfect match. I mean, they’re both just a series of tubes.
World Community Grid takes on cancer, take two
Not sure what happened to this post. It literally just disappeared. (Has anyone ever experienced a spontaneous Movable Type database reversion?)
Anywhere, here it is again. I’ve typed extra hard to make sure it sticks.
The World Community Grid has just launched its third program to fight disease using the combined computing power of desktop machines across the world. Like prior programs (which continue to run!) Help Defeat Cancer stitches together idle processing cycles to crack the nut of cancer tissue microarray analysis, a step towards enhanced treatment.
Oh, WCG also has Linux and Mac clients now. (They ain’t pretty, but then neither is data-crunching, frankly.)
Tracking
Today I pulled a $1 bill out of my wallet and saw that it had been stamped with the Where’s George URL. I had read about the dollar bill tracking site before, but this was my first encounter with a tracked bill. So I popped in the serial number and I learned that the bill had previously been in Carmel, Indiana.
Kinda cool, but the real experience was digging into the Where’s George site. It is a huge community of mindbogglingly dedicated bill-trackers. The site has merchandise for sale, forums by region, external fan sites, scoring competitions — things you’d associate with a popular band or videogame, not a site dedicated to tracking denominations of US currency.
But that’s the thing. The map of a bill’s travels around the world isn’t so much the story of the $1 note as it is a visualization of straight-line vectors between fellow dorks. The money is secondary, really. Think of an indiviual bill as little more than a slow-motion chain letter between likeminded, trainspotting money geeks. Once the bill arrives it is plotted on the map and the community grows by one. Where’s George doesn’t track money; it uncovers people who care about tracking money.
Which reminds me of the wine bottle re-gifting from last year. You may recall this as the experiment to see how many times a bottle could be re-gifted. It started in Chicago, jumped once in Chicago, then made its way to Miami where I have lost track of it.* Like Where’s George this small network isn’t so much about where the bottle is as a map of people crass enough to re-gift proudly.
And that’s what’s cool about a social networks. Often the stated reason for the networking (professional connections, hobby information, etc) becomes secondary to the social insight that comes of it. The link makes the node. Not the other way around.
[*] Maybe this Christmas I’ll start a site called Re-Gift Tracker (no, better: Re-Giftr). You’ll be able to enter UPC codes for obviously regifted items and see where they came from. And then there’ll be an interface to Cork’d. And then Amazon. And, and … oh my, Web 2.0 fame and fortune here I come.
Zodiac desktops
I’ve been looking for a good desktop background. But not just anything. Over the years I’ve formed fairly strict requirements.
- Usable. Not sure who first said “wallpaper makes bad stationery,” but it was my guiding principle. Backgrounds need to be easy to work against, contrasting highly with the folders and files that live on it. Photos of children, hot rods, and (sigh) rocket ships generally don’t offer this.
- Widescreen. 1680 x 1050.
- Constrained variation. I wanted the ability to change the background periodically but with some consistency from image to image.
- Cool-looking. Understated references to various aspects of my geekiness score highly.
Well, I found the source material in this amazing collection of images from A Celestial Atlas by Alexander Jamieson published in 1822. The last point was satisified first. These pages are beautiful, simultaneously astronomical and mythological, information design and storybook. But the best part is that they are a calendar sequence tracing the motion of the starry sky over the course of a year — perfect for changing desktops. In order to satisfy requirements one and two I had to do some modification. Inverting the colors immediately produced a pleasant white on blue that blueprintized the prints satisfactorily. Then I reduced opacity to 15% to make contrast with desktop elements generous.
It’s probably no coincidence that I am captivated by these images given my immersion in Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence right now. He makes a great case for the multi-layered beauty of astromonical graphics.
You can download the modified images here. (All 1680 x 1050.)
Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo
–
Libra – Scorpio
Sagittarius
–
Capricorn- Aquarius
Pisces
Also, all in a single zip (8 MB).
There’s always room for improvement of course. I have five displays on my desktop. Ideally they’d all share similar backgrounds that stretch horizontally from one to the next. You could do this with the astronomy prints (stitching the ecliptic into a continuous Mercator armillary across the displays), though only one machine would ever be correct to the current month.
Also, does anyone know if there is a way to have iCal.app schedule desktop image changes?
Inspiration
The Romantic concept of the poet inpsired from seclusion and singular inspiration seems to be alive and well, though once removed. My post on the isolation tank seems to have been the muse for a poem. Here’s an excerpt.
groupmind human searing feedback feedback human searing in human and groupmind and groupmind and and in to groupmind in feedback feedback and and
The weird thing (among many) is that it looks copy-and-pasted, but it isn’t. It’s non-random.
Update: some interesting stats from Chris.
504 is the dominant number in the sequence. If the (perhaps deliberately) malformed “groupmindand,” “nd” and “earing” were normalized then “prayer,” “and,” “feedback,” “groupmind,” “human,” in,” and “to” would all appear 504 times. 504 is also the HTTP status code for “Gateway Time-out.”
Just gets weirder, eh?
Musical floods, musical islands
Last.fm and Pandora are great, no doubt, but for real introduction to new music either you need to work a shift at a college radio station or … befriend a bunch of people with broad taste and an expansive collection. Not being in college, I choose the latter.
In the past nine months I’ve grown my music collection (in sheer filesize) by probably 15-20%. My musical horizons, much more than that. This is almost exclusively due to meeting new people and swapping music. Social networking indeed, but it has all been offline. The Long Tail is a remarkable phenomenon but it is damn long and there’s no roadmap. For me it comes down to it trust in a live human being for recommendations — still my favorite way of experiencing new tunes. Here’s a selection of artists that I’ve taken to in (let’s round up) the last year.
Sufjan Stevens
Four Tet
Boy Least Likely To
Richard Villalobos
My Morning Jacket
Feist
Doves
Chicago Underground Trio
Badly Drawn Boy
Calexico
Imogen Heap
Mojave 3
Sigur Rós
Ladytron
The Arcade Fire
Phoenix
Charlie Hunter
Broken Social Scene
The Kleptones
James T. Cotton
Audion
The Notwist
Nomo
Detroit Experiment
Cornelius
Alex Gopher
Midwest Product
Yagya
Lusine
Lali Puna
Dosh
Claro Intelecto
Casino Versus Japan
Matthew Dear
The Avalanches
DJ Cam
Twine
Mike Relm
Rjd2
DJ Shadow
Tadd Mullinix
Porcupine Tree
Ulrich Schnauss
Tycho
UNKLE
It has been a good year.
And yet. You don’t know what you have until it is gone. A few days ago, the network card on my home fileserver crapped the bed. In an instant, I was cut off from all music and media. Being headless, the Linux machine that I store everything on was totally inaccessible: obviously I couldn’t log into it, but I couldn’t even work on the machine without lugging a monitor out of storage. Before I figured out what was going on I went through the five stages of data loss: (1) Concern, (2) Anxiety, (3) Panic, (4) Lightheaded Otherworldliness, (5) Viewing Sharpened Pencils as Implements of Suicide. But I did lug that monitor and the files are alright. I bought a NIC (for — not kidding — $5) and should have it all back soon.
It has been an interesting period of deprivation. All I can play is what I had loaded on my iPod at the time of the failure. Like being frozen in time, my music queue is now only a sliver of a catalog, a snapshot of what was last updated. It is pleasant, in a way, to have fewer choices. There was a time when you only owned so many CD’s — no vast digital archive, no P2P, satellite radio, or streaming music. You just had to listen to what you had at the time. A few hundred megabytes stuffed into a bottle floating in an ocean that you just can’t drink.