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Category Archives: copious spare time

Tracking Browsing History

26-Jun-11

I’ve long wanted a way to track/store (and later search?) my browser history. Why do modern browsers throw any of this away? I estimate I consume far less than < 50M of html per day (flash videos, large files excluded) I want to be able to search over this, and gather stats about my browsing […]

Ranking Algorithms for My Feedreader

20-Mar-11

I have been using a home-brew Feedreader for the last 6 years or so. It’s a river-of-news style aggregator, that ranks posts in order of “interestingness” rather than date, with the most interesting entries that I haven’t seen yet at the top. Interestingness is derived via my click interactions: if my feedreader shows me an […]

Authority, Influence in Social Networks [tentative thoughts]

29-Jan-11

I spent the day fiddling around with twitter and buzz, to see what signals I have at my disposal. Eventually I’d like to get some metrics that quantify a few different aspects of human relationships: Global influence (how much influence does this user have upon the world). This is pretty straightforward. Local influence (how much […]

Wrapped Up In Books

09-Jan-11

A while ago, I decided I wanted to keep better track of what books I read. So, I created a low-maintenance google spreadsheet form to help me. I suppose I could have gone with a text file or rolled my own webapp to facilitate this, but a spreadsheet form seemed like the best balance of […]

Consolidating Music Metadata

04-Dec-06

Finally finished a script a couple weekends ago to synchronize data between Amarok, Rhythmbox, and iTunes. I now use Amarok exclusively, and it’d been bugging me for a long time that my old metadata from multiple machines and multiple apps was locked away and unexploitable. So i fixed that, for myself at least. I harvest […]

Back

10-Jan-06

Back now. And married, too! Strangely enough, not much is different, with a few subtle exceptions: our kitchen is a bit more well-equipped from the wedding gifts I get to wake up every morning next to a beautiful woman our apartment is an absolute mess from all the moving boxes I suddenly have a little […]

emergent road maps and route-finding

28-Sep-05

Cold-medicine induced altered mental-state yesterday gave me an interesting idea: Right now all the mapping companies (mapquest, yahoo maps, google maps) use NavTeq to gather data. Once (if ever) cell phone usage data tied to GSM becomes public (a la MIT’s Mobile Landscape), I wonder if you can aggregate data of people going from point […]

Data Synchronization/Backup Headaching

24-Sep-05

A friend of mine’s recent hard drive catastrophe finally got me around to implementing a decent, cron’ed backup implementation for all the stuff I don’t store in my svn server (mp3s, photos, and other media just don’t change enough to merit the overhead of checking them into a VCS). RSync would work well, you’d think… […]

sxsw microaggregated

15-Mar-05

Some day, I need to go to SXSW–if only for the experience of being around so many creative nerds at the same time. I never see some of my friends so brimming over with ideas and vitality of life as when they come back from something like this… In the mean time, i can live […]

Nixie Clocks

17-Jan-05

Someday I’d like to build a clock made from old-school nixie tubes. There’s something warm, reassuringly retro about these things. Like the comforting clicks of old keyboards when you juxtapose them with the cold feedbacklessness of touchscreen inputs. Slick and streamlined makes for professional and productive user interfaces, I’ll grant you… but there’s something soothing […]